School Woodwork

New Month Old Post: first posted 1st April 2018.
  
The practically skilled will mock the mess I made. If I could do it again now, I think I would have the patience to make a decent job of it. At school, I didn’t care enough.

The room smelt of sandpaper, sawdust and lacquer. It housed eight workbenches: the solid wooden kind with shoulders at the sides, tool cupboards underneath and a vice at each corner. And in our tough new carpenters’ aprons: loops around necks, strings tied at the back, deep pockets at the front, we really looked the business.
 
With that pencil-behind-ear can-do competence that only real woodworkers possess, Tacky Illingworth showed us how to shape a piece of wood into a ship’s hull by pointing the bow and rounding the stern, how to chisel out a couple of recesses in the top to leave a bridge, fo’c’s’le and fore and aft decks, and how to attach dowel masts and a funnel, simpler than but not dissimilar to the model in the picture. Mine was awful: irregular, lob-sided, gouge marks and splinters where it should have been flush-flat smooth. At the end of the year I didn’t bother to take it home. I think we made them only because it involved a variety of tools and techniques, rather than for any functional purpose.

I did learn to love the beautiful, age-old tools though: the tenon saw with its stiffened back, the smoothing plane, the spokeshave, the carpentry square, the brace and bit, the mallet and woodworkers’ chisels, and best of all, the marking gauge.

How could you guess what a marking gauge is for unless you know? Why does it have a sliding block with a locking screw? What are the spikes for? Why two on one side and one on the other, and why are they moveable? A mystery! I’ve got my own now. I last used it to mark how much to plane off the bottom of a door when we got a new carpet.

After spending the following year in Metalwork, we were allowed to choose which to continue. I returned to the relative peace and safety of woodwork, the lesser of the two evils. We had to decide upon a project, so I went for the ubiquitous book rack in its simplest form: a flat base with two vertical ends and a couple of pieces of dowel for feet. I selected a beautiful plank of mahogany which my parents had to buy, and began to cut out what were supposed to be stopped (half-blind) dovetail joints – visible underneath but not at the ends. It was far too ambitious. At the end of the year the book rack laid unfinished on a shelf in Tacky Illingworth’s stock room, wrapped in a soft cloth. His school report flattered me: “Progress is slow but does work of good quality”. Perhaps I had not yet made the mess it eventually became.

That could have been the end of the story because there were no crafts in subsequent years when ‘O’ levels took priority, but an unexpected change of policy allowed games-averse weaklings to escape to art or crafts instead. Metalwork was no longer on offer. It had been replaced by pottery, which was tempting, but for some bizarre masochistic reason I went for woodwork again. Maybe I refused to be defeated. Tacky Illingworth proudly retrieved my unfinished book rack from his stock room, still in its protective cloth from eighteen months earlier. 

I even finished the thing. I wrote the date on the bottom: April 1966. It’s a real mess of course. At one end I broke through the wall of the ‘pin’ part of the dovetail and had to stick it back in, and the joints were so loose that even glue could not hold them together. Tacky reluctantly allowed me to fix it with screws. It has been on my desk for over fifty years.
 
I wondered could I find it hiding in old photographs, and yes, here it is in various Leeds and Hull corners of the nineteen-seventies. It still holds one of the same books.
 

As I said, if I were to make it again today, in the same way with hand tools not machines, it might not be perfect but I like to think it would be better. That would match my other subjects. At the very least I would hope not to break the ends. It probably comes down to patience, and perhaps a bit of care and confidence as well. As someone once said, education is wasted on the young.

A Practical Wife

New month old post - last month’s old post was part of a longer piece. This is how it continued (first posted 18th August 2014).

In ‘Dad’s Thursday Helper’, I wrote about the dubiously wonderful things Dad could do with fire, lead, tar, meths, petrol and so many other substances while Mum was out. Yet, Mum never thought him particularly skilled in practical things. There was another reason for this too, which was that Mum was by far the more practically gifted of the two. She did all the gardening and repairs around the house.

She inherited a naturally practical, creative imagination that had run in her family for generations. Her great grandfather had maintained steam engines on barges in the 1870s. One of her brothers was a plumber, another was a self-taught mechanic. I watched the plumber dig down at Grandma’s house to connect a water-toilet to the new drains that had reached the village. And later, the mechanic effortlessly dismantled the broken mini-van lock and made it work with the ignition key. Even Mum once rescued me from a car maintenance disaster with pointed kitchen scissors after I had stupidly twisted the top off a grease nipple. She could use tools in entirely different ways from their intended purpose.

“Aren’t I lucky to have married such a practical wife,” Dad used to say.

I remember them decorating together, a paintbrush each. Mum got on quickly and efficiently with long smooth brush strokes, whilst Dad stabbed away awkwardly, making slow progress. I later realised she had given him an old brush, the stock clogged up with dried paint, stiff and ineffective, but he did his best without realising anything was wrong.

This kind of thing is pretty insidious. Dad, who made himself a cat’s whisker crystal radio as a boy, taught both me and my brother to assemble Airfix models and make things with Meccano, preserved fences with creosote, repaired punctured bicycle tyres, helped maintain his firm’s cars and vans in the 1940s and 1950s, and had the confidence to melt lead and tar on the kitchen cooker and get away with it, gradually came to believe himself functionally incompetent in all matters practical. We all came to think it.

After Dad retired he made some real howlers. He decided to help around the house by cleaning the finger marks off the furniture with a mixture of vinegar and water like his mother used to do. Within minutes he had knocked the vinegar water on to the carpet. “For goodness sake, get a bloody job,” Mum yelled.

Mum spent her final months explaining how to do the household things she had always done for us all. Dad carefully wrote it all down in a notebook, but it did not always help. Mum became so exasperated at his ineptitude as she tried to instruct him how to build cane pyramids for runner bean, she exclaimed “I’ve got more sense in my little finger than you have in your whole body.” Dad knew she you would never harvest them, and she didn’t.

