Читать книгу Postcard From The Past - Tom Jackson - Страница 6

Every summer during the late sixties and early seventies my sister and I had two week-long holidays away from our home in Northampton. We spent the first with our paternal grandparents at a boarding house in Brighton where we rented deckchairs, played shove-ha’penny on the pier, ate 99s with extra sprinkles, rode the model steam train to Hove and marvelled at the stuffed puppies, kittens and squirrels dressed up to the nines and arranged in dramatic tableaux under glass in Walter Potter’s museum of taxidermy under the pier.

We spent the second week with our parents staying at a hotel in Spain, Portugal or Menorca. We swam in the pool, got sunburnt and were confined to the games room for the following day. We ate prawn cocktails and black forest gateau, got diarrhoea and blamed it on ‘foreign plumbing’. Occasionally we took hot, dusty rides around the nearby town in a cart pulled by a sad donkey. We went to a Roman amphitheatre once, though Mum remained behind reading David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon under an umbrella by the pool. We returned to Gatwick or Luton airport in a bumpy little plane with my sister throwing up pretty much the whole way, taken aback always by the deep green of the English countryside. We arrived home to an overgrown lawn and an avalanche of post which made it hard to open the front door.

These cards are archaeological relics of that lost world, a world whose colours were somehow both drab and oversaturated at the same time. A radiant, atom-powered future loomed over the horizon but the ghost of rationing lingered. Foreign travel might be enjoyable in small doses but going beyond the Mediterranean was the preserve of genuine adventurers. You might, of course, travel to Australia to visit your emigrant in-laws but it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience which you relived annually when you got out the projector and put on a slideshow of the snaps you took while Down Under.

TV reception depended on the weather and breathable waterproof fabrics had not been invented. People smoked like chimneys and had gnomes in their gardens. Cars broke down all the time but most self-respecting men liked nothing better than getting the bonnet up and having a crack at fixing them. Phones were immobile and if Mr and Mrs Patterson and their children went on holiday to the Algarve they would be incommunicado for a fortnight. If Mr Patterson’s sister became dangerously ill during this time a sober announcement might be made at the end of the news on the World Service asking the family to get in touch.

It was a time of stoicism and small pleasures – a decent ham and mustard sandwich, a well-hoovered B & B, a clear day. You were allowed to moan but excessive emotion of any kind was frowned upon outside a football ground. Hats remained popular among people of middle age and only sailors had tattoos.

Until recently I thought of these things as amusing at best and embarrassing at worst. Ice cream wafers and It’s a Knockout seemed to go hand-in-hand with the most terrible opinions about anyone who wasn’t a well-spoken white man in a sports jacket. No blacks, no Irish, no gypsies.

I wonder now if the baby wasn’t thrown out with the bathwater. In a culture where we are constantly exhorted to earn more, to buy more, to travel more, where we eat sugar snap peas from New Zealand and decorate the table with roses from Ethiopia, where we take our jumpers off and crank the heating up while the polar ice cap melts, where minor celebrities eat raw camel nipples on television in an effort to become slightly less minor celebrities and animals are dying off at the rate of thirty species a day I’m growing increasingly nostalgic for Sunday closing and the deckchair.