“DINKY” DAYS

One of the things I found when trawling through the shelves on my recent quest to find something completely different in the darker corners of my little house was this rather ancient  “Dinky Toys” Catalogue which, despite the ephemeral nature of such things, seems to have, against all the odds, survived a good forty years of being packed up and travelling on to the next place I chose to call “home” with me.

As is usual with such objects from the dawn of your own life, it probably tells me more about my young self than it does about the toy cars it was trying to sell at the time. There is, of course, the fascinating sense of a forgotten world that seemed fresh and new at the time, but which has now slipped from our grasp and is lost forever, just out of the reach of our outstretched fingers. Dinky Toys itself is long gone, as is the system of currency that caused the catalogue to have a price of 3d, and even the store whose name is stamped on the back, Lewis’s Ltd, is now just a fading memory, although the building it for so long occupied at the edge of Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester still stands. As for the toy cars that were being advertised within, well they might have seemed cutting edge and fresh, exciting and new to the young boys of the late 1960s as they sat on the brink of the exciting possibilities that the 1970s promised, but now they are mostly the kind of thing you only see in old photographs, classic car shows, reruns of “The Sweeney” and rusting away in scrapyards. Time is the fire in which we all burn.

Skipping through the pages, I discover quite a lot about the six or seven year old me. For one thing I was not yet averse to marking such precious documents with my felt-tipped pens, something I would frown upon doing nowadays. In a box printed on the back of the catalogue, the shop’s own stamp sits in fading purple ink, boxed off by my own wobbly linework, to separate it from my own address which has been added in one childish hand and then later over-written with later, more fluid strokes. This shows that this catalogue was a much-prized possession even then, speaking as it does of hopes of future toys and gifts, and being put safely aside for future reference. I suspect that, given our limited income in those days, not that such a concept would have been much understood by me at that age, those pictures in that catalogue was as close as I ever got to owning many of the actual toys themselves.

I’ve also tried unsuccessfully to colour in the band of colour containing the “Dinky” logo at the top of the page, and scrawled a massively inaccurate (and hopelessly primitive) “Joe 90” logo there too, which at least reveals one childhood obsession. I’ve even tried to draw the strange ball that Joe used to sit within, and, opening up the first page I discover that “Joe’s Car” is one of the vehicles that I have meticulously drawn a line around to indicate my interest. “Sam’s Car” has been dismissed by having a lightly drawn “X” scrawled over it, as has that cornerstone of many a late 1960s toybox, the classic “Thunderbird 2”, which is ironic, as that toy is one that I actually do remember once having.

The vehicles from Gerry Anderson’s popular puppet dramas dominate that opening page spread, and it seems that my desires alongside “Joe’s Car” included the entire range of Captain Scarlet’s “Terrific Trio” as well as Lady Penelope’s Rolls Royce “Fab 1”, although that too seems to have been crossed out by a later, more realistic hand. I never actually got to have any of them, though. As well as all these examples of my childish covetousness, my biro seems to have marked the word “Penelope” in an early attempt to remind myself of the pronunciation, which tells you a lot about how we were taught to read in those days, I’m sure. Oddly, given my later love of the show, the Mini Moke from “The Prisoner” sits unregarded at the bottom of page one.

It probably didn’t have any missiles.

Throughout the rest of those 24 pages of dreams and desirables, it is the cars that I have chosen to mark out that surprise me now. What kind of mind would pick out the surprisingly box-like Mk1 Vauxhall Viva , but be unmoved by the Jaguar “E” Type sitting next to it? Why would I covet the open top Aston Martin DB5, but be unstirred by the DB6? Why was the Rolls Royce Phantom V Limousine first circled and later crossed through? Did I have a sudden dislike of the kind of divisive lines in society that such a car represented…? Or was it just that I wanted the others more, had someone found the catalogue lying around at some time close to my birthday, perhaps?

There is a slightly perverse logic at play here. I seemed to like the Triumph Spitfire, the Volvo 1800S and the “Tow-Away Glider Set”, but the only toy car on those pages I ever actually had was the unmarked “Rolls Royce Silver Cloud Mark III”. Irony, it seems, crept into my existence at an early age. Why though would I want to pay special attention to a Saab 96, and yet also be simultaneously drawn towards both the Lamborghini Marzal and the boxy American monster that was the Pontiac Parisienne, but ignore the Ford Mustang Fastback and the Alfa Romeo Scarabeo OSI? On another page I seem to be impossibly impressed by such drabbery as the Ford Escort (Mk 1 – I actually ended up driving a real one of those), the Morris Mini Traveller and the Ford Zodiac Mark IV, but unimpressed by the Dino Ferrari and the Jensen FF.

Delving deeper, my desires seem to include all manner of military, police and fire service vehicles, but I remain unmoved by those twin stalwarts of the boy’s toybox, the double decker bus and the racing car. Nor did the tractors and other farming toys inspire me, but some of the odder choices did. Would I even have known what a “Brinks Armoured Car” did in those days? Still, it seems to have impressed me enough to make the cut, but then, so too did the Ford Transit van, so what did I know?

I seems to remember that I ended up actually owning very few of those toy cars, despite, I’m sure a constant barrage of suggestions and less than subtle attempts at persuasion. Perhaps this taught me that I couldn’t just have everything I wanted, or perhaps that little booklet just gives me a glimpse into the aspirations and desires of the me that once was.

Oddly enough, now that we are in “the future”, very few of the cars I see resemble “Joe’s Car”, and a great many of the vehicles I have ever owned tend more towards the duller end of the spectrum, so maybe all about me that was ever to be known was already written in the pages of a tatty little catalogue that has stayed with me for all those intervening decades.