Comics and things

I had forgotten about the tin pencil box with aspecial pen and pencil inside, and a picture of the newly-crowned Queen on the lid. We were all given one at school to commemorate the coronation, but I have forgotten what happened to it. If only I had made the decision in my childhood to preserve some of the things I had in the fifties. If only I had put them away carefully, looked after them, or in other words, didn't use them, play with them or get any pleasure out of them at the time. But I was not encouraged in this. We were not that sort of family, and I was the sort of child who believed in squeezing every tube of toothpaste that life offered me, until it was absolutely empty. Pencils were used and sharpened with the kitchen knife, until they were stubs, too short to hold. Fountain pens did not fare so well under my tender care. I seemed to have a habit of dropping them on their nibs, or the little rubber tube inside would burst, making a dreadful mess. Tins got dented, broken or lost. Comics, once read and kept for a few weeks, became clutter, and ended up as fire-lighters or in the dirt pail.
I was an avid comic reader from quite an early age. I suppose Beano and Dandy were the ones I bought most frequently, as they were only two pence, a penny cheaper than all the others, and two pence cheaper than the one my mother ordered for me, that used to be delivered on Sunday morning. That was 'Girl' of course, sister comic to 'The Eagle', the one I think I would have preferred. But I am afraid, my mother's attempts at gentility did not really make much impression on my. Definitely before I was ten, Minnie the Minx and Dennis the Menace were my undisputed heroes. I found it delightful how they invariably ended up being put over an irate parent's knee and being thrashed with a slipper. Belle of the Ballet and Wendy and Jinx didn't get a look-in in the popularity stakes. It was only as I started to get older, that they started to appeal to me. I wish I had a pile of my old comics now. Comics, or what passes for comics these days, like lots of magazines, seem to be all pictures and headlines with no 'meat' in the middle, or they want to teach children their letters and numbers. Children don't want comics to be taught letters and numbers, or anything else that the adult world wants them to learn. They need comics to slip into and enjoy the private world of childhood. They need to be vicariously naughty, stuck-up, stupid or just plain bad, through the characters in the comics, and learn the consequences of such behaviour. In fact, there was a black and white morality in comics. Bad deeds and naughty children always got their just deserts in the end. The good and downtrodden were ultimately rewarded. The world made sense (what the public was allowed to hear, that is) But now, the unmuddied morality of those days seems to have turned into a veritable morasse of political correctness gone mad and justice frequently stood on its head.

The Coronation

I never quite manage to keep to the title if I write it first. I find the best method is to meander to where my writing takes me and think of a title afterwards, when I am done with the day's offering. For example, the subject of food leads quite naturally on to the theme of parties and Sunday School parties, and a street party for the coronation.
It was 1953 of course, and I watched from the upstairs window how long trestle-tables were put up in the middle of the road. Everybody had to bring their own chairs, so it didn't matter about those. The party can't have taken place the actual day of the coronation because we were away at my Aunt's at Hatch End to watch it on the TV - the one with the tiny twelve-inch screen, that we would acquire a few years later.
I remember, on the morning of the party, my mother looking pessimistically at the leaden June sky and predicting that it would pour with rain, and the half-a crown that she had paid for me to go would be wasted. But it didn't rain, not more than a few drops anyway, but it was chilly, and I had to cover up my best summer dress with a thick bobbly cardigan.
People had gone mad with red, white and blue. In the house opposite us they painted the palings of their fence in pillar-box red, royal blue and snowy white. The bunting they put up for the party, the decorations in all the shop windows and even my hair-ribbons were red,white and blue. My not desperately patriotic mother declared when the coronation was all over, that she never wanted to see those colours again as long as she lived. But she did take me into Central lLondon a couple of times, along the Mall and to Buckingham Palace, to join in all the excitement of getting ready for the important occasion. I think it was even bigger than Charles'and Diana's wedding. Probably it was a celebration that the war and all its privations was well and truly over. The country needed a reason to celebrate, be happy and go a bit mad. And the ascension to the throne of the pretty, young queen with her then, handsome husband and two beautiful children, was the excuse that everybody had been waiting for. It was a burst of pure sunhine after a long,dark night.
