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Recently, while searching for an address book in a
rather untidy bedroom cabinet, I discovered a Letts
Schoolboy’s Diary for the year 1956.
I was 11 and had received similar diaries before,
but for some reason I was driven to write an entry for
every day of that year. I have never had any inclination
to do this since and it stands as an accurate chronicle of
a year in the life of an 11-year-old boy who lived on a
council estate in Staffordshire.
Daily references remind me that my family didn’t
have a TV so we ‘made our own fun’ – as the
expression goes. During the long cold evenings our kitchen
was the arena for three indoor winter sports. My brothers
and I used it to play Subbuteo, billiards and a rather
cramped but skilful game of table tennis on a tiny table.
We were mad keen footballers and played in the
street or on a muddy playing field, which we called the
‘rec’. I recorded a match lasting most of the day,
which my team won 21-17. Not exactly a tight defensive
game! In the summer we played cricket, sometimes all day,
until it became dark or we played putting in the local
park.
A rather more dangerous activity that seemed
popular this year, I refer to as ‘bows and arrows’. It
involved a group of boys lying behind fallen trees on a
local derelict farm every now and again popping up their
heads and firing a steel-tipped arrow from lethal home
made bows in the direction of the opposition’s defensive
barriers. We never considered it dangerous and amazingly
no one was killed!
We went to the cinema at least once a week. We went
to a regular kids’ Chums Club on a Saturday morning,
which involved raucous audience participation. We watched
a regular diet of cartoons followed by a short comedy,
often Laurel and Hardy, a longer movie, usually a Western,
and finished with a serial – maybe Flash
Gordon or similar.
We were still very war orientated at the time and
many of the films we saw at the regular cinema were of
that genre. A list of my favourites for that year includes
Reach for the Sky, the story of Douglas Bader, A Town Like Alice, and my favourite film of the year, Cockleshell
Heroes.
I also loved comedy and listed in my diary films
starring Norman Wisdom, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and
enjoyed The Lady
Killers, a classic, involving one of the first
appearances of Peter Sellers.
I developed a liking for scary Science Fiction
movies and mentioned seeing Forbidden
Planet. It seems very innocuous now, but back then it
scared me to death.
This was the year we went to see Rock
around the Clock, which because I was not quite a
teenager, gave me an insight into the teenage rebellion
culture that had a startling effect on my big brother. I
remember being very curious about his reaction to rock and
roll, but still feeling like a little boy and that this
was not quite for me yet, I wasn’t sure whether I was
allowed to rebel.
Radio was still the most popular media in our
house. We didn’t have a telly, which was starting to get
its grip on the nation. Journey
into Space was all the talk among the boys at school.
I mentioned regular comedy shows such as Take
it from Here, Educating Archie and Life with
the Lyons, which were on in the evenings during the
week and were often repeated on Sunday lunchtime, when we
would listen again.
In October we were given a wind-up gramophone in a
huge wooden cabinet. It only played 78s and you had to
wind it up every two records and also change the needle.
We somehow acquired a collection of recordings from the
1940s and early 1950s, and when I bought my first ever
modern pop record, Oh
Boy by Buddy Holly, it seemed strangely out of place
on this elegant piece of furniture.
When we acquired a real electric Dansette record
player I took the wind-up player apart and its
spring-driven mechanism kept me absorbed for ages.
Although we didn’t have a TV throughout 1956, I
still managed to get hooked on the new sensation. A lot of
families in our street had a set and some of them placed
it in the kitchen. I would often contrive to get invited
to a friend’s house to watch my favourite programme and
if there was a big audience I had to sit under the kitchen
table. I remember at one house I shared this position with
the family dog, who often had a better view than I did.
In August I recalled the long school holidays. I
remembered being jealous of many of the families in the
street because they would often go away to exotic
locations such as Blackpool and Rhyl, sometimes for up to
two weeks!
One of my elder brothers was a rep for a tool
company and he worked the area around Lincolnshire. That
year he took my mother’s brother in his company car to
stay at my aunt’s house near Grimsby. Sometimes we would
go to Cleethorpes or Skegness, but in my mind it hardly
compared to the bright lights of Blackpool.
I mentioned for the first time watching the FA Cup
Final on TV, in which Manchester City defeated Birmingham
City 3-1. Another sporting highlight of the year for me
was when I was taken to Edgbaston Cricket Ground by my
brother Brian to see Warwickshire play Australia. The
names in my diary – Keith Miller, Ian Craig, Neil Harvey
and Jim Burke – were huge sporting heroes at the time. I
also went regularly to watch Wolves play at Molineux. I
wrote about a 2-1 win over Sunderland and a 5-2 victory
over Arsenal!
Happy Days – how things have changed!
Philip
Stimpson
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This story
was first published in Best of British in May 2007
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