Favourite Toys: Action Man, chicken feet and the Mr Benn antique shop time machine

It’s true that most of us all-too-often struggle with attachment. We cling to people, places, and things like comic books and toys from our past for all sorts of reasons. Moving home especially our first home can be a truly emotional experience as we are leaving behind the home where we developed our first friendships, where we first went to school or where we played with our favourite childhood toys.

My family first moved into what was to be my first real home (pictured above as it looks today looking very run down ) when I was around 3 years old in 1963. Dubbed the “electric flats” we moved into the top floor of a newly built two storey maisonettes just outside Glasgow as part of the redevelopment of the city. It would be fair to say that I was lucky (not all kids were) I had an idyllic childhood with loving parents, a kind/fun brother and great friends living in an all mod cons new house in a time when it was encouraged for kids to simply be kids. Yet despite having had a great life for the 5 years that we stayed in that house I had almost no memory of the day I left my first home. Well, that was until around May this year when visiting a local antique market, I came across the above Action Man Ski Patrol outfit that was on sale in a ridiculously overpriced stall in the market.

The mind is a strange thing in how it makes connections to the past, as immediately upon seeing that ski patrol outfit and those Action man stars I was transported back to the living room of my maisonette home on Christmas day circa 1965 playing with my Action Man (actually it was a GI Joe that I had) decked out in his ski patrol outfit as he undertook a dangerous mission on our lamb’s wool rug (used to simulate snow) in front of our toasty 2 bar electric wall mounted fire. That memory then triggered a series of other half-forgotten events from that time including the day my pal Ronnie received a Johnny Seven toy gun for his birthday (I’m still jealous some 55 years later) and the time his cousin broke his arm while playing “dead man falls” trying to re-enact the effects of being hit by a German grenade. Stranger still, I had a vivid flashback to when a group of my pals and myself were playing round the back of some local shops and we came across a bag of chicken parts from the butchers. The bag contained some chicken talons (I know disgusting), but you can imagine the fun a group of 6-year-old boys had with that and the torment we must have put the poor girls thorough.

So, what has all this all to do with the memory of me leaving my first home, well in the same display case that housed the Action Man outfit was a small blue plastic cap rocket. I used to have loads of these as a kid but on seeing the blue rocket I had an almost instantaneous nano second flashback to the day when my pal Ronnie had given me a similar rocket as a going away present just as we were leaving our old house in my dad’s Ford Anglia to move to our new home. I can still see my dad’s car in my mind’s eye with the family all crammed in and carrying some items we hadn’t managed to put into the removal van and the sight of our neighbours and my pals waving us goodbye as folk did back then. Like Mr. Benn I plan to visit that antique market again very soon to see what items may trigger some other long forgotten memories.