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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.
😊. Pleased to be of service! Didn’t think I would be inspired by the prompt, but my unconscious must have been working away overnight and this ‘wrote itself’ this morning. The wonders of the creative process…
Well done, Jill – the only inspiration I’d had so far, came from my mother’s mincer (of which I’ve a 1960’s version in a cupboard. Back to the drawing board for me 🙂
Sorry, Sandra, but they do say that great minds think alike! I am sure you will come up with some other object that will make a really interesting story. I look forward to reading your entry.
Dear All,
Please note that this doesn’t have to be about an object. From the theme up there (points up) “an object, or an event, or a saying, or anything at all really that you remember as commonplace when you were young”
Echoes of a life twinkling in time.
As years roll away from me I look back at reflections caught in memories rainbow.
I know I was lucky. My childhood was idyllic, because woven among the colours of my life and simplicity of youth, the feelings of each moment are held, perfect and bright, like small lights of sheltering warmth against the passage of time.
My first memory, misted with awe, is my face pressing against the large window of Langley Lodge. A lightning storm rumbling and the gloom brightened by the flash of a jagged bolt hitting the lawn by the tree-swing. Also, muted by time, I remember the scent of the hayloft, where we sometimes played, and the old ice-house where we didn’t.
When I was six ‘Sunny View’ at Mopley was where dreams were dreamed and fantasies were lived. It was a child’s paradise, tasting and smelling of easy freedom that I devoured with unquenchable fascination. Each day, wandering the bluebell-lined wheat field bedside the house, hinted of adventure, while the barn owl at dusk led the way, softly, into the one that followed.
The wild things, then, were unafraid. Rabbits fed easily under the windows, deer leapt the high-banked hedge at the bottom of the garden, and unseen foxes coughed under cover of darkness.
Once, outside my window, I saw a velvet-backed, mole feeling its way across the grass. It was old, my mole, or it would’ve never let me hold it as it did. I remember paws, rough and hard, liked cracked leather, against my fingers as I carried it to the mossy bank of the hazelnut-hedge. I remember too, sitting, spellbound, with dad, listening to the haunting melody of a nightingale rising and falling as it broke the silence of still night with its song.
I recall small, innocent, things, like the cool-stone, floor in the larder and the ivy-leaf pattern of lino in my room. I remember lizards, log-basking, alongside soft summer echoes of horses and plovers calling across the field. I think of the white house at Lepe with the comely face, winking across at the island and through it all, each memory of childhood is flavoured with the excited rustle and tear of paper on Christmas morning.
I was rich then, with the delicious tone and flow of it all, and I am rich now with the deep wellspring of memories from a time that will not come again.
(400)
There’s a word for it!
The much faded five inch diameter Quality Street tin I inherited from my mother is near-filled with buttons, their variety in part due to them having been donated by my aunt Muriel, who was a dressmaker and her mother Dora who was a tailoress. Needless to say, had there been such, I would’ve won ‘best-dressed child’ many a time had the rest of the Pickles and Sutcliffe family not been numerous and similarly skilled(as I suppose the majority of Calderdale women were in the late nineteenth century). As s child I took pleasure in sorting them, grouping and making ‘families’ with them; deciding on ‘favourites’, recalling which buttons had been used on dresses made either for myself, my mother, other aunts or paying customers (Now living In Dovercourt, such local skills perhaps less prevalent, each of my days were accompanied by the double rocking of the black metal treadle at the base of the sewing machine that occupied space in the living room.
Sometime after I married, I acquired a second, Quality Street tin of my own, less pleasurable, but more useful, children also benefitting from donations of sewn and knitted garments and their ‘spare’ buttons, along with more prosaic shirt and trouser buttons (some like leather footballs.
Some years ago, my brother visited, The conversation turning to memories of time spent at my grandmother’s house (both of us had been born there) I produced the smaller tin. Opened it, and let the contents spill across the table. My brother leapt to his feet and backed away, his face contorted with horror. ‘It’s buttons’ he gasped, ‘I can’t stand them. Take them away. ‘
I did, of course (aware that time was I’d’ve thrown a handful at him, to pay him back for the spiders) and, some time later, was delighted to find there is a word for my brother’s panic: koumpounophobia.
[359 words including title] and not really a good fit to the brief, sorry.. although, since all my spare buttons nowadays arrive in tiny, self-sealing poly bags, I could justifiably claim button tins a thing of the past?
Fuel
(385 words)
At dawn she was in the kitchen, a follow-on to hours of restlessness, the turning over under heavy blankets, a heart driven to pump quicker than usual, a fluttery stomach. She was sixteen. It was a relief to get up and do something.