Not that there was very much sunshine to be seen on the actual day of the coronation. But the wonderful, mile-long procession went ahead anyway, with all its pomp and ceremony in spite of the fine drizzle which hardly let up the whole day. Sovereigns and statesmen from all the parts of the Comenwealth were there. I remember especially the Queen of Tonga who was over six foot tall and enormously fat, who rode in her own coach. And what a splendid display all the soldiers made, not onlyour own soldiers, but the colourful mounties from Canada, the Ghurkas and the Australien troops, with their wide-brimmed hats pinned up on one side. The palace guards wore their bearskins, but rather disappointingly, their red uniforms were covered by their long, grey coats, because of the rain.
The thousands of people waiting along the coronation route, however, hardly seemed to notice the rain , so loudly did they cheer. Probably the rain was evaporated in the warmth of their exuberance and enthusiasm, and the few drops that reached them merely served to send them into even greater frenzies of cheering. That is how it seemed to us, safely watching it all on television in a dry, warm living room at Hatch End. Perhaps the reality was, that many people got colds and suffered from mild exposure, especially those who had been there all night.
I can see it now, in vivid technicolour in my mind's eye, though at the time, I was only able see it all in black and white. I even remember the gold of the beautiful royal coach, with the Queen waving and smiling, and the crowds going mad.
Princess Anne a tiny little girl then, with a shock of blond, curly hair, was considered too young to go. Prince Charles, a serious, chubby little boy with a sheet of thick hair combed straight over his forehead, was allowed. He was very, very good. The royal children were not much younger than I was, so I could identify with them.
At school, on Monday mornings I queued up to buy National Savings Stamps. I mostly had to be content with a sixpenny stamp, with Princess Anne's curly head on it, but sometimes, when my mother had been feeling more generous than usual, I would be able to buy a larger stamp for half a crown (five times more expensive than the sixpenny one) with Prince Charles on it. Soon, my savings book was full of stamps, and my savings could be transferred to a Post Office account. I have forgotten what happened to it after that. The Post Office was a sort of black hole, where once you had handed your money in, over the counter to the clerk behind the metal grill, you never saw it again.
My Grandmother used to buy a magazine every week, either 'Woman' or 'Women's Own'. One of them, round about that time, had a centre-fold of Prince Charles and Princess Anne sitting in a beautiful garden, and surrounded by lush, dark foliage. It had the atmosphere of a Watteau painting, mysterious and exciting. I remember setting myself the challenge that if I looked at that picture long enough and concentrated hard, I would suddenly find myself transported into that magic garden with them. Needless to say, it didn't work, and somehow, after the failure of my little experiment, the mundane hit me especially hard. I didn't want to be in a place where nylon underwear and stockings, dripped from a line strung up in the kitchen. and where my grandmother wore an old working apron instead of a tiara.
I can see myself now, carrying the old kitchen chair down into the street. It was not a particularly safe operation for a childof my age, considering how many stairs and outside steps I had to negotiate, but I was adament. I wouldn't let anyone help, so my mother just hovered, just in case. Nothing happened. I got to the bottom without mishap, and took my place at the trestle table, right in front of an enormous green jelly. Yes it was the normal party fare for those days. The hard-pressed adults in charge did their best to get us to behave and eat the sandwiches first before demolishing the cakes and jellies, but I don't think they entirely succeeded. Jugs of orange juice were passed rapidly up and down the table, and became empty so quickly, that it was almost a full-time job for someone to keep replenishing them. Mugs got spilt. Colourful table decorations got spoilt. Balloons escaped from their tetherings or burst, sending the little ones into floods of tears with the shock. Naughty boys discovered ten different things to do with left-over jelly and blancmange, and the whole thing ended in our part of the road, with our table collapsing. By this time we were all overexcited and our parents began to appear to remove us from the fray.
