The joy of a toy

Die-cast metal toy cars were the quintessential toy of my childhood, along with Lego bricks and plastic model kits that needed sticking together. I've written about the latter two here and here. Essential to my desire to own more and more toy cars (I had over 100 when we moved from Croft Gardens to posher Cleveland Road at the end of my Grey Jumper'd Childhood) was the catalogue.

At the time, the two main brands were Corgi and Dinky. These toy cars were generally 1/43rd scale. Smaller in size were Matchbox toys, a third staple of my car fleet. From time to time I would get a Spot-On car or Budgie (Dinky/Corgi size) or Husky (Matchbox size). There are many websites showing photos of the toys themselves - but if you're my generation, beware - going to these sites may well result in a serious loss of time, spent wading in purest, golden nostalgia.

The joy of getting my little hands on the toy car was heightened by the anticipation, which began by hours-long gazing at the catalogues, which Corgi, Dinky and Matchbox published annually. The 1960s, my childhood decade, was a time of rapid innovation in the toy car market. From toys that offered no more than rotating wheels, rubber tyres and plastic windows that I'd play with in my earliest childhood, to fully-featured toys with opening doors, bonnet and boot revealing a detailed interior and engine bay, each new catalogue brought with it a wealth of new expectations.

For the toy to bring hours of pleasure to me, it needed features. And the very apex of die-cast toy sophistication for me was the Corgi Toys James Bond Aston Martin DB5, which helped make the Christmas of 1965 the best ever of my childhood. Another was the Corgi Toys Mini-Cooper Magnifique, released in 1967. My urgent fingers would open and close the doors, tip forward the seats, slide the sunroof, examine the engine - and prepare the car for long-distance journeys.

Many others spring to mind from that golden age - the Corgi Toys Lincoln Continental (four opening doors, opening bonnet and boot and colour TV in the back!); the Dinky Toys Rolls-Royce Phantom V (again, four opening doors, opening bonnet and boot); the Corgi Toys Porsche Carrera 6 that rolled further and faster than any other toy car in Oaklands Road Primary School playground.

Yet thinking back, it was catalogue-gazing that brought me most pleasure. The joy was in the anticipation, imagining how it would be to open that box and to wheel out those four ounces of metal on four rubber tyres and push them around the floor.

Christmas; another time, another place

This is me, aged five, in December 1962. I've just received my present from Swiety Mikolaj (as opposed to Santa Claus), at the Polish school in Ealing. Inside the box was an plastic toy locomotive, like this one but in orange, without any stickers on it. A few weeks later (for St. Nicholas's Day is celebrated on 6 December), I received for Christmas two tin-plate trucks, rather like this one. And a Lego set, seen on this catalogue (set 212 or 213).

Time to get metaphysical. Something around these presents triggered in me an early 'anomalous familiar memory event'. A pleasant memory, though patently not of this lifetime. When I think back to that Christmas, to those toys, I can still feel that sense of 1950s USA and Scandinavia, the textures, the klimat, the wonder at feeling a different reality, as a small child, that I knew was entirely at odds with what I'd experienced in my short life to that time.

Winters that feel like they do today; snow-covered gardens with small evergreens, outdoor lighting, neat, white, detached, modern houses - not Hanwell London W7.

Autumn

Autumns started earlier in England than they do in Poland; to put it another way, summers would end sooner (and in any case were cooler and wetter). School would start at the beginning of September and all thoughts of summer would soon fade amid the wood-varnish and Magic Marker smells of the new school year.

By the time of my birthday in October, gloom would have descended; wet pavements, darkness just after tea-time and the early evening news in black and white, electric fires and, outside, the all-pervasive dampness.

I remember my tenth birthday; 1967. My present, well-remembered, was a Dinky Toys Rolls-Royce Phantom V. My father bought it at Confiserie Francaise, the best toyshop in Ealing Broadway (on the Mall). We walked down the Uxbridge Road to Ealing Common, where I took the car out of its box (but not off the stand; as well as all four doors opening, the boot opened as did the bonnet (on two sides). It cost 10/6d. That's 52.5p expressed in today's money, though the equivalent value today would be more like £7.00.

On Ealing Common we collected conkers (horse chestnuts) under the large, wet, reddish-brown leaves until the drizzle became more like rain and we retreated to the car, returning home to Croft Gardens so I could play with my new toy.