Later, most memorably, he melted the plastic lid of the kettle by putting it on the gas ring without water. The next day, having bought a new lid, he did exactly the same again. “They always used to have metal lids,” he complained.

It was a vicious circle, lack of practice leading to lowered confidence. Were those tar splashes on the yellow shed and the flaming pool of meths creeping across the table, mentioned in the last post, early indications?  

I like to think I inherited Mum’s practical abilities. I can garden, hang wallpaper, service a car, replace light switches, maintain computer software, put new taps on washbasins, mend toilet cisterns and make guinea pigs hutches, to mention but a few. Dad visited us one day to find me hammering a hole in the bedroom wall to fit a new electrical spur socket. The floorboards were up displaying my neat new wiring all ready to connect up. I proudly showed him what I was doing.

“Aren’t you lucky to have married such a practical wife,” he told me.

Dad’s Thursday Helper

New month old post (first posted 18th August 2014)

Thursday afternoon was half-day closing. The whole town seemed to shut down. Retail businesses got the afternoon off in part-compensation for being open on Saturdays. So, Dad came home and Mum went off to Grandma’s leaving him to get on with his Thursday afternoon jobs. I ‘helped’.

 

We cleaned and brushed his boots and shoes, black and brown, with Cherry Blossom polish from a round tin with cherries on the lid, and Wren’s waterproof dubbin with a little bird. 

We replaced brake blocks and pumped tyres, and mended punctures by immersing the inner tubes in bowls of water to see the bubbles, marking with chalk, and sticking on puncture patches with stringy rubber solution. I learnt about tyre levers and tubular (box) spanners. We polished the wheels and handlebars with rags (old underpants were good) and mustard coloured chrome cleaner, transforming dirty grey to silver shine. We smeared on vaseline for protection from the weather – a magnet for yet more grime. 

We soaked the chains in trays of petrol to remove the oily grit, and then disposed of the petrol by setting it alight. Dad once just tipped it on the garden but had to stop after Grandpa came for tea one day and complained: “This lettuce tastes of petrol.” 

We cleaned Dad’s pipes, scraping out the burnt black ash with a gadget barbed like a miniature medieval mace, and soaking up the evil-smelling gunge with fluffy pipe-cleaners.

Then it was time for nicer smells and sounds: the matchsticks that rattled in their flat green and red box with a picture of a swan on the top, the firework hiss and smell of sulphur when he struck one, and the clouds of sweet St. Bruno smoke. He would pack the pipe bowl with tobacco from a black and white metal tin (with new tins, you had to pull a rubber vacuum seal from the bottom before you could open the lid), put the stem between his teeth, suck a flame down into the bowl, and blow smoke from the side of his mouth with a satisfied expression and popping ‘p’ sound.

“Can I have a puff?” I begged. “Let me have a puff”. I was only four.

“Oh all right,” said Dad reluctantly. He held the stem of the pipe near my mouth. I was instantly sick. 

And then there were the fun jobs – playtime. We had a model steam engine, the “steam boiler”, which drove a flywheel through dual pistons, exactly like the one pictured. It had a brass water tank heated by a methylated spirit burner that slid underneath. Dad loved to take it out of its oily cardboard box and fire it up on the back room table. Once steam was up, it could be set in motion. The flywheel revolved at a fair old pace, puffing and rattling, spitting out a lethal mixture of hot oil and boiling water. It had a screeching whistle and a safety valve that blew like a railway engine when the pressure got high.

It was important the pistons were always oiled and that the water tank did not run dry. The spirit burner needed topping up frequently. The smell of methylated spirit mixed with hot emulsified oil is unforgettable. Once, we spilled methylated spirit on the table and it caught light. I watched fascinated as a lucent blue pool of flame spread slowly across the surface, Dad flapping it frantically with his hands, looking panicky.

A move to another house brought a whole new set of Thursday afternoon jobs, sanding and painting skirting-boards and staining wooden floors around the edges of carpet squares before fitted carpets became the norm. 

We painted the garden shed banana yellow. It leaked, so we mended the roof. I sat up there with Dad, ‘helping’ him tack down new sheets of roofing felt and painting it with hot black tar. Dad heated the tar to boiling point in an old paint pot on the kitchen gas cooker. Then, holding it with just a wooden cane through the handle, carried it bubbling and the smouldering tar acoss the kitchen floor, across the garden, and up on a rickety stepladder and on to the shed roof. It must have been a thoroughly hazardous operation. There were splashes of black tar on the yellow paint for years.

But there was still room for play-jobs. 

We found some old lead piping in the shed. Dad melted it on the kitchen cooker in an empty tin can, and then, holding it with pliers, poured the molten metal into toothpaste tins which had originally contained hard, flat, tablets of ‘dentifrice’ wrapped in red cellophane. You rubbed it with a wet toothbrush to form a lather. The empty tins were just right for moulding make-believe medals – possibly something Dad had himself made in this own childhood. After pouring the lead, the medals were dropped into a bowl of water and sizzled as they cooled. The embossed ‘Gibbs’ lettering transferred perfectly to the moulded medals. No one knew about lead poisoning then.

Perhaps it was just as well Mum went to Grandma’s on Thursdays. 

‘Dad’s Thursday Helper’ would have continued for me until I started school, but Dad was then able to do it all over again with my brother.

Old Wires

You do odd jobs, you accumulate all sorts of bits and pieces, and you them keep because they might come in useful one day. You buy things and they wear out but you keep the bits and pieces that go with them because they might also come in useful one day. And, fifty years later, you have boxes full of all those bits and pieces, some of which may have come in useful but most of which didn’t. 

Here is part of my lifetime’s collection of wires and plugs. Funny what memories they bring back! 

I found the plug, socket and cable used to make an extension lead for the fluorescent light I fitted under the eaves of my loft room in the shared house in 1972, a short length of ring-main cabling from when I installed several spur wall-sockets after moving into our current house thirty years ago, and some left-over heat resistant cabling used to wire up an electric immersion heater around the same time. Then there were the transformers from old computers, printers and scanners, and their plugs, sockets and adapters. I can still identify them: RS-232, Centronics, VGA, S-Video, Ethernet, HDMI, DIN. There was even an old cordless telephone system. 

