Peter Viney's Blog

Or A Child’s Christmas in Bournemouth

All pictures from my collection of vintage magazines

More than seventy Christmases should be in my memory, but in my childhood, a camera had twelve tiny shots in black and white and that film was expected to last a year. We have whole albums of 80s and 90s and 00s Christmases, but I’ve checked the albums and I don’t think we have any Christmas photos at all older than 1975.  Those Kodak Brownies didn’t have a flash and all the early pictures are outdoors. So memories are selective and only vaguely dated. I’m not going past 1978 when we had our first child, and then started taking several rolls of film every year. Then digital meant vastly more pictures.

As a child, it’s presents. Just this Christmas 2021, my 23 month old grandson, the first Christmas he’s aware of, was astonished by the presents (he has five older siblings, and his next one up was born on Christmas Day, so having his fifth birthday too). The little one was not into acquisition so much as taking paper off, which others allowed him to do. Long after the last present was opened, he tugged my arm and suggested, ‘More presents, grandad!’

When I was a child, Father Christmas always left the presents in my parent’s room … a very good idea that went by the wayside, but much better than trying to creep into rooms in a red dressing gown with a cotton wool beard. We went into their bedroom to get them, and it was a stocking, or if we were lucky a pillowcase. Yes, you got an orange and a couple of unbreakable walnuts every time and a small bar of chocolate. We went back to sweet rationing, so Cadburys Dairy Milk came in 1d, 2d, 3d and 6d bars. The 6d bar is what we’d now call a standard bar of chocolate. The 1d bar was a tiny thin sliver.

The first present I remember as being too big for the pillowcase was a fort. It had its own hill with dungeon, and was handmade and hand-painted and second-hand, or rather passed to my dad from a customer who’d made it for his own son years earlier. I was very careful with toys. Only knights could go in the fort. My best friend Micky thought cowboys and Indians and modern infantry could join the fight, but I was a stickler for historical accuracy … as is my eight year old grandson with his Greek and Roman Playmobile. 

The next outstanding memory was the Christmas dinner. We kept chickens in a run in the garden. Each had a coloured leg band, and each was named after a character in Dandy and Beano. I fed them and collected eggs. Mysteriously, one escaped the run every Easter and Christmas. It must have managed to fly over the wire and join happy hens in the countryside, my dad told me. I was particularly upset when Little Plum fled at Easter, but nothing prepared me for the shock of the following Christmas Day. The chicken was golden and glistening … and there, round the leg, was the purple ring of my favourite, Beryl the Peril. Yes, of course I refused to eat it … her. It was years before I ate chicken again. In the early 1950s, chicken was a luxury and only ever appeared at Easter and Christmas.

Do you know Johnny Cash’s One Piece At A Time about a car factory worker who builds a car one piece at a time from spares purloined from the production line? That was like my first bike. My dad worked as a sales rep for John Bull Tyres, and did a little swapping here and there with bike shops, and assembled a bike, with frame, wheels, saddle, pedals, chain, handlebars all different makes. That was a Christmas present in 1957. In 1958 I started at grammar school three miles away and found out why my present had been a bike. With a red frame and a green mudgard and a white mudguard. My dad pointed out that the secondhand frame was a racing bike frame, though the rest was not. In place of a brand name on the upright, I had a John Bull Tyres sticker.

The next one changed my life. 1960. I woke to the sound of a portable radio outside my room (by portable it was the size of a briefcase and took two huge cube batteries). Portable meant it could be carried from room to room, not that you could take it to the beach. From that point every night was Radio Luxembourg, and it set my love of popular music and record collecting.

Teenage ones start to blur, but Christmas 1962 brought my first three LPs. I had worked all summer to buy a record player (at £2.75 a week), and all I wanted for Christmas was LPs. One full price … Rock and Roll No 2 by Elvis Presley, just then re-issued, then two on the budget Golden Guinea label Picture of You by Joe Brown ad Cameo-Parkway’s All The Hits By All The Stars (The Orlons, The Dovells, Chubby Checker, Dee Dee Sharp). My Shadows and Cliff Richard fan friends scoffed at the first and last, but I believe history bears out my choices, except for Bobby Rydell. That was the year it snowed heavily on Boxing Day, with waist high in drifts on Redhill Common, and snow stayed on the ground in blackened icy lumps till the beginning of May. Great! I couldn’t cycle to school and had to get the bus, which was shared by the neighbouring girls’ school. Chatting to girls was much better than cycling the hilly route to school.

From 1963, I worked on Christmas post through sixth form, college, and universities. Seven years of trudging around in the cold. Two students replaced each postman, half the walk (i.e.round) each. If you were lucky, you might get a house on your walk where a postman lived, which always meant a hot tea waiting for you from Mrs Postman. All postal workers were male. The nightmare was being paired with a good-looking girl, because then you got two thirds of the round in those sexist days with chivalrous postmen who worried about young girls carrying heavy bags. I was bitten by dogs twice, the second one very badly, stitches and tetanus jabs. The dog (a pub Alsatian) had badly savaged a small girl (who lost the use of her arm) and a postman previously. The post office drove me from the hospital straight to the police station to make a statement. The pub owner was already on two warnings, so it was put down. The pub owner got a notice that his mail would now have to be collected from the central post office. People are surprised that I really don’t like dogs. The thing about the post-office was you were paid at 12.30 on Christmas Eve. Then it was straight to the town centre to buy Christmas presents … I had no money until then.

