I got to thinking the other day about some of the toys I had as a nipper in the 1950’s. (For younger readers this was a decade in ancient history and not the 10 minutes before 8 o’clock). In particular that cavernous gap between expectation and reality.
Take Airfix Kits for example.
In those Dickensian days before ToysRus every town would have a toy shop selling train sets, chemistry sets, magic sets and even dolls for all I know. And in the window would be Airfix Kits with pride of place going to stuff only the sons of Rockefeller could afford – a model of the Ark Royal, for example. Lesser pockets like mine settled for a Spitfire or Tiger Tank.
But even these were pre-packed with disappointment. Whereas the picture on the front of the box promised Douglas Bader, for instance, doing a victory roll after downing some pesky Heinkel, the reality was tiny pieces of grey plastic and a tube of glue which required days of patient precision to assemble – not a commodity commonly found in 7 year olds.
Invariably, before it was completed you trod on the bloody thing and that was that.
Another thing destined to fail were weekly children’s encyclopaedia magazines. The name that springs to mind is “Look and Learn” although I may be doing that magazine an injustice. It cost around 1/11d (just under 10p for the chronologically challenged). Which was cheap!
But after six months or so the weekly alphabetical instalments had only got as far as “Afghanistan” and it dawned on you that you would need the resources of Fort Knox and to live to be 150 before you got to “Zygote”.
Marketeers 1 Kids 0.
One success I do recall having in the toy department though, was with a “parachute rocket” (my words – I can’t remember what it was actually called). This was a plastic rocket about 9” long which you launched vertically using a type of strong rubber gadder. And boy, did it fly? I reckon it must have made 100 ft, barely visible, in fact. At that point, at the top of its arc, it deployed a parachute and slowly drifted back to earth.
There were variations to the concept with one I recall replacing the parachute with helicopter rotor arms.
We had hours of fun with it down on the local rec. Well, my dad, mostly.
I’ve never understood why it didn’t become The Greatest Toy of All Time.