And where on earth were the following electronic components from? It might have been one of the kid’s Design Technology projects at school, involving transistors, capacitors, thermistors, a photo-resistor and light-emitting diodes. They remind me of my brother’s nineteen-sixties electronic engineer’s kit, or my nineteen-seventies home-built Heathkit stereo. 

How many of the following does one really need?

• spare 3, 5 and 13 amp fuses
• spare mains plugs and multi-socket adapters
• travel adapters for various kinds of power supply
• transformers for long-gone printers, scanners and computers
• cables for printers, monitors and keyboards
• USB cables
• ADSL micro-filters for connecting broadband to telephone lines
• SCART leads for video recorders
• mono/stereo audio/video jack plugs, DIN plugs, HDMI leads, S-video leads
• television aerial cables
• lawn mower cables
• electric kettle cables
• time-switches
• wall sockets, light fittings and light switches
• wiring of various lengths and thicknesses

If I don’t sort them now, someone else will have to do it. This is some of what will be going to the electrical skip at the recycling centre.  

And the rest? Sorted into smaller boxes, labelled and back in the loft in case they come in useful one day.

Laid Up

We enjoyed decorating son’s bedroom together. It was like thirty years ago when we first moved in. We painted the walls and the woodwork, replaced his football border with a nice flowery one, got the pine-framed bed out of the loft and bought a new mattress. We dismantled and lost his gigantic desk under the bed and now have a guest room. He said we had turned it into an old people’s bedroom.

Most of his stuff has gone to his flat. You would not think so from how much was left. The word ‘pillock’ was mentioned several times. There were A-level, university and postgraduate course notes and books, the empty boxes for every gadget he has bought in fifteen years, a six-feet tall cabinet of DVDs, and books, books and more books shelved double depth. Kids have too much money these days. 

The number of books is astonishing, and he has read every one without a single crease to the spines. No one else was allowed to touch them.  

He did then help sort paper for recycling, documents for shredding and books to go to Ziffit which I heard about through Sue in Suffolk’s blog. They pay next to nothing – you do well to average a pound a book – but it’s better than the charity shop, assuming you can find one to take them at the moment.  

How quickly things can change. One day you are decorating bedrooms, lifting furniture, washing cars and going for country walks, and the next you are crawling on your hands and knees to the bathroom. I don’t know how, but I hurt my back, both upper and lower. Comfortable positions for one were agony for the other. To make matters worse, I then overdid the Ibuprofen and messed up my stomach and could hardly eat anything for a week. Ambrosia will be delighted with their sales this month.

Nights have been spent in the new ‘guest’ room, impatient at the slow pace of recovery. I’ve read the spines of son’s remaining books, and renewed acquaintance with Rusty the Pony who I bought on impulse when Mrs. D. was expecting. Rusty’s friend, bought at the same time, a texture-feely caterpillar we named Snake, was sucked to destruction, but Rusty and some of this other friends survived.  

Who are all these writers: Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, Robin Hobb and George R. R. Martin? I could also mention Scott Lynch, Patrick Rothfuss, David Hair, Tad Williams, Joe Abercrombie, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Only about half of those he has kept are in the picture. Apart from the history books at the bottom, it is nearly all epic fantasy and science fiction. Then there is Stephen King who throws in extra horror. How can anyone write so much waffle – sixty-four doorstep thick novels? I’ve never read any of these authors despite their enormous popularity. George R. R. Martin, for example, wrote Song of Ice and Fire which became Game of Thrones. Much too violent for me.

I suppose it is only like in my day when I enjoyed reading through the science fiction shelves of the public library. Then it was Brian Aldiss, Ray Bradbury, John Wyndham, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. They had a bit more mid-twentieth century reserve and decorum.

At random, I picked up Dreamcatcher and began to read, appropriate as King explains at the end he was in pain recovering from an accident when he wrote it. I know how he felt. Not that I read to the end. I managed about fifty pages before deciding I had little curiosity about four guys with telepathic powers, and not much liking for their characters. From the synopsis on Wikipedia I avoided quite a few nightmares. Most likely, it’s me that’s boring. I never had much time for Tolkien, either.

POSTSCRIPT: I subsequently realised that I hurt my back during a seizure of which I have no memory. This was the first manifestation of my illness. 

A Fiddle Too Far

This is my parents’ brass carriage clock. It was a touch of luxury, new around nineteen seventy. I seem to remember it ticking in their bedroom, but there it is later on my dad’s mantelpiece around fifteen years ago, just before we sold his bungalow. That picture could be a whole blog post in itself.

On the back it gives the maker’s name as St. James of London. A few clean and shiny ones otherwise the same are for sale for £300 or £400 on ebay, although around £100 seems more the going rate. That is when they are working. This isn’t.

It worked until recently. I assiduously wound it up every Sunday morning, and it kept good time until a few months ago when it began to stop mid-week. A little nudge would start it going again, but gradually became more and more ineffective until it stopped completely.

Could the cause be a simple lack of lubrication? I bought this clockmakers precision oiling tool. 

Four screws under the base of the clock secure the case. I undid them, lifted it off and applied tiny drops of oil to the centres of the large and small cog wheels visible here above and below the hairspring. It worked. The clock started up and ran well for a few minutes.
 

Just before putting it back in its case, I thought it might better disperse the oil around the mechanism if I wiggled the slow-fast lever. Idiot! The hairspring broke. One bit of wiggling and fiddling too far. It doesn’t go at all now.

It would cost at least its value to have it repaired, not really worth it. It has little sentimental value because I was no longer at home when my parents bought it (I wouldn’t have fiddled in the first place if it had). Should I label it “not working” and put it in a charity sack, or just send it to scrap metal recycling?

