No, I stayed inside, safe warm and all alone with a colour television that showed me a smorgasbord of delights such as “Crown Court”, “The Galloping Gourmet”, “The Sullivans”, “Paint Along with Nancy” and “The Amazing World of Kreskin” (Although I will admit that there was time for exercise in my youthful days. I would, for example, have the occasional bounce on a bright orange spacehopper or drive around the garden in my much loved KettCar). I had my own key to the front door and a lunchtime appointment just up the road and around the corner at Auntie Ada’s (not my real Auntie) house to be fed and filled with the kind of fizzy pop that was delivered on a flatbed lorry once a week in a vivid and enticing range of colours that never seemed to get through the doors of the family homestead. Our fizzy drinks were brown, or gingerish or had no colour to them at all.
It seems strange to me now when we live in an age where children can never be left alone for a split second for the first thousand years of their lives, that at eight, I pretty much had the run of the house. Nowadays, of course, I would have been whisked away by the powers that be and my parents would be doing time at the big house for neglect, whilst I would perhaps be getting spoiled and pampered by some kindly middle-class liberal foster parents who thought my experiences must have been so very terrible that they would send me away for counseling every week.
Hmmm… Maybe I missed out on something there…
Ironically, of course, both of my parents were at work trying to earn enough of a crust to feed me more than a crust, and even more ironically, my father worked in Social Services in those days and was out presumably busily doing some of the actual whisking away of other people’s children whilst I wallowed all alone in my neglected state.
The daft thing is that I didn’t feel neglected at all. I was in my element and I wouldn’t have had it any other way, well, apart from having more ready access to the more vibrant colours of fizzy pop, of course. Instead of being forced to go around and spend the day playing with other kids who I probably didn’t really like, I was able to stay at home and let my imagination soar.
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| The box where old ideas go to die |
I would sit at the dining room table with a craft knife (Yes, really. They should have been kicking in the front door…), some tubes of glue (Dear Lord…) and some cardboard and construct space vehicles of all shapes and sizes and my days would pass in a frenzy of creativity and possibility. The box shown in this photograph, which I took recently when I found it in one of the cupboards, is pretty much all that remains of all those endless hours of what I called ‘fun’, but which the boys kicking the footballs and grazing their knees probably would have considered a bit of a strange thing to be up to on a sunny afternoon. It’s a kind of graveyard of spaceships, I suppose, but I guess I should be kind of impressed that they’ve survived at all.
K6142 (the transfers were probably from an aircraft kit I'd built), is a very early one and used to have ridiculously long legs that weren’t very stable when it proudly stood on my display shelf and which are now long lost. Beneath it is a reduced scale replica of a moon-base I used to play with which was imagined up out of some old polystyrene packing materials, probably the ones that my dad’s stereo music centre was delivered in. The shiny round one, built from one of my sisters old talc dispensers, an aerosol canister lid and some adhesive tube caps was loosely based on a picture in the “Radio Times” (possibly from an episode of “Horizon”), and the long, thin one, now broken in two, was my interpretation of the ship from Gerry Anderson’s “Into Infinity” TV movie.
The silver shape at the top is my interpretation of something I saw and half remembered (in those pre-video days) from a “Flash Gordon” episode. I think even then we knew that “Flash Gordon” was pretty much rubbish, but we were still captivated by the stories. It looks like it’s made from a bit from a vacuum cleaner, the plastic dome from the wrappings of a Terry’s chocolate orange (when they still had them), a pin, a lolly stick and some of those bullet-type refill things we used to have to put into our everlasting pencils.
At the bottom, marked ‘X3’ in black biro (in my pre-Letraset years, obviously) is my own less-than-sleek variation on a passenger ship, obviously heavily influenced by both “2001” and the Eagle Transporter. I can also see the remains of an old “Space:1999” Eagle Transporter kit (still one of my all-time favourite spaceship designs) at the bottom of the box, which dates from later years, and some kind of electronic knick-knack, no doubt torn from the innards of a broken radio, glued to something else, which means that it was probably once part of some grander construction of the sort that I used to collect and hoard all sorts of useless looking bits and pieces to build.
I think on some level I always hoped that I could grow up and build model spaceships for a living, but of course that wasn’t the kind of suggestion that got taken very seriously in the careers department of my comprehensive, where the army, teaching, banking or further education (and therefore somebody else’s problem) seemed to be the mantra. Oh well, it’s too late to get annoyed about it now, I guess.
Last week I bought a lavishly illustrated book about the old defunct BBC Visual Effects Department and it truly is a thing of beauty, but it does of course completely confirm that, as long-term career choices might have gone, it probably wouldn’t have been the wisest one (not least because London was never my abode of choice). Nobody, it seems, builds models much for films and TV any more, and I don’t suppose that there’s that much of it going on in the world of Architecture, either, what with programmable laser cutters and such. In fact the only places that I see the likes of large models nowadays are in the display cabinets of museums, and I don’t suppose they’ve got much in the way of budgets any more.
I still dabbled in model work during my student years. The odd 3-D project required some of those skills I learned in Outer Space, and I knew a couple of film students who I built things for occasionally. I don’t remember any of their names coming up on any recent Oscar night, though, so maybe my efforts weren’t good enough to help them up the stepladder to their own personal glories. My model work spluttered on until it died for a few years after that, and I still have the last two spaceships I ever built and completed. Their pictures are at the bottom of this contribution and, I suppose, must be seen as the culmination of my spaceship designing programme. Ironically, one was a model I’d wanted to make for years which was of a design I used in a couple of the paintings I did back at school which I wanted to finally see in a 3-D form, so I guess it was both a look to the past and the future at the very same time. I suppose this makes them a sort of relic of “Retro-futurism” from years ago, if you like, if that makes any kind of sense.
Phew! No wonder time-travellers struggle with their tenses, but if you are a time-traveller and you happen to whizz past the eight-year-old me, tell him “hello” from the future and ask him how he managed to have so much patience and not to worry about the fizzy pop because it turned out it would probably have been very bad for him.
I should make an effort to read your blogs more often. That was right up my street. I did used to kick a ball against the wall when young. However, building Airfix and later Matchbox model kits was preferable. My big brother introduced me to them. He used to amaze me when he would use bandage gauze for cam nets on tanks. Not rocket since but inspiring to a 7 year old. I followed in his footsteps. I too was quite solitary and still am really. Happy in my own company.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I remember playing in the local park when I was 5. Of course my older sisters would be there to look after me. They were twins... of 9! Too much stuff and nonsense molly koddling (spelling?) nowadays.