There was the advantage of course, that I didn't have far to go home. By this time, my red, white and blue hair ribbons were drooping, throughhaving been dipped in the orange juice and I was tired. There had been too much excitement that afternoon.
I suppose I had better call this instalment 'The Coronation'

More about fifties food

Now where were we nearly a week ago? Examinining the contents of the biscuit barrel I think. But to move on from there to my all-time favourite meal as a child, egg and chips. The chips were home-made of course, shallow-fried just out of the pan, and the yolk of the egg would be yellow and just a bit runny. Then liberally sprinkled with salt and vinegar, and with a huge dollop of tomato ketchup on the side of the plate to dunk the chips in, I was in heaven for as long as it took to consume the feast, which usually was not very long.
From quite an early age, I always remember, when I ate alone, I usually had a book of some description propped up in front of me. That is another bad habit that I have not been able to break. Even now, when no one else is around while I am eating, there is never a book or a newspaper far away.
The back of cereal packets were quite a good source of entertainment too, in those days. There was plenty to read on them, and things to make when the carton was empty. Most of the breakfast cereals that we had in the fifties are still around today, but I think that sugar coated puffed wheat was the only sweetened one. Weetabix had to be opened from the top in those days, and then you just had to pull back the paper inside to reveal a neat row of biscuits, or slightly less neat, if I had been at them first. I once sent off for a Weetabix Wonder Atlas which only cost tokens as far as I can remember. I kept it for decades, well into my mid-adulthood. Perhaps that might have been one of the reasons why I got so hooked on geography. I loved finding out where other countries were, and wondering what it was like to live there. Indeed, I would often take my precious atlas to bed with me as bed-time reading.
I am tempted here to let myself be completely sidetracked from the subject of fifties food, but I cannot let it go without mentioning the delightful theme of junior school dinners. We had to eat them up, that was the worst of it. Every last grey lump found in the mashed potatoes, every last piece of fat or gristle in the meat and every last spike in the spiky dark-green cabbage. I used to sit sometimes in misery, the only occupant left sitting at the long table on the long bench , with my portion of evil-looking cabbage or congealed fatty meat staring back at me, and I would miss half my play time. They were the days when I had not been quick enough to get to the waste-food container without being seen by the teacher on guard. Usually, I was quick enough, and sometimes the food was palatable enough to finish without undue problems. So I didn't miss all that many playtimes.
A clean plate was a passport to the promised land of pudding, or dessert or afters, as I mostly called it and I rarely had any problems with that. The iced cake was delicious with hot custard over it, for the custard melted the icing in a most delightful way. Funnily enough, they usually managed to get the custard right, smooth and creamy, just the way I liked it. Even things like rice pudding and tapioca, which we used to call frogs' eggs, were quite palatable. But the favourite was at Christmas time, when they put coins in the Christmas pud. I once found a silver sixpence, and I have never forgotten the thrill of it. I think that was probably the present that gave me the most pleasure that Christmas.
It was at Christmas and mostly at Easter too that we experienced the luxury of luxuries, a whole chicken, roasted brown and still sizzling from the oven. The sage and onion stuffing which invariably accompanied it had been livened up with butter and extra onions and also done to a turn in the oven until it was crisp and brown on top. At Christmas time, this was always accompanied by fairy cabbages as my mother used to call brussel sprouts and roast potatoes.
No I can't exactly make out a case for being deprived and undernourished in the post-war years. But I am sure that in reality, I was just too young to appreciate the very real privations of the forties, and by the time my memory started to function reliably, it was the fifties, and things were beginning to look up.