Stair Rail

(First posted 9th October 2018)

Soon after moving to our current home nearly thirty years ago, I fitted a handrail to help my ageing father and struggling mother-in-law get up and down stairs. They hauled themselves up, breathless, with stiff backs and aching knees, and then eased themselves down, woodwork and bone groaning as one.

I brought it home on top of the car, which was a bit risky because at 14 feet long (4.25 metres) it stuck out both front and back. It’s a pig’s ear handrail – a reference to the cross-sectional shape, not the quality of fitting.

Neither my father or mother-in-law need it now, but even in my darkest moments, I never imagined that I would. 

School Metalwork

(first posted 21st November 2017)

The heat, the acridity, the instruments of torture - it was like entering the bowels of hell

By the time Tinplate Thompson had finished describing the gruesome horrors of the metalwork shop, we were too scared to move. He went over and over all the ways to hurt or injure yourself: cutting your skin on sharp edges, scraping it on rough surfaces, hitting your fingers with a hammer, trapping them in pincers, burning your flesh with a soldering iron, melting it with molten metal, ripping off your scalp by catching your hair in a machine, or an arm by catching a sleeve, … the list went on and on. It was so terrifying that none of us made light of it when he ended with “... and remember, before you pick up any metal, spit on it to make sure it’s not hot.”

The first thing you noticed was the smell: sharp, bitter and pungent, a mixture of metal polish, machine oil, cutting fluid and soldering flux. It clung to your hair and clothes. You knew when Thompson had walked down a corridor before you because it hung in the air behind him in an invisible cloud. You could follow it like a bloodhound. Sometimes, you catch a reminder from plumbers who have been soldering pipes, or brass musicians. It brings it back: the heat, the acridity, the instruments of torture. It was like entering the bowels of hell.

There were lethal looking hand tools, powered lathes, drills, cutters, grinders, a blacksmith’s forge and anvil, and welding equipment with a Darth Vader face mask. We made feeble jokes about bastard files and horizontal borers, but most of us would rather have stayed with the lesser perils of woodwork, or, safer still, been allowed to do cooking or needlework. There would have been no shortage of feisty girls eager to swap. 

“We can make anything in this workshop from a teaspoon to a motorcycle,” Thompson told us. Guess which we got to make.

We each cut the shape of a tea caddy spoon out of a brass plate, hammered out the bowl over a wooden form and smoothed the edges with a file. Mine was such a jagged and misshapen catastrophe I decided to ‘lose’ it in the acid bath where, hopefully, it dissolved away to nothingness. Yet it was magnificent compared to my sugar scoop. That was made out of soldered tinplate and supposed to look like a box with a slanted opening. Oh dear! A three-year old would have done better cutting it out with blunt scissors and sticking it up with paste. I might just as well have scraped on the solder with a builder’s trowel. It was ridged and lumpy, and didn’t hold together very well at all. Thompson wrinkled his nose in disgust as he marked it, as reflected in my school report.

Everyone else’s work looked neat, smooth and functional. But I did have one minor success. It was a hammer. It turned out right because the lathe did most of the work. All you had to do was squirt milky fluid on to the cutting tool while turning a handle. Even I could manage that. I was not even troubled by the springy coils of ‘swarf’ that flew off like shrapnel, threatening to slice your skin to shreds. My next report grade leapt from Very fair to Fair.

The hammer head consisted of a sawn-off rod cut with a couple of grooves and drilled with a hole to accommodate the handle. The handle was a longer, narrower rod with a non-slip grip pattern milled into one end, and cut thinner at the other end to fit through the head. I can no longer remember exactly how the head was fixed to the handle – it might have involved heat and expansion – but mine didn’t fall apart. I’ve still got it. You can see from the battered ends I still abuse it now and again.

Thinking back to that one year of metalwork, it is surprising that, so far as I know, no one was ever seriously injured. There were a few minor cuts and scrapes, but the nastiest accident was to Tinplate Thompson himself. Ignoring his own advice, he picked up a piece of hot metal without spitting on it first and burnt his hand. You should have heard him swear!


The photograph of the forge is from pixabay.com and is in the public domain

Kitchens Old and New

The new kitchen; not quite finished. Still awaiting new blinds and flooring. I also have bits of painting left to do such as the skirting board, ceiling and around the windows. At least the two weeks of takeaways, eating out, ready meals and washing up in the bathroom are over. Zoomers can get to work on the pictures and scrutinize our minutiae: Who is Katharine? Who takes max strength congestion relief? Who’s the Big Mug? (it’s me) Good job we haven’t hung up the calendar and notice board yet. It all feels much lighter and roomier than the worn-out, twenty-five-year-old configuration it replaced, although even that was luxury compared to kitchens of old.

Here is my grandma in her kitchen in 1964; in fact, it was not just the kitchen, it was the bathroom and the laundry room as well. The (what is now known as a) Belfast sink was the only place in the house with running water. It was not so many years since they had to fetch water from the village pump. The tall screen on the left was unfolded and placed across the alcove for privacy when washing. It would be mostly in cold water: the electric geyser was a relatively recent addition. Previously, water had to be heated on a large, black and silver, cast-iron, coal-fired range to the left of the camera and carried across the room. Look at the damp on the wall behind her.

For many years there was no flushing toilet. She had one outside by this time, but originally there was only an earth closet, the contents of which would be shovelled through an opening in the wall into the adjacent open-roofed ‘ash midden’ and burnt with the household rubbish.

She brought up a family of four there.

My mum’s kitchen around the same time is better equipped but not dissimilar. There is a top-loading washing machine on the right, a gas cooker on the left, and gosh, is that a mixer tap? By this time water was heated by an electric immersion heater in the bathroom water cylinder. There was also a Baxi back boiler behind the front room fireplace.

The sink and draining board are enamelled and mounted on formica/melamine cupboards. Above is a high wooden shelf for pans, and behind were floor-to-ceiling drawers and cupboards which were built-in new with the house in the nineteen-twenties; the other houses in the row had the same. The plastic bag hanging on the wall contains ‘silver paper’ (aluminium foil) and milk bottle tops for charity. Like her mother, she has a mirror hanging above the sink. The walls are tiled and free of damp and we have a separate bathroom, but by today’s expectations, it’s still quite basic.

