Memories of the swinging sixties – the adventure of going out

The second episode my my memoirs was posted on my deceased blog not long before the hacking incident that killed it. Luckily, I managed to salvage most of it, dusted it off, polished it up and put it back together. If you’ve read it before I apologise but I promise the next one will be brand new. As the title suggests, this one is about going out in the very early 1960’s.

The swinging sixties was a time of great change. The austerity of the war years was over and the economy was recovering. People were going out on the town with money in their pockets and having fun for the first time in decades. For a little girl of two or three going out was a big adventure but the things that made an impression were not always the ones you’d expect.

When my sister Alex got a boyfriend, Mother saw me as a very good way of keeping her ‘out of trouble.’ When they wanted to go to the cinema she said they had to take me with them, so there would be no canoodling in the back row. Having a two or three year old child in tow meant their viewing was severely limited, no horror films, Lawrence of Arabia or Great Escape for them, they had to watch Bambi and Sleeping Beauty with me sitting between them. If Alex didn’t feel like pushing me out of the bedroom window before she probably did then. Still, there was always ice-skating, I was too young for that and Alex was rather good at it. Funnily enough I never did master that art.

Walt Disney cartoon films were all the rage back then, Sleeping Beauty, Bambi, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, we saw them all. One of the films made a massive impression on me and sticks in my mind to this day. It was  Snow White. I remember being enthralled by the seven dwarves and their Hi Ho song. The wicked queen with her mirror on the wall terrified me though. I sat with my hands over my eyes and it was years before I would eat a red apple. Maybe we were more innocent in the sixties because children’s films these days seem to be far more graphic and violent. Even so, the Disney cartoons have stood the test of time and are still a big hit today.

Another favourite outing, this time for the whole family, was the speedway. There was a track at Banister Court where the Top Rank dance hall would later be. The speedway team were called the Saints, just like our football team. Southampton Saints were one of the founder members of the first speedway league back in 1929 and, in 1961, they were national league runners up, going on to win the league in 1962. I do remember the riders with their red and white striped bibs, the noise and the dust. Mostly though I remember the yellow and blue rattle I had, shaped like a jester, which spun round and made a terrible racket. Sadly the speedway track closed in 1963 and that was the end of that.

Something else we did as a family was go to bird shows. My dad was the chairman of the Hampshire Caged Birds Society and Mother was the secretary. Amongst other things, Dad bred canaries and I loved to watch him feed the baby birds, all pink with fluffy feathers coming in. Their eyes would still be closed but they’d open their beaks wide for the mushed up baby bird food he’d give them using an orange stick. Even today I can’t use an orange stick on my nails without remembering my dad and the pink gaping mouths of those baby birds.

When there was a show coming up Mother’s job was to send out the programmes to all the bird club members. She’d type addresses on hundreds of brown envelopes and I was allowed to use a funny roller to wet them and wrap them around the rolled programmes. She had a big old typewriter with keys that made a loud clack and a ribbon that made her fingers dirty. It was on this ancient monstrosity that I first learned to type, little knowing I’d make a living out of it as an adult. How much easier her job would have been today with laptops, spreadsheets and mail merge!

The day before a show Dad would bring all the birds we were showing indoors in their show cages to be bathed and made ready so they looked their best. Large dishes of water were set out on the dining table, clean water, water with vinegar in, for the brown birds I think, and also water that Mother would dip a little bag of blue in for the white birds. Blue bags, for anyone who doesn’t remember the sixties, were small cubes of blue stuff wrapped in a kind of muslin. Housewives swished them in the laundry water for the final rinse to make the whites whiter, it worked on bird feathers too by all accounts.

Of course birds would escape during this process. This washing was always done in the dining room with the door firmly closed and Dad had a big cloth net for capturing escapees. Mother was always worried about her rows of glass ornaments on the mantelpiece but I don’t remember any ever getting broken. I do remember some epic chases though with birds fluttering about the room and Dad running after them with his net. No birds were ever harmed in this process I can assure you, dad loved his birds.

At the shows we’d walk around the big marquee tent looking at all the birds in show cages hoping to see a rosette on one of ours. There’d be all sorts of birds chirping and singing. My favourites were the minah birds and the budgies because they could talk, something I was still learning to do myself. Dad must have won a lot of rosettes because the top of our piano was filled with silver cups. Every so often Mother would get out the silvo and polish the tarnish off them all. It took all day and, whenever I clean silver today, the smell of the polish takes me right back to my childhood. What I really remember is the chips though. They’d come wrapped in newspaper and, because I was only little, I never had a bag of my own so I’d walk around taking chips from everyone else’s paper, all salty and soggy with vinegar.

At home we had a bird room for the canaries. It was a brick built out house the size of a small room. One wall was all windows and opposite were the cages where the canaries lived. There was also a large ‘flight’ cage at the far end of the room where the birds spent the day flying about, it had long canes they used as perches. We had an aviary at the bottom of the garden with lots of other types of birds. There were cockatiels and cockatoos, red factor canaries the colour of carrots and a pair of zebra finches that belonged to me. My favourite was Cocky the golden pheasant. He had the most brilliant coloured feathers I’ve ever seen, red, gold, green and blue, and a long, long tail. When he moulted I was allowed to keep the feathers. Mother used to catch spiders in the house and take them to the bottom of the garden as a treat for him. Cocky loved to eat spiders.

Because I was little Dad would sometimes let me go through the low door into the aviary to help him feed the birds. They’d flutter down and land all over us because they knew we had seed. To some people that would be a nightmare but I was never afraid of the birds. There was a special metal switch to let the old water out of their bath and then Dad would put more in using a big metal watering can. It was so heavy I couldn’t lift it but I could move the switch to let the water out so that was my job.

We also had fantail pigeons. They lived in a pigeon coop and flew wherever they wanted. Often they would sit on the roof of the aviary fanning their tails and soaking up the sun. The white ones were my favourites. They ate corn, the type you make into pop corn, and they made a mess with it, there were always corn kernels on the path by the coop. Mother would put bread and bacon rinds on the bird table for the wild birds but the pigeons often chased them off and got the lion’s share of the bread.

Indoors we had a budgie. His name was Joey and he was blue and white. Mother would let him out to fly around the room. He liked to sit on the mirror above the fireplace and peck at his reflection. Joey was a very vocal budgie. He could say his name and address and he’d picked up lots of things that Mother said often. When he said “where’s Alex?” He sounded just like Mother. I’m pretty sure he could say more words than I could back then.

Once a year there would be a big bird show up in London, it was the highlight of the year. London was the place to be back then, the capital of fashion, music and culture. We’d all go up in a coach with the members of the Caged Birds Society. It was usually around Christmas time so we could see the lights. The funny thing is, I don’t remember the lights at all but I do remember the coach and falling asleep with my head on Mother’s lap. Another thing I remember is a little fluffy white dog toy I got from somewhere in London, it had sparkly black glass eyes and fit in the palm of my hand.

So, at the beginning of the most exciting decade of the century, my memories were not about the fabulous new fashions, the hedonistic cultural revolution or the swinging music scene at all. This little girl was more interested in chips, fluffy toy dogs and hiding from wicked queens bearing red apples.