The Baby Boomer Generation by Paul Feeney Page B

retain from our childhood family life of the 1950s are frequently quite simple ones: the wonderful smells of mum’s roast dinners and freshly baked cakes; the cosy nights we spent by the fireside listening to the wireless as dad snoozed in his favourite armchair and mum rolled a fresh ball of knitting wool from a skein stretched between a child’s tiny arms; afternoon tea at auntie’s, patiently watching the clock as mum caught up on all the latest gossip; Sundays spent at granny’s, with talk of drawing rooms and parlours and aspidistra plants; an ashtray in every room and ticking clocks all over the house; rooms filled with brown wooden furniture and comfy armchairs stacked with lots of cushions, all engulfed in a heady mix of musty smells sweetened with furniture polish. Homes were so very different then; there were no flick-of-a-switch sources of entertainment except for the radio, but some of us had the added luxury of a wind-up gramophone and an upright piano; this, however, was the full extent of our home entertainment equipment and there were no fancy electronic gadgets to amuse us. People spent a lot of their leisure time at home reading, listening to the wireless or pursuing one of the popular hobbies of the day. Adult hobbies usually involved practical things to do with the home. The skills of needlework, knitting, darning, cooking and baking were handed down through generations of women and every mum seemed to be an expert and eager to show their daughters how to do it. Men were the gardeners and the fixers – anything that involved an engine or a hammer. As for us kids, when we weren’t playing hopscotch or annoying the neighbours with games of ‘Knock Down Ginger’ and ‘Tin Tan Tommy’, we would be plaiting our plastic scoubidou strings or honing our yo-yo and hula hoop skills. We rarely got bored. Even if we were stuck indoors we would find something interesting to occupy us; whether it was reading books and comics, sorting through our collections of stamps and beads, or constructing something from one of the Airfix or Meccano kits, we always found a way to pass the time. In the evenings, families would often do things together, and not just at Christmas. Board games like snakes and ladders, draughts, Monopoly, and Ludo were very popular forms of family entertainment, and we would play loads of different cards games, from Happy Families and Snap, to Cribbage and Pontoon. We kids liked listening to the wireless as much as our parents and we especially enjoyed radio shows such as The Clitheroe Kid , Dick Barton , Educating Archie , The Goon Show , Paul Temple and Meet the Huggetts . Many of us begged to stay up late so we could listen to the scary science fiction serial, Journey into Space : the stuff that kids’ nightmares are made of.
    While teenagers hung out in coffee bars, youth clubs and dancehalls, we children burned up our excess energy playing in the local streets and alleyways, and on any piece of open land available to us. Many of our towns and cities still bore the scars of the Blitz bombing raids that left over a million houses destroyed or damaged in London alone. These bomb ruins and derelict buildings, together with all of the wasteland that was created through post-war slum clearance, became our natural playgrounds. We may have twisted a few ankles and got some bumps and bruises while playing amongst the hazardous rubble but we had some wonderful adventures, and the bomb sites provided the perfect place for us to build our bonfires each Guy Fawkes Night. We also came across an unexploded bomb or two and I suppose we should count ourselves lucky to have survived our childhood exploits.
    We spent as much time as we could outside in the fresh air and memories of the long hot summers we loved so much are as indelibly printed in our minds as the cold, smog-filled winters we hated. It was a long time ago and some may think it’s a trick of the