THE BOY IN BLUE PYJAMAS

I found this old photograph the other morning. I’d been having yet another look for a long-lost album that has still failed to suddenly reappear despite the time-honoured technique of “ignoring the problem for a while so that it would magically turn up when I least expected it” failing totally to work this time around. Instead, a tiny lime green plastic covered (and very 1970s looking) book of images came to hand, and this was the very last image it held, a picture of a boy in blue pyjamas looking happy enough in the years before life chewed him up and spat him back out again.

I’m playing with my Hornby train set, a toy that spent rather too many years being ignored and taking up much of that vast seeming bedroom. Eventually it would be unceremoniously removed from its dusty neglect and given to the grandchildren of the people who lived next door one day while I was still at school, but that was still a few years in the future when this optimistic little snap was taken.

I’m never really sure why the train set eventually came to be so much ignored that it was merely a piece of obstructive furniture. Perhaps it was that I was too impatient to be bothered with all the cleaning and scraping and rewiring that was required, or maybe it was just that, ultimately, the trains just went round and round, and once you’d switched the switches, they could do that all by themselves and I could go off and do something more interesting instead.

Perhaps me having the train set was my father’s little dream. I’m pretty sure it was he who painted the cloudy skies and built the airport buildings, and provided the ‘money box’ church, whilst I was off building the Airfix Lufthansa 737 you see soaring into the skies off an improbably short runway. He had built a number of things like a railway engine cab with knobs and levers and so forth for the “play group” my mother used to run in the school holidays when I was younger. The other kids probably used to think I was lucky to have such toys to play with after they’d all had to go home, whereas I was just annoyed at the other kids having to be there at all. A few years later, my father would also build me a spaceship control panel for me to sit at and play out my fantasies of getting as far away from them as is possible in a three-bed semi-detached.

I do sometimes wonder what became of many of my childhood toys. Perhaps they were just forgotten, although I’m starting to remember them now. I know that I still have a couple of boxes of toy cars somewhere about the place – I may even still have the one parked at the airport in that picture - but the rest just seem to drift away without there ever being any kind of ceremony. I find myself suddenly feeling bereft at the loss of the “Sea King” helicopter and the “Harrier” Jump Jet that are also parked at that airport, and wonder quite whatever happened to simple livery like that on the plane parked at the terminal.

The best sort of toys always seemed to be construction toys. I had “Stickle Bricks” and “Plastic Meccano” and then someone managed to wangle me some grown-up “proper” Meccano from somewhere, although it didn’t really stimulate me as much as it might have done. Much too fiddly, and the things never seemed to really look like what they were supposed to. Perhaps I was already becoming obsessed by “Lots of detail, and attention to it” as a later supervisor would say. Maybe, if I had stuck with it, I would have ended up being one of those structural engineers that I so admire. Oddly enough, I found the old instruction manual from that kit only last weekend, which perhaps explains why these things are much in my mind today.

The church and various other “play groups” I got farmed out to also had another kind of construction toy which involved coloured tubes and plates with slots in them, a toy which I only vaguely and fondly recalled, and which, when I asked around, nobody else seemed to remember at all. I knew it had existed, though, as I had once rescued four of the cylinders from a rubbish bin and glued them together to make starship engines a few years later. I found out last year that it did actually exist and was called “PlayPlax”, so I wasn’t imagining it at all. The best construction toy by far, though, was my Lego, and I still recall spending a happy afternoon years later during one of those group holidays spent in a rented cottage snapping together those familiar plastic bricks that one or other of the children present had brought along with them. I was probably far too old to be doing that sort of thing then, so I don’t know why I’m missing it so much now.

Looking at that photograph now, I wonder quite what became of the boy in blue pyjamas, who probably thought that “Thunderbirds” wallpaper was the greatest thing ever. The rest of the room seems kind of emptier than it would eventually be as I got into my later habits of accumulating clutter. I can see the petrol-engined “Hawker Hurricane” my grandfather bought me for my eighth birthday sitting in its box. I think it flew once and the guns got broken off in a hard landing. In later life I found out that, as a plumber during the war, he had manufactured parts for Hurricanes, but I’m sure I didn’t know that then. On that same shelf is also a rather camp looking cap bought for me on a long-forgotten holiday in Yugoslavia, a (fake) stuffed parrot that stayed with me for far too many years, a roller skate (those I didn’t take to…), the first three volumes of what eventually became a full set of Disney Encyclopedias (long gone), and even a volume of my father’s “The War Illustrated” which he sold for a pittance after his enforced retirement. On the wall is my sister’s oil painting of our late, lamented cat “Dumpling” who ran under the wheels of a passing car one trauma-filled night not so very many months before this picture was taken.

The other shelves reveal still more. The mighty Saturn V rocket was already a fixture and, notably to any of my regular readers who have been paying close attention, in this picture you still can’t see the top of the thing. There’s an old Pritt stick lurking in close proximity to a home-made phone box which speaks volumes of certain other burgeoning interests already being spoofed and of years of future model-making to come. I see a Yugoslavian wooden donkey, a long-lost toy Chopper motorcycle, the remains of a rather too cutesy cat and dog calendar, and rather fewer books than there would soon be, although you can be almost certain that all of those books are still with me somewhere even now.

It’s a funny thing, nostalgia. I maintain that I can’t remember anything that happened before I was twelve, but that picture has brought back so much to mind this morning. Meanwhile, as to that boy in the blue pyjamas, I wonder whether he was happy?

You know, I think maybe he was…