from Roger Bunce
View Ye Goode Olde Dayes through rose-coloured glasses? Me? Absolutely!
You must remember how great it was to be out throwing snowballs on a freezing winter’s morning, while still forced to wear short trousers. And the pleasant sensation of warming yourself up again in front of a real coal fire – radiant heat that roasted you on one side while leaving you shivering on the other – and those jolly red blotches that formed on your legs – and the happy agony of pins-and-needles as sensation returned to your fingers. These youngsters today just don’t know the thrill of scraping the frost off the inside of their bedroom windows each morning, or going outside in their dressing gowns to pour kettlefuls of boiling water over frozen pipes. I bet they’ve never had to wring their mum’s washing through the mangle, or get down on hands and knees to polish the lino. They’ve never waited in suspense for the sweep’s brush to pop out of the chimney, or been sent out with the coal shovel to scrap up the horse manure. I don’t suppose modern kids even wear smog- masks on their way to school. I mean this, photo-chemical stuff they talk about these days – that’s not real Smog! 1952 was proper Smog. See through it? You could hardly walk through it. And in case you missed it when you were indoors, the grown-ups would obligingly saturate the atmosphere a pea-souper of fag smoke.
We were so much healthier in those days, when people lived in asbestos-walled prefabs and ate bread and dripping. Sweets were rationed, of course, but clinic orange juice was so thick with sugar that we hardly needed them. Tooth decay? Nothing you couldn’t cure with a piece of thread and a slamming door. When the School Nurse dipped her steel comb in that pink stuff and ran it through our hair, she never found any nits. That’s because nits only like clean hair. We never washed our hair in the ’50s – just smeared on another layer of Brillcream. O.K. once a week we were forced into the bath, and took a scrubbing brush to the accumulated mud and scabs on our knees. “You could grow potatoes on those knees!” cries Mum. I don’t know when I first discovered that tips of fingernails were supposed to be white, not black. When the air stank of coal-smoke and most buildings were encrusted with soot, black just seemed a natural colour for everything.
Of course, we didn’t have to worry about M.M.R. jabs in those days. We just had to have Measles, Mumps and Roubl … Roob … German Measles. Not to mention Chicken-Pox, Scarlet Fever, Whooping Cough, Asian Flu and, in my case, Pneumonia. Why bother with vaccinations when you can have the real thing? “Roger, go and visit your friend Colin. He’s in bed with a temperature of 160, vomiting and covered in painful purple pustules. We don’t know what it is, but you haven’t had it yet, so go and get yourself infected. It’s always best to catch these things when you’re young. And pop into the Cottage Hospital on the way back and get your tonsils taken out.” Happy days!
And do you remember the humour we found in Corporal Punishment – all those episodes of Dennis the Menace and Roger the Dodger, which always ended with the hero over Dad’s knee being beaten with a slipper. Then there was Nigel Molesworth’s guide to “Kanes I Have Known” and that wonderful TV series “Whacko!” about a cane-happy headmaster. One of the boys was called Wendover, purely so that Jimmy Edwards could use the line “Bend over, Wendover!” How we laughed! No one seems to think that physical abuse of children is very funny anymore. Then there’s that other subject that no one does jokes about anymore. E.g. Laurel and Hardy’s:
–
“My father’s just died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. How did it happen?”
“He fell through a trapdoor and broke his neck.” “Was he working in the loft?”
“No. They were hanging him.”
Or the cartoon of the man dangling on the gallows, with the caption, “This suspense is killing me.” Or: – “I say! I say! I say! Why do they never hang a man with a moustache?”
“I don’t know. Why do they never hang a man with a moustache?” “It’s not strong enough. They have to use a rope!”
“I don’t wish to know that! Kindly leave the stage.”
People these days don’t even know the difference between “hung” and “hanged”.
Then there were those marvelous adventure playgrounds we had: the overgrown, ruinous ones that had been specially created for us by Werner Von Braun and his Doodlebugs. There was nothing metaphorical about the word bombsite in those days: all quite safe, apart from the broken glass, occasional bits of shrapnel and sheer drops into open cellars. I found an interesting metal object which would have made a perfect toy spaceship. It had fins at the back and everything! Unfortunately my homecoming cry of, “Look what I’ve found, Mum!” was greeted by parental hysterics; threats to throw it in a bucket of water, call the bomb squad, etc. It turned out to be the rear end of an incendiary. Later, she used it as a vase. And at the seaside we loved to splash about amongst the rusting remains of barbed-wire entanglements and tank traps. No wonder we never suffered from racial prejudice. We were still much too busy hating the Germans.
Those were the days. luv, Rog.
