Toys! I had one or two that I thought of as being special, with the most special being a Meccano set. At Christmas time Mam (it always seemed to fall on her shoulders!) used to try to get us one ‘main’ present, with a few smaller ones - known as stocking fillers - thrown in to supplement it. Her policy was to try and buy us both the same so there would be no arguments over them. This was OK in itself, but it never took into account our individual likes and dislikes.
With the Meccano set, Mam had done her usual thing and bought two exactly the same, one for me and one for Alan, regardless of our natures. Sad to say, Alan only played with his Meccano for a short while and then ignored it almost completely, whereas I loved mine from the start as I was really into ‘things mechanical’. In fact I came out a double winner, because Alan’s and my Meccano got lumped together as one and I finished up being able to make things that otherwise I could not have. Incidentally, I kept and played with that ‘combined’ set right up to me leaving home to make real mechanical things.
Not far from where we lived in Barnsley lived a family called Beale who were cousins of Dads. Mr Beale had been advised by a friend to go to an auction and bid for a particular tea chest. He paid the princely sum of 10 shillings for it, to find when he got it home that it was crammed full of pieces of Meccano! Envy wasn’t the half of it, as I would have given my back teeth to have had that lot!
The other example was again mechanical, but this time they were metal motor cars made up from separate pieces which had to be bolted together. This time, though, Alan and I kept our own cars as we both liked them. Now for the story that goes with those two cars –
Another time, Mam had gone into Barnsley on Christmas Eve to try and buy us our ‘identical’ main present, only to be met with a ‘sorry, we only have one of them left.’ Closing time was drawing near and Mam was beginning to get a little desperate when she entered this shop, only to be told again that they didn’t have two toys the same. They had two that were similar, however, one being red and the other blue. So in desperation, Mam took them, and on getting home, wrapped them in paper and passed them to Dad who, without knowing which colour was which, wrote a name on each.
As it turned out, neither Alan nor I gave it a thought that we had different toys, and in fact probably liked them all the more because of it, as for the first time we had something that could clearly be identified as ‘ours’.
The stocking fillers were usually small things like packets of sweets, toy soldiers, small model aeroplanes, an orange brought from overseas on ships which had had to face German U-boats, card games like ‘snap’, and so on.
One middle sized present we had was a smoking set of a chocolate pipe and icing sugar cigarettes. There was a war on and was very little in the way of toys about. This also went for non-essential food such as fruit etc, and that most food that was classed as essential was rationed.
Roy M Horne
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