But until quite late into my childhood, my banana intake was rationed to one a week, and it took me quite a long while to realise that pineapples ever had an existence outside the confines of their tins. Nuts, and dates we only had at Christmas time, and the nuts were still very much in their shells. We found that a flat iron in the fire-place was the best way of cracking brazils, even though the nuts inside were invariably smashed into a hundred small pieces; and poking the point of a pair of scissors in the join at the top and then twisting it, was the best way of prising open reluctant walnuts. Nuts definitely lasted a nice long time, and at least half of the pleasure of them lay in getting the things open.
It was the same with the winkles that we kids used to purchase by the handful when the winkle man came pushing his cart along our street with his cart. We used to extract the black, slightly slimy contents from their small snail-like shells with a hair-pin or a hair-grip. That was the interesting bit, but I never ate much of them. They were too cold and salty for my taste. It was a bit of a waste of a penny really.
What else did we used to eat? Butter-beans had to be soaked overnight to make them ready for cooking the next day. I used to quite enjoy them in soups and as a vegetable, although on a white plate they would look a bit insipid. Liver done in the oven with bacon and onions was better, from that point of view. But one thing was for sure, our menu was English through and through. Not even the Italian delights of pizza and bolognese, had filtered through to us, in the fifties, and exotic Indian and Chinese dishes, without which we could not imagine life today still lay at least a decade into the future. I don't think my grandmother had ever heard of curry, but we did eat rice. In fact my grandmother's rice puddings were second to none. She used to make them with custard and they had a lovely nutmeggy skin when they emerged piping hot from the oven.
We didn't go short on home-made cakes, sponges or pies either. Making a sponge-cake required a lot of beating and we used to take it in turns to beat until the mixture had reached the required state of fluffiness, and tasted good enough for me to take a surruptitious fingerful. As for pastry-making, I used to help with that too, crumbling the fat and flour together and lifting it high in the air. I loved to watch the floury mixture cascading down from my fingers, most of it landing in the bowl, but a considerable amount having to be scooped up from the table-top before my grandmother noticed. As a reward I was usually given a bit of the pastry to fashion how I liked and put in the oven by myself on an old saucer. That bit, still hot from the oven, with a dollop of jam on the top, always tasted the best of all.

Food (part1)

When I talk about the food we used to eat in the fifties, it fits in well with one of the stories that the newspapers are suddenly making much of lately. It definitely provides a contrast. When I was a child, "Thou shalt not leave the food on your plate" had the force of the eleventh commandment and I knew that I had to do my best to finish my meals. Indeed, if I dared to leave so much as a crust of bread or a solitary brussel sprout on my plate, I was told to think of all the starving children in Africa. My unspoken retort "They are welcome to it." would mostly remain unspoken as I would contemplate the logistics of sending the sloppy, unwanted remains of my dinner all the wayto Africa. At quite a young age, I decided that that particular operation was not worth the trouble, and I proceeded to pay as much atttention to it as the old chestnut, "Eat up your greens dear, they will make your eyes sparkle" Years later I tried that tactic out on my grandson, then aged four or five. When he had dutifully finished his cabbage, he blinked his wide eyes at me and asked in all innocence, "Are my eyes sparkling now Nana?"
For Sunday dinner, at least when we had visitors, we would eat in the living-room cum my grandmother's bedroom. The one huge flap of the highly-polished mahogony table would usually be up anyway, either for my jigsaw puzzles or my grandmother's sewing. When visitors came, all traces of these activitieswould be swept out of sight, and on a pristine white table-cloth, the best dinner service would be laid. Perhaps I should say the remains of the dinner service that my Grandmother had received as a wedding present in the early years of the nineteenth century, in Edwardian times, in fact. But one by one, over the years, the serving dishes and the soup tureen had got broken, until all that was left were the dinner plates and a couple of gravy-boats. Even the glaze on the plates was all cracked due to the family habit of putting them in the oven to warm, and often forgetting them until they were too hot to hold without a teacloth or an oven glove.