From the time I was fifteen or sixteen, my dad had a small barrel of beer delivered every year. You had to let it settle for three days or you got the runs.

Christmases were secular in our house. The first time I went to a Christmas Eve service was probably 1964 (though we may have been made to at youth club, but I have no recall), with a girlfriend and her parents. I remember trying to surreptitiously hold hands while standing in the carols. It was crisp and freezing cold walking back at midnight and I thought, ‘This is quite a good idea.’

1966 was a weird one. My dad had died in July, and I went to university at the end of September, my sister got married in October … I hitch-hiked back for the wedding. When I came home for Christmas, my mum had moved from our house to a flat (half a house). In the move my large collection of Just William books were given away. I’ve spent my life since re-assembling them. It was strange going back to a place I’d never seen in my life. That was the first Christmas with a daytime church service … Christchurch Priory, at my brother-in-law’s suggestion. Christmas hits the newly bereaved hard.

The next couple of years were either at my sister’s, or at my brother-in-law’s parents. That was different, because the men went to a pub from twelve to two, and came back in time to sit down to dinner. It started with friends who were at work … a Christmas Day drink then back for lunch at two. My dad would never have done that. Neither did I after a couple of years. Then they used to wonder why women found Christmas stressful, though in those days, men would have been considered utterly useless and in the way in culinary matters. Sexism worked both ways.

It was Christmas Eve 1969 that stands out most strongly. I’d been out with my friend Hutch, maybe his band was playing in a bar. We went back to his house and the phone was ringing. It was half-past eleven. It was our friend Richard, travelling back from playing in Munich for Christmas. He’d missed the last train in Waterloo, and ended up in Hounslow, working out that it was the closest he could get to Bournemouth. A mere 100 miles away. There were no more trains. Could Hutch come and collect him? He was at the phone box outside the underground station. He did not tell us the phone number. Hutch said of course, put down the phone and exclaimed a foul oath. He’d taken the back wheels off his car to work on the rear axle over Christmas. So it took us nearly an hour to reassemble the car, a Sunbeam Rapier convertible. Of course we both went so as to stay awake talking … a musician night drive rule in those days. Someone talks to the driver! We left after one o’clock. Empty roads, but pre-motorway days, so you trawled into and through Southampton and Winchester. What Richard had failed to note is that there are three underground stations in Hounslow … West, Central and East. (I spent a week or two every summer with my aunt near Hounslow West, so knew this). We got to the West one well after three a.m. No sign. Central? No sign. We found Hounslow East (no maps, no sat nav!) Icy roads. The phone box was completely covered with icy rime. We pulled open the door with difficulty. There was Richard, bolt upright in a leather coat, enough ice on his beard to look like an extra from War and Peace. A dead one. We hauled him into the car (a convertible with a canvas roof remember, so not warm). We drove to the 24 hour transport cafe near Camberley which miraculously was open at just before 5 a.m. on Christmas morning. We had the biggest full breakfast they could produce with multiple cups of coffee while Richard regaled us with picaresque tales of Munich, then got home around 8 a.m.

In the early 70s, Christmas Day was at one or other parents. Boxing Day lunch was often at a friend’s parents. The late John Wetton’s parents had a small hotel, and John’s mum did a Boxing Day full lunch for John and friends. We’d meet up for Christmas Eve dinner too. John and I were thrown out of a local restaurant for applying cork moustaches from the wine corks and candle on Christmas Eve, plus possibly being raucous and even using bad language.  John would have been in Family or King Crimson then so it was rock ‘n’ roll behaviour.  

I’ll fast forward to 1974. We decided to escape the Christmas turkey by going to Turkey. Yes, we were anti-Christmas twenty-somethings. We went to Istanbul, only to discover that the lunar calendar and solar calendar had synched, and it was Bayram … Topkapi museum closed on December 25^th. It was dense fog too, and many houses had sheep suspended outside, draining blood across the pavement.

However, we met out friend Taner Barlas, the actor and director. When he’d been studying English, he’d performed mimes in our weekly sketch shows, then because he was so obviously brilliant, started acting with us too. We went to see a play he’d directed (in Turkish) and thoroughly enjoyed it.  We had dinner with his parents who spoke French, but not English. Then Taner asked the lighting guy, who was studying English, to look after us for the day. He asked Karen what she wanted to eat in Turkey and she said, ‘traditional yoghurt.’ That involved a boat trip across the Bosporus, then a bus ride to a small town, then a taxi to a place on the Black Sea that he said served the best yoghurt in the world. And it truly did. While it was a total of four hours to get yoghurt, it was fun and fascinating all the way in good company.

That was around our five or six years as vegetarians. Our Christmas treat was a large head of curly endive (now usually called frisée) which one greengrocer in Bournemouth arcade sold at Christmas, at a then unbelievable price for a salad vegetable … about as much as a chicken. Now it’s in most supermarket mixed salads. We would take a bowl of it to my sister’s house or to Karen’s parents  (one would be Christmas Day, the other Boxing Day) with a homemade four portion nut roast – half for each day. I thought of that yesterday with my two vegetarian grandkids.

By 1978 the photos start rolling in. I considered going further, but we’ll stop in the pre-photographic area (though we do have a few from Turkey).