My red-and-white bicycle

I got this bike when I was three. As a reward for no longer being in nappies at night. With 12" balloon tyres, rod-operated brake on the front wheel, finished in red and white, this Silver Knight bicycle lasted me until my tenth birthday, when it was replaced by a Hercules Jeep (24" wheels). As my principal form of transport for nearly seven years (fitted with stabiliser wheels at first), the Silver Knight was not just a bicycle. It was a racing car, an aircraft, a flying boat, a police motorbike, and express engine. Inspired by endurance - the Le Mans 24 Hours, the Indianapolis 500, the first round-the-world flight - I would do endless laps around the block - Croft Gardens, Oaklands Road, Seward Road and Manton Avenue before returning home for a pit stop or a landing at a remote airfield then carrying on. Over the years, the Silver Knight lost all unnecessary parts; mudguards (I'd not go cycling in the rain!), rear carrier rack, triangular metal 'fins' on the chainstays; the saddle and handlebars were raised as far as they would go, and an STP sticker applied to the frame. When I got my new bike (long overdue!) the Silver Knight passed onto my brother. Above: That's me, aged five, outside our house, going as fast as I could up Croft Gardens. Note total lack of cars parked on the road. The few cars that belonged to residents of Croft Gardens tended to be garaged whenever possible. The fact that my father (who took the picture) was home at the time, and the long shadow from a westering sun, suggests a late spring evening.

Street Cries of Old Hanwell

The rag and bone men would come by occasionally. Their horse-drawn, four wheel cart, would be piled high with old bicycle frames, mangles, spin-dryers, mattresses, vacuum cleaners - any old junk beyond repair. 

As they progressed along Croft Gardens to the clip-clop of hooves on asphalt, they would call out to householders eager to dispose of junk. I could never work out what it was they were shouting. "RI-to" (that's an "i" as in "bit", "o" as in "cot"), it sounded to me. Certainly not "Any old rags and bones you wish to dispose of, missus?" 

The institution of the rag-and-bone man (or totter) was an early bottom-up recycling initiative, not dictated by the council but by the market. I'd guess that most parts of London would have had their 'round' served by rag-and-bone men, who'd have been doing this since Victorian times. 

The TV series Steptoe and Son, about two rag-and-bone men and set in Shepherd's Bush (just a few miles up the Uxbridge Road from us), was aired on BBC TV between 1962 and 1965, when I'd have been too young to watch. The second run (1970 to '74), in colour, was already nostalgia, as by then we'd moved to posher Cleveland Road, the rag-and-bone men and their horse-drawn carts had gone.

Airfix boy

From the day my father bought me my first Airfix kit (Supermarine Spitfire Mk IX, JE*J), sometime in the spring of 1963, I was hooked. Making plastic models of aircraft would be something I'd be up to for the next decade or so. I recall the day. We'd gone to the see the parish priest at Andrzej Bobola Polish church in Hammersmith about my brother's forthcoming christening. Rather than going straight home, we drove to Bushey Park, where, in the car park, my father presented me with the kit. It was in a brown paper bag; inside was in a clear plastic bag with a card stapled the top with an illustration of a Spitfire. The kit itself was of pale blue plastic. Wings, fuselage halves, ailerons, wheels, etc, were attached to sprue, there was a set of transfers with the RAF roundels and a clear plastic hood.

I'd guess my father made the kit, but he showed me how to do it. After a while I was sticking them together with aplomb. At the time there was no mention of solvent abuse, but I'm sure there was something about those fumes from the polystyrene cement (larger kits had little browny-yellow capsules of glue with them). Also, I can't remember whether JE*J (the plane of ace fighter pilot 'Johnnie' Johnson) was ever painted or whether it remained pale blue with transfers applied.

Towards the end of that summer, making plastic kits had become my favourite pastime. Well, that and building things out of Lego. One day, my father took me to Woolworths. I was very keen for him to buy me an Airfix kit of the North American Harvard, like the Spitfire, Series I, costing all of 1s. 11d., and moulded in bright yellow plastic. My father offered to buy me an Avro Lancaster bomber. Series 5 (. Four engines! Moving turrets with elevating machine guns! Functioning ailerons, elevators and rudders! Rotating undercarriage wheels! Which to choose? The Lancaster was a kit bigger and more sophisticated than any I'd helped build before. So I chose the Lanc, though I was a bit sad that the bright yellow Harvard was not to be mine.

Above: That's me proudly displaying the finished Lancaster kit ('G' for George), one fine September day in our back garden in Croft Gardens. My brother is in the pram (the wheels of which would end up as the starring stage prop in Class 3V's production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang five years later). My mother's hand is by the tea things. Behind us is the summerhouse, full of things like a wind-up gramophone, old furniture and other discarded items. The putty on the summerhouse's glazing was forever falling off (or picked away by little fingers). And note the crease in my grey flannel school shorts.

Incidentally, from what my father told me, the previous owner of our house on Croft Gardens, a Mr Appleby or Applegate, was an RAF navigator flying Lancaster bombers. We used to have a large, heavy, grey compass that came from one in our veranda. The insides were painted black and a luminous needle would wobble around inside.

Pounds, shillings and pence

Talking to my daughter Monika over the holidays about pre-decimal money that we had when I was a child, she expressed her horror at just how complicated things were. Four farthings to a penny, two ha'pennies to a penny; twelve pennies to a shilling, twenty shillings to the pound - twenty one shillings to the guinea... things would cost tuppence (not two pence), thruppence (not three pence) or thruppence ha'penny, we had tanners (sixpence), bob (shillings, never expressed in the plural, so six bob, not six bobs), florins (two shillings) and half-a-crown (two shillings and six pence). No crowns, though, which would have been five bob. A penny was 1d, a shilling 1s. One shilling and six pence ('one and six') would be expressed as 1s 6d.

Decimalisation removed all this wonderful jargon and replaced it with prosaic pence and pounds, one hundred per. Yes, it is now so much simpler. But as a child, I never had any problems with the value of money. Down at Tanner's, the sweetshop, I know what a ha'penny could buy, what thruppence worth of chewy milkbottles or rhubarb-and-custard boiled sweets was like, and that sixpence would purchase a nice bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk ("a full glass-and-half in every bar"). Fry's Turkish Delight would cost 5d.

Now 5d is nominally two pence. That's the rate at which old money was changed into new. A shilling is five pee (as they're referred to now). But it would be wrong to say that a Matchbox toy (a shilling) cost only 'five pee in today's money'), as average earnings in the mid-1960s were some 12-15 times less than they are today.

To compare 1965 prices with today's click here for a useful calculator.

School lunches, or 'dinners' as they were called at Oaklands, cost one shilling and thruppence (1s. 3d.) a week when I started school in September 1962. For that price, a child had five main courses and five desserts. Thruppence a day to feed a child! I remember bringing five thruppenny bits to school on a Monday morning, standing one of the 12-sided coins upright on my desk, then carefully placing a second on on the first, then a third... no one could do all five!