We usually had a Sunday roast of some description. I can see andalmost smell the aroma from the joints of pork even now. It would be covered in delicious crackling and served up with home-made apple sauce and Paxo sage and onion stuffing. Joints of beef would be expertly carved into wafer-thin slices with a knife as sharp as a samurai sword. They had been sharpened to perfection on a rectangular bit of stone which, even then, was wearing a bit thin in the middle because of all the use it had had over the years. A small dish of bright-yellow strong English mustard was always on the table when beef was served , and you would ladle out thecontents with a tiny spoon. Brown, continental mustards had not yet found their way to British tables, and neither had all the spices and herbs that we use today. Salt and pepper were the only condiments we had, and they were sprinkled liberally on everything. No-one had heard that salt was bad for you. My grandmother always used to keep a small pepper-pot in her handbag though. "Just in case..." she would explain. But she would never say in case of what.
As for cooking herbs, a small pot of mint on our kitchen window-sill would hang precariously to life, even when most of its foliage was picked to make mint sauce for the leg or shoulderof lamb
we weregoing to have that Sunday. First of all, it all had to be chopped impossibly fine and mixed with a teaspoonful of caster sugar. Then vinegar would be poured ove itand itwould be left to mature for at least twenty-four hours. We didn't use mint for anything else though. We had never heard of mint tea for example.
My grandmother did love her cup of tea. At least five times a day she would sit down and sip the steaming brown liquid in utter contentment. In fact, I can hardly recall her drinking anything else at all. Tea bags still lay in the future, back in the fifties. Instead, tea was purchased in small packets about the size and shape of a box of After-Eight mints. There were all sorts of makes, like Lyons, Tetley's and PG Tips, and prices. I cannot remember tea being rationed, but I suppose it must have been. But as it definitely belonged to the necessities of London life, and was not a mere luxury, I should imagine they took it off rationing as early as possible.
My mother loved her cup of tea too. Indeed, at the office where she worked as a typist, the tea lady was an extremely important person.
Even I, as quite a small child was taught to enjoy tea, sweet, milky and not too hot, served up in a white enamel mug. It was back then that I began a habit, which I have never been able to wean myself from, namely dunking my biscuit in my tea. And worse still , that socially questionable practice was handed down to my children, and now my grandchildren. Even if they have not got a cup of tea of their own, they ask if they can dunk their biscuits in mine. What can I say!
The biscuit barrel was always kept on top of the radio in the kitchen. It was literally a barrel-shaped container, with wood-effect on the outside, and china inside. The shiny metal lid was not at all air-tight, but just rested loosely on top, ensuring that the contents would be stale by the end of the week. Not that the biscuits often lasted that long, although we only had one packet a week, and I wasonly allowed a couple a day. It was only when I was ill or absent, that it was really put to the test. I can remember custard creams and chocolate wholemeals, as digestives were called then, being the height of luxury, but usually we just had bog-standard rich tea or shortcake. Really the british biscuit has not changed much since the fifties. That is a nice thought.

Junk that we used to eat

I'm afraid I have not written anything these last few days, but the weather has been so lovely, and I have been catching up with all the gardening jobs.
Freedom was something that my generation had plenty of, even if we didn't have nearly as much in material things as today's children. I started to make little forays to the local playground on my own when I could not have been older than five or six. Yes I really was so young that I hadn't yet acquired the knack of consuming unmessily either penny ice-lollies or sticks of chewing-gum. I remember walking home one hot summer's evening from Camden Gardens, where I had been playing, with my hands and face, not to mention my clothes, all stuck up with sticky, grey strings of what had once been a piece of chewing gum, or on another occasion, with the front of my dress soaked with orange ice-lolly effluent.
I started childhood being a parent's dream as far as sweets were concerned. I didn't like them. And I didn't much care for chocolate either, and I only liked ice cream if it was a cylindrical type, that fitted on top of a cornet. I wouldn't touch oblong-shaped ice cream, which was the only kind you could buy in Regent's Park. As for fizzy drinks, I wouldn't touch them.
