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…

ROCKETS TO THE MOON & ROCKETS IN MY ROOM

Way, way back when I was a spudlet (or a new potato if you will…), men were landing on the moon (and before you start, yes, they were…) and this was something that excited many young tubers of about my age. Knowing that this subject did indeed fascinate me, and although I was far too young for it really, someone once upon a long ago, had the rather bright idea of buying for me a rather splendid Airfix model kit of the mighty Saturn V rocket, the very vessel that had transported men to the moon, so that I could have one of my very own to stimulate my imagination and inspire me to fulfil whatever dreams I may have had back then.

For various reasons, not least my relative youthfulness, the actual construction of this delightful project fell into the hands of my sister who built the whole thing for me and painted it. Nowadays, of course, I know that the paint scheme didn’t actually match any of the actual rockets that took off on the moon missions, but that never really mattered. She was young, it was the 1970s and she rather happily never got over-burdened with my pernickety obsessions for detail. Never the less, the fine results of her labours stood tall and proud in the various bedrooms I inhabited as I grew up into the jacketed potato that I became, before eventually being dismantled and placed into one of the various cardboard boxes that it languished in throughout my sophisticated “adult” years.

It’s ironic really that she did this for me, because the real Saturn V, the largest and most powerful launch vehicle ever brought to operational status, was also a project that was undertaken by other people than those who ended up using it, although the many people who worked on the Apollo programme probably hoped that their work was for the good of all mankind even if, in practical terms, it ended up being used only by three people who did little of the actual construction work themselves (although they were heavily involved with a lot of the technical consultation), but benefited greatly from the work the others put in.

I’ve read that 400,000 people were involved in some small way with the Apollo programme and the construction of the original rockets (as opposed to just my sister with some glue and a bit of paint…) every little part of which had to work perfectly just once. A fully operational Saturn V rocket came in at 363 feet tall and weighed over six and a half million pounds and the one that sent men to the moon ended up costing approximately 185 million dollars which would work out at about 1.1 billion dollars nowadays. It contained over 3 million parts which made up 700,000 components and remains one of the greatest engineering accomplishments that humanity has ever achieved.

I still hear people say every now and again that space exploration is a waste of time and money and we’d be better off spending the money on other things, but that is to ignore all the benefits that humanity got from the things that had to be developed for the space programme from computer technology, to better trainers and from solar energy to ultrasound scanners, not forgetting all those satellites that make all our mobile phones and web activity just a tad more possible. In fact there are so many that I’d be boring you for weeks if I decided to write about all of them.

Sadly many of the “space age” dreams that people of my kind of age had came crashing down in the brutal inflationary years that the 1970s became, although from the ruins of the Apollo programme came the Shuttle programme which is even now approaching its last hurrah. ‘Discovery’ took off on its final flight a couple of days ago, and there are only two more planned launchings of the Space Shuttle, so I really don’t think I’m going to realise one of my ambitions which was to attend one of the launches. Still, one day I’d like to go to Florida and look at any of the Saturn Fives that they have on display there and see one of them for myself and get up close and personal with that little bit of history that took my breath away when I was still young enough to be simply impressed by such things.

I still have most of that Airfix model in a box in the room I’m currently writing this in. For a while recently, around the time of the 40th anniversary of that historic first moon landing, I put all the remaining bits I still had together and they stood for a few weeks on a shelf behind me. Sadly, and inexplicably, some of the parts have been misplaced, although I’m sure they’ll turn up one day. One of the lower fins and one of the five main engines are gone, as is everything for the very top of the model, above the service module (the cylindrical bit below the pointy bit where the astronauts actually sat) including the heatshield and the escape tower.

I had to dismantle it because, every so often the breeze would get up and it would all come crashing down, not least due to the wobbly foundations caused by that missing engine. I eventually realised that this was probably doing the remaining pieces more harm than good, so I reluctantly put all the bits back into a box, where they remain, hoping for the glorious day when the missing parts show up and I can perhaps glue the whole thing together into a more robust, complete and satisfactory facsimile of the transport that made one of mankind’s greatest adventures possible.

If anyone reading this should happen to have any spare bits of their own old kit lying around in a box or a drawer somewhere which might help restore that battered old relic from the childhood of this battered old relic and are willing to part with them, well, I’d love to hear from you, and you’d be making me (relatively) happy. As to whether you’d want to make me happy, well, that’s a different topic for a different day, but such an offer would be very gratefully received.