The first person downstairs each morning had to check the Aga. The temperature gauge on its cream enamel front was a horizontal thermometer, like one placed under a patient’s tongue. But this gauge was fixed against a panel, a painted tricolour: black, white, red, meaning too cold, hot, too hot. She looked. The heat of the great rectangular lump of cast iron was in the white section but not as high as the line that demarked an ideal heat. Every morning the Aga needed more anthracite.
The house was quiet. She did nothing. It was easy to dream instead of work. A slip into pleasure. That boy, arriving yesterday with the builder who was putting a sunroom at the back of the house where potted geraniums and cacti would live. The boy was an apprentice who seemed to know a lot already: how to mix mortar, how to lay bricks in perfect rows. How difficult it had been not to watch his smooth movements, his long limbs, his quickness when the builder asked for something – a trowel, a brush, or their lunchtime sandwiches. And how awful, terrible, to have been seen watching – face-scorching bad, cheeks burning even now at the thought. So she’d gone to the lounge at the front of the house, tried to read and not strain to hear the builder and the boy talking. Then Mum had told her to take mugs of tea out to them. They’d thanked her, both smiled. The smiles hadn’t meant anything except that it was time for their break – smiles for themselves, that was all.
In the kitchen she raised the hot-plate cover and, with the special handle, lifted out the plug of iron at the hot-plate’s centre. Next: the effort of heaving up the hod of anthracite, tipping pieces over its curved lip onto yesterday’s embers. She put the plug back. Slowly the gauge rose. Had it ever reached the red section, dangerously hot? It was tempting to add more fuel, just for temporary companionship, the anthracite making heat in the dark.
A brace of fabulous entries this month. Real life has struck at an awkward moment with silly demands on time. I hope you won’t mind too much If I pinch a day from the next comp. and post the results tomorrow evening. So sorry about that.
Jill’s entry grabbed my attention straight away, because although my own childhood was a few years later, so much was the same. And yes, all the shops shut. In fact, almost everything shut on a Sunday apart from Church and Sunday School. “Hear the pennies dropping” for those who remember it. So much centred on the home back then. A wonderful piece that stirred so many memories.
Terrie’s rich and evocative writing is almost a hallmark. This piece is a classic example. She writes “I know I was lucky” with her idyllic childhood, and proceeds to tell us exactly why, with a gorgeous sequence of images of the wildlife, the countryside and how she reacted to it. It’s like a costume dotted with diamonds: The lightning, the hayloft, the bluebell-line wheatfield, and so many more, not forgetting the mole with its paws “paws, rough and hard, like cracked leather”.
Sandra’s piece is all about buttons and dress making and tailoring – oh, and annoying brothers. My mother mended and made. Is it still taught in schools? I would have liked to learn. I remember an old sweet tin full of buttons as well. There were some fascinating examples, probably from the C19th, that had been inherited. My favourites were like tiny glass paperweights. These went missing when my parents, both teachers, had a party of children back one afternoon. I forget what for, but villainy was obviously on at least one agenda. Sandra’s piece raises so many memories for me that I had put away for years. I loved it.
Libby’s story. I so much wanted to know more about this young girl’s life, the before and after of this snapshot – which is the mark of good writing. I assume she is in service. In a household where an Aga runs all day, the children of the family do not rise at dawn and top up the coal. But it seems like a happy household. She slept poorly, but has no complaints. She prefers rest to work, but she’s not alone there. And she does have time to snatch some rest and maybe dream about the young workman she saw yesterday. In amongst this is a machine that she feeds: an Aga. The detail of topping up its fuel, plainly stated, sets it as a functional item, not simply a historical artefact. The heart of the kitchen – maybe the household.
Honestly, on a different day and in a different mood, I could have picked any of these. But I have to pick one and today it’s Libby’s entry. Well done everybody and thank you all.
Thank you Ath for comp and commentary and well done to all of us for so vividly evoking childhoods now past, I particularly enjoyed Ath’s reference to radio – ours was a brown 18″B Bakelite cube which was only allowed into our bedrooms when we were sick (and often. it seemed. Luxembourg sicker. Looking forward to Libby’s comp for August.
First, congratulations to Libby. Look forward to reading what theme you are going to set us for August.
Secondly, I echo Sandra in the fact that childhoods now past have been vividly evoked here in rich words worthy of Denizens! In addition, thank you Sandra for introducing me to a word I had never heard before and one which is impressive in its length and ‘tongue twistedness’ – koumpounophobia.
Thirdly, but not least, many thanks to you Athelstone for setting a challenge which has brought back so many memories of those simpler times gone by and for the detailed and kind comments on all the entries. I think your comments have included memories of your own which could have comprised an excellent entry, had you not been the setter… Jill
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