Later in the sixties, we moved to a house with a serving hatch and an Aga cooker: real ‘Abigail’s Party’ stuff. But it still had the same kind of laminate drawers, cupboards and worktops. My mum now has a food mixer and there is a stand-alone spin dryer beneath the work surface in the corner. We also now had a fridge. I have no recollection of what the dispenser-like gadget screwed to the wall of the serving hatch could have been. It was a nuisance keeping the Aga going all summer, but in winter the house was always warm despite a vague but persistent sulphurous smell from the smokeless fuel. Mum didn’t like it. It was too like cooking on her mother’s coal-fired range. She eventually replaced it with a gas cooker.

On to the pigsty of the shared house in Leeds where I lived in the nineteen-seventies: if anything a step back. Along with 40% of other households, we had no fridge or washing machine, and domestic freezers were almost unknown in the U.K. I think the black and white picture was taken to prove Brendan did sometimes do the washing up.

The room is populated by a chip pan, dirty cups and beer glasses. The black and white picture contains a ubiquitous Russell Hobbs K2 electric kettle, although I think we lost that when someone moved out because the later colour picture has one that heats on the gas cooker.

Look in the other direction and you see what I mean by ‘pigsty’. No one ever did any cleaning. The formica/melamine unit with its gathering of nineteen-seventies tins and packets is simply disgusting. No wonder we had mice. The medieval toy soldiers above the cellar door, shields glinting in the flashbulb, came free inside breakfast cereal packets.

My kitchen standards have clearly come a long way in fifty years. No doubt, commenters such as arty Rosemary from her ex-gamekeeper’s cottage in the South-West of England with it's beautiful grounds and one hundred elegant objects will say of the new one (going by what she so woundingly said of our garden because she’s Northern and has to say it straight): “It’s not much of a kitchen is it?” She will explain it simply follows the humdrum nineteen-fifties American form originating in Benita Otte’s nineteen-twenties Bauhaus design: the seamless look of built-in worktops and cabinets with integrated appliances. She might even go so far as to say the flat panels in the cabinet doors clash with the raised panels of the room door.

Actually, we like the rounded corners and sage green doors. Mrs D. has been saving up for four years to pay for it. The only thing is, it cost more than a whole house would have cost in the nineteen-seventies.

Doorstep Deliveries

Milk seems such an ordinary product, yet it sparks off so many memories.

A pickup truck sounds in the night, footsteps trudge to the door, bottles clink, the truck drives off and I drift back to sleep in the silence. It was to be our last delivery. We had left a note to cancel the milk, to join all the other households who over the past forty years have forsaken the milkman for the supermarket.

Until a couple of months earlier our milkman had been Rodney. Like day follows night, he delivered five days a week, extra on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and called to be paid once a month on a Monday. But one month he surprised us by calling on a Friday, “… to make things easier for Monday,” he said. “Good idea to have a bit of a break on a bank holiday,” we replied.

On Monday there was double on the step: eight full bottles (the kids were at home). Where could we keep all that? And there was a note signed by Ben: “I have taken over as your new milkman”. Rodney had not let out even the tiniest hint. “I will be delivering three days a week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I will not be calling for payment but will leave a monthly invoice instead. Please would you leave a cheque by return.”

Three days a week! Monthly invoice! Cheque! What a layabout. We replied on the Wednesday to say just four each time please. There wasn’t enough room in the fridge for more. On other days we began to buy our milk in four-pint plastic bottles from the supermarket. We never saw Ben in person at all.

*                         *                         *

How different from how things used to be: milk fresh to the door seven days a week. It had to be before we all had fridges. In summer, we had to keep the bottles in a bowl of cold water in the kitchen sink, covered with a wet tea cloth, to stop it going off.

When I was little, our milkman was Jack Hunter who had a van. Not so long before that he had brought his milk on a horse drawn float. He was already ancient, but we had him all the way through my childhood and beyond. He worked well into his eighties, tall, straight, white hair, khaki dust coat, bottle carriers at his sides. How did he keep going? I would not have got up in the early hours to work a sixty-hour week, snow, ice, wind and rain, even in my twenties. There used to be a joke about the milkman who joined the army and thought it was great because he could stay in bed until six o’clock. Jack usually got to us before breakfast time but one day it was dinner time before he arrived. “You’re late today Jack. You look terrible!” my mum commented. “Sorry,” he said, “Edie died in the night.” His wife had died in bed beside him yet he still came round with the milk.

Jack left the bottles in the boot scraper beside the front door. Bottles were taller and thinner then, not the squat dumpy ones we have now. I know because Sooty the cat is sitting next to such a bottle on another doorstep in 1964. Milk was always full-cream (full-fat, perjoratively). No one had semi-skimmed until the nineteen-eighties. Even in 1985, full-cream accounted for over 90% of sales. My dad remained loyal to it until the end. The “cream” floated to the top and he liked it over a bowl of strawberries or raspberries. It was a treat to have it on your cornflakes.

It was always full-cream at school too. The government would not fund anything less. All school children under eighteen were allowed one-third of a pint free per day to alleviate poor nutrition, a major hindrance to learning. The Wilson government ended it for secondary pupils in 1968, and “Thatcher the milk snatcher” for all children over seven in 1971. Until then it came in little bottles exactly the same shape but one-third the size of those at home, sour in summer, frozen and expanding up from the tops in winter, slithering out at the necks like the heads of snails wearing silver berets. When not frozen we had a round, plastic, dimpled gadget for pressing in the foil tops, to avoid poking your thumbs in, but I didn’t like how it looked and felt, and it smelt as well, so I wouldn’t touch the nasty thing and used my thumbs anyway.

