Like Enid Blyton 2

Saturday night, coming up to 11 o'clock. In the top bunk, in the small glow of the kelly lamp I had fixed to the wall, I lay in my sleeping bag, warm under the weight of the extra blankets laid on top. In winter or if the weather had been wet there might be a slight touch of damp about the bag and a faintly musty smell. But it didn't make things any less comfortable and would soon disperse. 

Picture: James Butters
http://www.jamesbutters.com/

We had a Perdio Piccadilly, one of the first generation of solid state radios, tiny compared with the valve radios that had gone before. At eleven it would bring us the lush sound of Samantha by the Pete Moore Orchestra, signalling the start of Pick of the Pops, the BBC's first ever top 20 chart show. Introduced by David Jacobs it had the now familiar countdown format, playing the top 20 hits of the week. On the brink of becoming 1960's teenagers we drowsed to the sounds of a new era beginning. 

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We roamed freely, exploring the abandoned grounds and buildings. 

Looking across the garden from the french window, can be seen some of the  'great glasshouses' described by Jacks  in 1880 (See Blyton 1). We went poking around in these places, our feet crunching on glass, smashed where it had fallen from the disintegrating roof. Overgrown travesties of the old horticulture writhed among opportunist invaders such as bramble and buddleia. Leaning against walls and lying on the floor, implements rusted in the stillness left by their users, as they closed the doors behind them decades before, never to return.




I was intrigued by the electric light bulbs, permanently sealed into their sockets by ancient corrosion. They were a different shape to the ones we knew: straight sided, tapering back toward the socket end. I guessed they were an earlier evolutionary stage of the light bulb and was impressed that in its day this place must have been very modern indeed.

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In one outhouse there were two large black double-doored cupboards and once again I had the feeling I had walked in on a day in the life of someone long ago. Inside there were shelves filled with hundreds of empty wine bottles. The shelves had been lined with newspapers and we cleared some bottles away so we could carefully pull a few out. I still have one of them now. It's the Midland Free Press from March 1880. It's become very fragile indeed and will crumble away to dust very soon.

This was the first time I had encountered an old style newspaper with its column after column of tiny print and few pictures. A lot of what was in here was dull stuff to me. A general election was coming up and there were long pieces by candidates, written in the verbose style of the day. In a column of foreign news snippets though, there was an item I still remember. It reported 'atrocious murders in Chicago'. I was a teenage boy, a fan of crime fiction; The Untouchables, all about Al Capone and Elliott Ness was on TV and  the film, Al Capone, was in the cinemas. I expected atrocious murders of Chicago. And these were atrocious: bodies fished out of the river were found to have had their innards removed, carefully sliced up, as if by butchers, and reinserted. And I had thought horrible crime in Chicago was a nineteen twenties thing.

This stuff remained with me and so when I was choosing options in history more than ten years later one of them had to involve that period in  America.  So I did get to find out about that appallingly fascinating era of exponential expansion in Chicago, the stockyards and meat packing industry.

As I'm putting these posts together I'm struck by how I was surrounded by attention grabbing history as I grew up. No wonder I became a history buff. 





However this might be the moment to state that, not so long after the events described here, I failed history at GCE 'O' Level.

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Colston Hall from another viewpoint, around 1900
Photo: Picture the Past 

• Pictures unless otherwise stated are by Roger Whysall

• I got the picture of the radio, identical to one of ours (we had two, the other one blue), from a brilliant website by James Butters. I'm struck by how beautiful these mid 20th century bits of technology were, especially compared to the slug-like objects of the era we have just lived through. Mr Butters does them proud. If, like me, you are interested in the history of everyday things, visit him now at

http://www.jamesbutters.com

• Music and smells are very powerful memory cues. When I hear this, I go back in my head to the musty pleasure of those moments:

http://bbc.in/1EXaz9j