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When televisions had rooftop aerials shaped like an “H”, showed black and white, had only two channels, and one more turn of the knob found The Home Service and maybe The Light Programme, they often came with a slim metal rod perhaps 8 or 9 inches long. This could be slotted into holes on the back of the set labelled Horizontal Hold and Vertical Hold and twiddled gently to correct images that flickered because the scanner in the Cathode Ray Tube had drifted away from what was being broadcast. Oh, those hot days with storm clouds when no amount of prodding around the fearsome voltages in a TV set would correct the picture, or rid us of interference from some French broadcast.
The theme for July is an object, or an event, or a saying, or anything at all really that you remember as commonplace when you were young, but which no longer features, or is very different, in the everyday world today. Preferably as part of a story, but that’s not essential.
I hope you have fun with it. I’m off to tune the wireless to Hilversum.
A 1950s Childhood
July 2026 finds me sitting in the shade in our garden, grateful for the slight breeze and half drifting off into a heat induced sleep. It is Sunday and we have just finished a FaceTime call with our family in America. Again, gratitude for the wonders of modern technology allowing us to keep in touch and part of our grandsons’ lives as they grow up, oh so quickly.
In my soporific state, my mind wanders back to my own childhood in the 1950s. Sundays then were very different. No shops were open and it was for many a real day of rest, with family time, Sunday School or Church – perhaps a trip to the park. Only a few had a car to wash on a Sunday! My family was not amongst those few.
But we had a large garden and we girls were often to be found shadowing our father as he went about tending it on a Sunday. That garden was the breeding ground for much of my own creativity, as I played letting my imagination run wild.
On a Sunday, our mother would cook the traditional roast and we would enjoy the family meal; afterwards perhaps watching a programme on the very small screen, square television set which our father had first rented so that we could watch Queen Elizabeth the Second’s Coronation. It would be truly dwarfed by today’s screens, but we thought it wonderful then.
After Sunday, obviously, comes Monday and, in the July/August school holidays we were free from any computers, social media or smart phones – free to play in the garden or go cycling or to join with friends in whatever activity took our fancy. If it rained, there were books or board games.
Monday would be the day our mother took out the clunky meat mincer, clamp it to the kitchen table and mince whatever was left over from the Sunday roast to make a shepherds’ pie or cottage pie. The routine never wavered. The mincer was, of course, hand operated. Nowadays we are spoilt with so many kitchen and other gadgets using electricity.
‘Yes’, I think, as thirst jolts me into moving to go indoors for a refreshing cold drink, ‘those were simpler times not all that long after WWII and each decade since has brought myriad changes: some good, some not so good.’
396 words including title.
Thank you, Jill. I forgot to set a word limit, so I take your entry as “the bar” and set it now at 400 words.
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