The ending of school milk never bothered me because I had left by then, and in any case, most of us had stopped drinking it by around fourteen. It was there if you wanted it, as much as you could drink, crates of it piled next to the lockers. When in the sixth form we started going to a friend’s house most days after school, and his mother complained about the amount of milk we were getting through, we began helping ourselves to milk from school. By the end of the year he must have had a hundred empty bottles stuffed under his bed. We got rid of them in a street bin around the corner.

So many memories! At one place I lived, the milk came around 6.00 a.m. but it began to disappear from the doorstep, stolen by an early riser or someone going home from the night shift. I entertained the idea of substituting a pint of sour milk until I realised it might get thrown through the window. I listened for the milkman in my sleep, dashed down to bring the milk in, and went back to bed. I suppose that’s why I still hear him in the night.

When we moved to where we live now, Sandra, the milk lady, waylaid us as we unloaded the furniture. “Free milk for a month” she said, which was too good to turn down. Her round was later taken over by someone else, and then again, until we got Rodney around ten years ago. The only problem we ever had was that someone pinched our metal milk bottle cover which prevented the birds from pecking at it and giving us psittacosis. I made a wooden one. Rodney was impressed. “I could sell those,” he said. “It even has little feet.”

We imagined Rodney would go on forever until, one day, without warning, there would be no milk and we would curse him thinking he was just late. We never thought he would actually retire.

*                         *                         * 

The new deliveries just three days a week were confusing and inconvenient. Not only that, it usually came around midnight. What good would that be on warm summer nights, standing out in the early morning sun before we brought it in? And then we got a note to say the milkman was going on holiday and had not been able to find a stand-in, so there would be no milk for a week. Unbelievable – a milkman who goes on holiday! It seemed best to cancel it completely. The irresistible forces of home refrigeration, supermarket price wars and a milkman who wanted some sort of work-life balance had finally won.  

It seemed a pity. Despite paying twice the supermarket price for the privilege, it felt good to be supporting a local service. The milk came from a nearby farm and the reusable glass bottles were environmentally friendly. It seems that in some city areas, doorstep deliveries are making a comeback supported by a growing band of eco-enthusiasts prepared to pay a fair price for their milk. One London firm still uses electric milk floats. “We have started to become hip and trendy again” they said. “Customers are beginning to realise that cheap milk from supermarkets is not sustainable for farmers.”

We put out the note to cancel the milk, rolled up and poked in the top of a bottle. That evening there was a loud knock on the door: a very determined knock. It was Ben, the new milkman: the only time we have ever seen him. “I don’t want to lose volume” he complained. We explained our reasons – the need to store large quantities, the milk on the step in the sun. “Well,” he said, “I can do it in four-pint plastic containers like from the supermarket.” So we’re giving it a go. We get all our milk from him now and haven’t cancelled it at all. Two four-pint containers will fit in the fridge door, whereas eight one-pint bottles will not. It costs less than glass bottles too. I had to make a bigger milk bottle box though. The hinged lid is very satisfying but we’ve no idea what the new milkman makes of it. We’ve still only seen him the once.

It is not ideal to be using more plastic, but at least plastic bottles appear to be more easily recyclable than the Tetra-Paks they used to have. As for Rodney, it turns out he hasn’t retired. He has just cut down the size of his round. We still see him out and about but he no longer delivers to our street.

REFERENCES

• On duty with the last of the milkman.  The Telegraph, 10th July, 2017.
• Milkmen to make a comeback – but they charge twice as much as supermarkets. The Telegraph, 25th April, 2016.
• Thatcher ‘the snatcher’ may not have been wrong. The Telegraph, 5th January, 2006. 
• Doorstep milk deliveries still gotta lotta bottle. The Financial Times, 29th April, 2016. This is behind a paywall, but if you search for the title you may be able to see it.
• The perils of the pint on your doorstep. The Times, 2nd September, 1981, page 11.
• Shopping around for a healthy life. The Times, 8th May, 1985, page 10.

Old Tools

Not long after my parents married in 1946, my maternal grandfather took my father to one side and, on account of the fact that his new son-in-law travelled in ladies underwear (so to speak) rather than having some more practical and manly occupation, told him, “Sither, th’d better ’ave these,” and gave him a set of tools. No doubt the items he passed on were surplus to his needs having acquired and inherited a considerable collection over his forty-five years.

Those tools, both my father’s and my grandfather’s, became very familiar to me. My grandfather’s tools remained in his garden shed-cum-workshop, and after he had died at what was even then an abysmally young age, I would sneak in to ‘play’ with his wood brace and drill bits, his awls and gimlets, his planes, chisels, hammers and mallets, and other tools I couldn’t identify, all logically arranged on purpose made hooks, racks and shelves. Some may have been handed down from his own grandfather, who had worked with steam engines on barges in the 1870s. Both would have been as appalled by my lack of respect for them as by my father’s mistreatment of the items he had been given.

My grandfather’s immaculate collection of tools eventually went to one of my uncles to be misused by his children, but my father’s neglected assortment are among the jumble of tools I now have to sort out, having over the years, just like my grandfather, bought, acquired and inherited my own surplus.

Now rusty and unloved, so many of them bring back lost associations. There are the bicycle spanners and tyre levers I watched my father use to adjust saddles, remove wheels and mend punctures (see Dad's Thursday Helper). There are thicker spanners and tyre levers from the toolkits of long-ago scrapped motor vehicles – his firm’s delivery vans – some marked ‘Bedford’, another labelled ‘Austin’, all in defunct British Standard Whitworth sizes.

There are broken files and sets of hard-handled pliers now so stiff it takes stronger hands than mine to pull them open. They carry the trademark of Elliott Lucas of Cannock which once made around half of all the pliers and pincers sold in the United Kingdom.

A group of wooden-handled, triangular scrapers reminds me of the time my father acquired a blowlamp and painstakingly scraped layers of old paint off the skirting board in the back room. Those old scissors are the ones my mother used for dead-heading the flowers in the garden.

