A childhood memoir of life before polio, and immediately after, and my magical childhood adventures in and out of a wheelchair
Ice Cream and Comics
Macari's ice cream was the best in the world. A sixpenny tub of ice cream - they did only vanilla and strawberry flavour - when I was rich and 6 years old, when I was rich having just won on the arcade machines. Now what should I do? Should I save three (old) pence and just have a threepenny tub of ice cream, investing the rest for a further try on the machines? Or hang around like predators whilst the grownups neared the mark of a win and then skilfully putting the pennies in the slot, almost guaranteeing a win? Well, more times than not, it was in such a way that I had won in the first place. But what to do? My greed overtook me. I had a whole sixpenny tub of Macari's ice cream.
I remember in the comic the Beano a character called Flip McCoy the Floating Wonder Boy: a boy who had strapped to his back a sort of pack out of which protruded a helicopter-type propeller with which he could fly. Another character was called (I think) Captain Jumbo: a boy who had, attached to his arm a type of gauntlet on which were all kinds of buttons and dials, plus an aerial which protruded up from the gauntlet and with which he conducted an army of tiny soldiers, planes that flew, tanks that actually fired real missiles, even parachutists that were dropped from the planes as they flew overhead. Fantastic stuff!
Not forgetting Biffo the Bear and Dennis the Menace, the Bash Street Kids, Lord Snooty and his Gang. There was even a boy whose father (I think) built him a metal fish with a domed, glass cockpit in which he had the most incredible adventures: this metal fish could actually leap out of the water, with this boy at the controls, and dive. Of course there was Desperate Dan and his Cow Pie with the horns sticking out of it, and the dustbin full of rubbish that Dan used to smoke like my granddad's pipe. But it was the Dandythat used to make my mouth water. There was always a plateful of steaming chips dotted with fried eggs and stuck with sausages. I had access to all the chips in the world, BUT NOT IN THE WINTERTIME! The restaurant was closed and I had only my sixpence a week pocket money. I was absolutely starving by the time I had read the Dandy or the Beano!! Even to this day I cannot resist a Fish and Chip Shop. I have to have some. ..but the cod today is codling - due to over-fishing - which has little flavour so I have to have haddock, a good substitute!
Then there was the Eagle featuring Dan Dare (The Pilot of the Future!) and the Mekon. Dan Dare was the very first Sci-fi series that I had read. Dan was a space pilot and The Mekon was his arch enemy. The Mekon used to float about in this kind of glass bubble: all head and a tiny body and looked alarmingly like The Greys of Area 52 (the supposed crash site of real aliens in America??), except the Mekon was green, as I remember.
And then there was The Topper? I was the first kid to receive The Topper (complete with free ThunderClap. A ThunderClap was a square piece of cardboard folded in two to form a triangle; attached to its edges was a piece of paper approximately one third down. When folded in and brought downward with considerably force, it made the most almighty BANG!). Having just contracted polio our newsagent, Auntie Mary and Uncle Fred Reynolds sent the very first Topper off the pile to me!
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