But by the time I was eight or so, all that had changed. I had graduated with honours into the land of teeth-rotting junk that children loved and still do. The only difference being between us and the children of today is that our pocket money was strictly limited and usually, when it was gone, that was it for the week. There was a Beech-Nut chewing gum vending machine on my way home from Junior school, and every time I passed it I used to try the handle, just in case, as actually did happen once or twice, that someone had forgotten about the free one that it gave out every fourth time the machine was used.
When I think of all the E-numbers and other additives, not to mention excess sugar that were in the sweets, ices and fizzy drinks that we all loved so much, it is a wonder that we weren't all hyperactive. Or perhaps we were, but because we had ample opportunity to burn off our excess energy, nobody ever noticed. Of course, some kids were slower at school than others, but I never remember anyone being diagnosed with hyperactivity. It was an unknown concept in those days.
In spite of my early very negative experience with ice-lollies, I came to love them. We could get teddy bear ice lollies in three different sizes, depending on whether you wanted to spend a penny, two pence or a whole (I believe) twelve-sided threepenny bit with a portcullis on the back of it. Tizer was our favourite beverage. It used to come in large, heavy glass bottles which had to be returned if you wanted your two or three penny deposit back. Our group used to club together to buy a bottle, then pass it round like a pipe of peace, everyone taking a swig, until the ambrosia was gone and the bottle was empty.
We were an unhygienic lot really, but we believed in sharing. If one of us had an ice-lolly and the others didn't, we were all granted at least one lick. 'Only a lick mind. Not a bite!' Were the usual instructions given. With gob-stoppers we took it in turns to have a suck. The rules were, that when you got to a new colour, you had to pass it on. Do those huge round sweets, that seemed almost as big as golf-balls, still exist? They used to cost a penny each, so it was just as well they lasted a long time. With sherbert, we were all given a small heap in our dirty palms, which we proceeded to lick with relish, enjoying the exquisite fizzing sensation on the end of our tongues. When we had finished the last morsel, we would discover that the middle of our palm was considerably cleaner than the rest of our hand, even if still somewhat sticky.
Palm toffee was a challenge. It was so hard that an electric drill would not have made much impression on it, and breaking it into bits small enough to get into our mouths, was not a task for the faint-hearted. Throwing a heavy brick on the rectangular bar worked too well, as half of it would be smashed to smitherines. We found hitting it against the corner of a wall or a post while still holding it flat in your hand worked best. But even then it took at least ten minutesof concentrated hard chewing until the postage-stamp sized piece became soft enough to really enjoy. No wonder I had to go to the dentist so often!
Back then, nobody thought anything of it when we bought fairly realistic packets of sugar cigarettes which we proceeded to 'smoke' imitating the adults we saw in the films. Such attitudes would be unthinkablein this day and age - getting children into bad habits, and so on. But on the other hand, a packet of crisps was a bit of a luxury. I really only remember having crisps during visits to Southend-on-Sea. They would be no particular flavour. They would just be Smith's Crisps, and have a little twist of blue paper at the bottom of the packet containing salt, which you sprinkled on the crisps.
As for chewing gum; that gave way to big blobs of pink bubble-gum, which we used to chew with relish until all the sugar had gone, then we used to get down to some serious bubble practice. I was never the street champion, though it wasn't through lack of practice, whenever I was outside. I wasn't allowed the stuff at home. I can hear my mother now "Josephine - put that disgusting stuff in the dirt pail, and don't let me see you with it again." It was very sad having to throw a perfectly good piece of bubble gum away, with hours of useful chewing life still left in it, so I decided that it was not worth the hassle, to chew gum at home. Ditto with school. They were very strict about it in those days, at least as strict as the drugs control at Bankok airport, and we feared the inevitable sanctions just as much. It was by far the easier option to smuggle in the occasional packet of Spangles or Fruit Gums, or even in desperate times, suck a button, which we also generously passed round,to relieve the boredom of sewing lessons and suchlike.