There is a thick metal punch, its top battered down from when I used it to chip out a groove in the concrete under the door of the yellow shed I had taken over, to form a base for a ridge of cement to act as a barrier to the rainwater that pooled in, although it never worked. That was in 1965 – I know because I remember scoring the date in the top of the cement, it being my birthday.

Among the screwdrivers with bent or rounded blades is one with its wooden handle splintered down to half its original size through being bashed with a hammer when it served as a substitute cold chisel. Other screwdrivers were misused as makeshift levers and scrapers. One of them, the most damaged and least usable of them all, was left by a mechanic under the bonnet of one of my first cars after it had been in for repair. My father and I weren’t the only serial tool-abusers in town.

For the last thirty years or so, my father’s tools lived in an blue metal tool box. The bottom is now rusted through despite the amount of oil and grease covering everything inside, soaking into the wooden handles and attracting a filthy film of old paint, grease, grit and bits of insects. I had to wipe them clean before I could begin to sort them.

In addition there are my own tools, once new but now seemingly as old as my father’s. There are tools for painting and wallpapering, woodworking, home plumbing and electrical work, the legacy of years as a home owner. There are sets of AF and Metric spanners, feeler gauges, a spark-plug spanner, a brake spanner and other specialist implements from the days I serviced my own old bangers. There is a set of miniature silver tools that once came in a pouch designed to be carried in a car glove-box, which were always useless, consisting of an adjustable spanner that did not grip, a hinged set of spanners that were all the same size, and a handle with interchangeable screwdriver blades which somehow failed to fit any screw I ever wanted to turn.

And now – the event that forces me to sort them all out after all this time – I have acquired yet more tools, this time from my mother-in-law, some old and worn, others as good as new, little used and much better than mine.

I am afraid that most of the tools photographed, together with the rusty blue toolbox, are destined for the metal recycling skip, having checked ebay and found them to be effectively valueless.

Two particularly satisfying things I will keep.

“That’s my daddy’s ruler,” my wife said when we unearthed this thirty-six inch Rabone boxwood 1375 folding ruler in my mother-in-law’s garage. These beautiful devices were used widely before the invention of the ubiquitous retractable tape measure. Its four sections can be folded down to a single nine-inch length, or opened out to an arrow-straight yard long rule. There seem to be plenty still left around, probably because they are much too satisfying to throw away.

“That’s my daddy’s oil can,” is what I could have said when we found it in the cardboard box that came from my father’s garage nearly ten years ago. He used to fill it with used engine oil and like the spanners mentioned above, it may originally have been from an ancient motor vehicle tool kit. This type of oil can predated the present day tins with built-in plastic spouts. Unfortunately, because of damage, it would now only serve its original function with a sawn-off shortened spout, so I’ve cleaned it out with a hot solution of washing powder to keep as an object of interest. I recently saw a similar one in a Cotswolds antique shop for £100.

Good. That’s the tools sorted. Now for my accumulation of nails, screws, washers, brackets, hinges, piping, wiring, fuses, electric plugs, wall plugs, bath plugs, coat hooks, cup hooks, curtain hooks, door handles, fork ’andles and other bits and pieces. On second thoughts, it can wait a few more years. If I leave it long enough it will be someone else’s problem. Either that or open my own branch of Screwfix.

Heathkit AD-27

A 1960s quest to play music in stereo leads to the purchase of a Heathkit hi-fi

“I’d never spend a hundred and thirty quid on a record player,” Gavin scoffed in contempt when I told him what my Heathkit stereo had cost, “especially when I had to make it myself.”

Such derision was painful coming from one of my best friends, but he did have a point. £130 in 1970 was today’s equivalent of around £1,750 in terms of prices, and possibly twice that in terms of earnings, so it was indeed a worrying amount to spend on just “a record player”.

Gavin’s dismissiveness should not have been a surprise. To begin with, he did not seem very musical going by what I’d heard of his hymn singing in school assembly. Secondly, his main interest was animals. If he had managed to save £130 he would have expanded his menagerie of amphibians, reptiles and cage birds. I would have quipped just as quickly that I’d never spend a hundred and thirty quid on a twittering flock of Java sparrows, especially then to have to feed them and clean out the bird mess.

I've always liked music. When my mother did her housework to Housewives’ Choice on the Light Programme in the nineteen fifties, all the songs went straight into my head and stayed there (e.g. almost at random: Mitch Miller’s ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’; The Four Lads’ ‘Standing on the Corner’; Eve Boswell’s ‘Pickin’ a Chicken’; Michael Holliday’s ‘Story of My Life’; Perry Como’s ‘Delaware’;  ... ). And later through the nineteen sixties pop explosion I recorded hours of LPs and singles on my reel-to-reel tape recorder. I learned to play guitar and clarinet, and even began to like classical music.

The attraction was always the music rather than the words. I could never understand the appeal of the tuneless Bob Dylan or the droning Leonard Cohen, and when performers came along who were more concerned with how they looked than how they sounded, they left me cold – I’m thinking here of posers such as David Bowie and Marc Bolan. I belatedly came round to appreciating Bob Dylan’s genius, and even Leonard Cohen’s, but in 1970 I would have always gone for the spectacular musicianship of The Who or Jethro Tull any day.

It therefore seemed entirely justifiable to spend a large sum of money on audio equipment – not a “record player” but ‘hi-fi’ – high fidelity stereo, the high quality reproduction of sound. Something of similar quality would be costly even today, despite the shrinking price of consumer electronics over the intervening decades.

People forget now that when the early Beatles and Rolling Stones records came out they were in single channel mono rather than binaural stereo, played in most homes on simple self-contained Dansette-type record players. Mine was a Philips, but basically the same – it had a built in amplifier with a single loudspeaker, the turntable speed could be adjusted for 33 rpm LPs (later called albums), 45 rpm singles and the old 78 rpm records, and it had a drop-down autochanger which allowed around half a dozen records to be played automatically in succession. The sound quality was not all that great.

