The Good Old Days!

The good old days …. nostalgia kicking in, that’s when you know you’re getting old (or are old!). Thinking about the contents of my toy box and the stuff I loved to play with and here we are! You know Paddy my old panda from an earlier post but here are some of my other much loved toys. That toy yacht was a great favourite …. when I was young in 1765, TV was really limited but highlight of the week was Sunday afternoons with Jacques Cousteau and his boat Calypso, he really fuelled my love for travelling but at the age of 6 travel was limited and my yacht (also called Calypso, mum painted the name on its prow) set sail on boating ponds at Southport, Lytham Saint Annes and later in Troon. Hard to believe that lots of  towns had ponds for sailing toy boats and even harder to believe that later in life I'd travel so much, even going diving in Cousteau's Marine Reserve in Guadeloupe. 

Probably my most treasured toy is the Sasha Doll in the middle …. and here she is! Now about 52 years of age, she still has an envy inducing mop of thick hair and is still in the original clothing, including undies only her socks are missing. The story behind the Sasha dolls is interesting, a Swiss artist Sasha Morgenthaler didn’t like the pink plastic dolls available in the post war era and so set about creating dolls who would appeal to children of every ethnicity, my cousins and I were all desperate for one, and one Christmas I finally got one. We had a fabulous toy shop in Ayr who sold them and on a visit from my cousins it was time for my wee cousin to get one, a baby! Oh she was as proud as punch, there we were all squashed into my aunt’s VW Beetle (four adults and 3 kids …. everything was possible in those days!), my cousin started to undress her new baby and suddenly there was screaming and crying ……. the now naked baby was obviously a boy. Deathly silence in the car …, here my cousin got lucky. The dolls were expensive but my aunt decided the best solution was to go back to the shop and buy a girl. 

On the left you can see ballet shoes, I started at 3 and fell in love and beside them pink glittery plastic high heels. I don’t know who bought them for me but I know my mum cursed those shoes and I loved them. I think they were called Cinderella shoes, no proper uppers just strips of elastic which meant endless trips (my nickname was fairy triptoes!) and going over on ankles but I still would insist on wearing them. 

Finally, there’s a nurses outfit, I think one Christmas I was given four of them. I loved everything to do with nursing and poor Paddy was jabbed, bandaged, operated upon, you name it he went through it. Mum had a couple of friends who were nurses who got me some equipment (including a syringe, shock horror!) my love of nursing continued for a long time, I was in the Red Cross Cadets till well into my teens.  

And here’s me and my lovely dad, wearing my nurse’s kit, I still remember mum not letting me wear the frock on that day because it was too cold! This must be the only photo of my dad with a beard, it was short lived, he shaved it off because I refused to give him a good night kiss with it on!