Toys

At Christmas and birthdays nowadays children get, indeed expect, roomsful of toys. Like evrything else in those days they were very scarce.

I remember Dad brought home a toy train made out of bits of wood and sawn off broom handle.

One Christmas, I got some Meccano. Those who know it will remember it came in different sized sets of pieces, with intermediate sets to upgrade from one to the other. The instruction booklet, of course, was based on these sets. Since mine was not an official set, I found it impossible to build all the wonderful things that were displayed, especially the excavator you could make with set twelve. However, I could build four wheeled vehicles which would skim across the floor, and the windmill. I was given a clockwork motor for my birthday, so the sails would go round by themselves though, on one occasion, they nearly took my finger off.

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