My first LPs were all monophonic: ‘The Hits of the Animals’ (an export version bought in Belgium), Georgie Fame’s ‘Sweet Things’ and Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets’. I didn’t own any others for some years  because I could lend these out in exchange for others to record on tape. LPs began to appear in stereo during the latter half of the nineteen sixties, but as they were downwards compatible most people continued to play them on mono equipment. I first heard true stereo at a friend’s house and was thrilled by the way Jimi Hendrix’s guitar floated ethereally across the room from one speaker to the other.

Shure phono cartridge and stylus, with boxes (these are from later in the 1970s).

When I got the Beatles White Album in 1968 it was in stereo, and I wanted to know what it really sounded like. I bought a Shure stereo phono cartridge – the cartridge is the part that holds the stylus underneath the head of the record player arm – and wired it up so that one stereo channel played internally through the record player as usual, and the other externally through my tape recorder. It worked, but not very well. The aeroplane at the beginning of the first track, ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’, did just about fly across the room in front of me, but it wasn’t all that convincing. Trials with other bits and bits and pieces of equipment fared no better.* It might have been stereo but it was certainly not high fidelity. After a while I gave up and went back to mono. As my uncle put it, “Good mono is better than bad stereo.” There was nothing for it but to save up for a proper system. It had to wait until after I started work.

Before the nineteen seventies, ‘hi-fi’ was an expensive minority interest and proper systems were expensive. One of the first affordable products was Alan Sugar’s Amstrad 8000 stereo amplifier which cost £17, but Sugar himself now admits that it wasn’t very good – possibly no better than my own first faltering trials. Hi-fi also still came as a collection of separate units – a turntable or record deck, a radio tuner, a tape deck, a pre-amplifier, an amplifier and loudspeakers – interconnected by a confusion of wires hanging behind in a spaghetti-like, dust-collecting tangle. Integrated music centres which came along around 1973 avoided some of this wiring mess, but their sound quality at first still tended to be poor. It was some time before consumers began to look for higher quality.

My Heathkit AD-27 Stereo Compact

Before these things came to market, the most cost-effective way to get high fidelity stereo was as a build-it-yourself kit – a collection  of wooden cabinets, chassis parts, printed circuit boards and electronic components. I bought a Heathkit AD-27 stereo centre comprising a stereo tuner/amplifier (Heathkit AR-14) and integrated record deck (BSR McDonald 500A), together with large Heathkit speaker cabinets containing bass and treble loudspeakers.

It took several weeks to put it together. One problem for me was that there were around a hundred and forty resistors of around sixty different values identified by colour-coded bands: green-blue-brown for 560 Ω (ohms), grey-red-brown for 820 Ω, yellow-violet-orange for 47 kΩ. Now, as previously posted, distinguishing red from brown from orange from green from grey is no simple matter for me, but I managed by sorting them into piles and checking I had the correct numbers of each according to the list of components. It’s a wonder I did it right, but I did.

Extracts from Heathkit AD-27 documentation
See links at end of page to download full manuals from Google docs

For the next few weeks I soldiered on with my soldering iron, mounting resistors, transistors, capacitors, diodes, chokes and other components on to printed circuit boards. I screwed together the metal chassis and wired in the boards, power supply, knobs, switches, sockets and other parts. I sometimes worked on it in the early hours of the morning. One night my dad walked wondering why the light was on, and seeing a stream of smoke rising from the soldering iron said in surprise, “Oh! Are you having a cig son?”

The speakers came flat packed and had to be put together. The back used a surprisingly large number of screws. One of the bass speaker cones had to be sent back and replaced because it rattled.

When at last it was finished it didn’t work. Despite re-soldering all the joints I wasn’t getting anything like the correct voltage readings at specified points on the circuit boards. I sent it back to Heath of Gloucester for attention, and for a nominal charge they quickly fixed it. Whether the problem was my fault is unclear because although they carried out more re-soldering, they also had to replace a faulty component.

On its return, I installed the unit in its wooden cabinet and switched it on, and it worked. My ‘good mono’ uncle rushed round to witness the moment, and as the full orchestra came in and rose to a crescendo near the beginning of the Peer Gynt Suite, without any sign of distortion, he gave me a thumbs up sign and said, simply, “It’s a good ‘un.” And it was. It had a wonderfully rich, warm tone.

It malfunctioned once more when about four years old, and I couldn’t mend it. I sent it back to Gloucester a second time and again they replaced a component and re-heated some of the joints. As well as making wonderful equipment they gave wonderful service.

It gave me years of enjoyment. Even my dad started buying records to listen to on his Thursday half-days off.  I was a bit put out to find Bing Crosby, Vera Lynn and Mrs. Mills among the LPs in my record box.

Despite the expense and derision, the Heathkit was well worth the money. But the fortune Gavin spent on animals was a much better investment. I never became a rock star but he later became a vet.


Here are a couple of YouTube videos of AD-27s, although the first one is in a completely different cabinet and you have to look near the end for a good view of the deck.

* In due course all the bits and pieces of equipment got thrown away: my Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder, an almost identical two track machine acquired for nothing from a friend who no longer used it, my uncle's old Grundig tape recorder, an extension loudspeaker and belatedly the Heathkit around 2003 after spending years in the loft. People are now interested in these things again, and I wish I still had them. I have a photograph from a wet morning in spring, 1978, showing my old record player, an extension loudspeaker and my uncle's old Grundig tape recorder waiting forlornly at the side of the road for their fate with the dustmen.

Links to Assembly Manuals and Related Items on Google Docs

The Heathkit AD-27 was based on the Heathkit AR-14 stereo tuner/amplifier.
Specification Sheet - Heathkit Kit Builders Guide - Invoice and miscellaneous items

AD-27 Assembly Manual (manual number 595-1134 dated 28th March 1969).
The circuit diagram which folds out from page 115 contains very small text so I have scanned it at higher resolution.
Assembly manual - Amendments and additional Information - Circuit Diagram

Berkeley Loudspeakers (model SCM-3, manual number 595-G590-01 dated 10th September 1970).
Assembly manual - Amendments - Additional information