Anecdotes
Pantomime Horse:
My son Andrew had a rare stroke of genius at the age of twelve when he came up with a plan to please his sister. Kath had been wanting a horse for some time and as each birthday approached there were vibes that this might be the year for her to wake up and find one on the lawn at dawn. So Andrew suggested we should borrow a pantomime horse. This wasn't easily arranged in July, but we succeeded and, secretly dressed in the skin, we hobbled off onto the back lawn before she woke on 28thJuly 1980.
We thought this was hilarious and enjoyed gambolling round and doing a sort of two-man Hokey-Cokey within view of her bedroom window. It didn't occur to us how psychologically damaging this might be to a ten year old. She claims the scars remain to this day.
Early telephones:
Whilst we all have mobile phones nowadays, during the war years only a small minority had a home phone. We were one of the few in the road who had a phone; the number was St Mellons 55. So I suppose there may have been 54 others spread across the villages of Rumney, where I lived and St Mellons which was 3 miles away. Indeed it was in a different county then. Even in those days boundaries were shifted frequently. When my parents bought the house in 1934 it was in Monmouthshire, but by the time war was declared Rumney was already a suburb of the City of Cardiff. Nevertheless the phone system remained linked with St Mellons and ladies sat at switchboards connecting every call individually. You would ask for a connection by town and number, but to telephone out of your own area was very expensive, often slow and of poor quality. The Church, to this day, still has Rumney in the Diocese of Monmouth, so it was very much a border village and the river bridge at the bottom of Rumney hill had been the dividing line for centuries.
Today we all refer to Wikipedia as a source of information, but in those days we went to the library. The Rumney library was in the Memorial Hall but only seemed to stock books suitable for the refined ladies of the district, written by those who wrote for modern womanhood in the 1940s, often humorously and light-heartedly, authors like Daphne du Maurier. This was well before Chick-lit became popular. I seldom went to the Library in the Memorial Hall, but in later years went to the reference library in Cardiff, where you could look at books, but not take them away.
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In my youth I learnt to type on the office typewriter. This was so primitive that for a numeral 1 we used the small letter 'l' and for nought a capital O was used. If a mistake was made you usually had to start again, because rubbing out, before Tippex was thought of, involved a messy process with a hard rubber on the top copy and a soft rubber on the carbon copy of whatever was being typed. I became quite proficient, and although I did not learn touch typing, I could very swiftly churn out multiple copies of letters.
Click the picture to read more about typewriters
(at the bottom of the Business page)