Living in the past...

[Steve B]

The thread above leads me to pose a question. Is nostalgia a comparatively modern phenomenon? My grandparents died in their 90's between 1978 and 1982. They never seemed to have a love of their 'good old days', certainly not to the extent that 50-somethings have today, and I include myself in that. And if I'm right, why?

 

Mum and Dad died in the last couple of years, both in their 80's. They spoke mostly about the War Years and seemed to enjoy and miss that part of their lives more than any other. That sounds odd, but they missed the cameraderie, the who-knows-what-will-happen-tomorrow, the we're-all-in-this-together party kind of atmosphere. They never had much good to say about the 50's and 60's and were really unhappy with the modern world.

 

One thing I miss from travelling by rail was the old BR food. I loved the tea from the big urns in a china mug, with a bacon and egg sandwich. A tea bag in a paper cup with a baguette just does not cut it.

 

Steve

[coachmann]

The thread above leads me to pose a question. Is nostalgia a comparatively modern phenomenon? My grandparents died in their 90's between 1978 and 1982. They never seemed to have a love of their 'good old days', certainly not to the extent that 50-somethings have today, and I include myself in that. And if I'm right, why?

I'm 67, so maybe I can empathise. The fact is there is very little to go back to in the good 'ole days. Many of our generation own our own property, run new cars, enjoy the benefits of central-heating, indoor toilet/bathroom, double-glazing and wall insulation, fitted carpets, hot water on tap and pressurised cold water, mobile phones, inexpensive land-line calls, computers/broadband, and money isnt a worry as it once was.

 

The good 'ole days started for me with Jerry lobbing bombs and V1's. Steam on every train, but we were too busy either in school or working 6?? days a week to get the most out of it. Corporation bus and BR railway fares were cheap so it was as well we couldn't afford a car. But life in the home could be grim (luckily we didnt know any different!).

 

In the bedroom the ice was on the insides of the windows, the lav was in the backyard along with the tinbath!

 

If anyone thinks this winter is cold they should have been around in 1955 and 1963! I spent 1963 collecting fares in the Pennine hills on an open rear platform bus with my boots almost welded to the snow and ice and my hair stiff with a concoction of ice and tobacco dew off the upper deck ceiling.

 

Looking back is one thing.....Going back is something else....

[Poggy1165]

Hmm - there were certainly some good aspects to the old days, but there were some bloody bad ones too. We tend to forget them. Things like sadistic teachers. Racism - I mean real racism not what PC people devalue the word to mean. Freezing cold houses with ice inside the windows. Bugs crawling across the floor.

 

When I look back it frightens me to realise that I can remember things like SLT trolleybuses. OK, I was only a little kid, but the last one vanished in 1958! It makes me realise what an old gimmer I am getting to be.

 

But yes, I too am guilty of nostalgia. I look back and remember steam locos, and walk-up rail fares that didn't need a second mortgage. I think modern TV is mostly crap, and much of the art, literature and music. The pubs are mostly ruined, and so on and so forth.

 

I think it's inevitable. I bet if you whizzed back in time to 1396 you'd find some old knight complaining that things had gone downhill since good King Edward's day. It's what us humans do once we're past the optimism of youth.

[The Stationmaster]

An interesting thing nostalgia. My dad, born 1915, spoke at times more about Pre-War days than anything else and what a couple of places he had known back then (York and Plymouth) were like before the Luftwaffe carried out a bit of redevelopment. But as he got older he tended to talk a bit more about wartime and early post-war years although he very rarely mentioned the various blitz/aftermath fires he attended in a number of cities as a wartime member of the AFS, just that he had been to some of them.

 

So I think our nostalgia tends to be very selective and probably concentrates on the memorable and the good things or on things which we just want to remember or don't want to forget. My main memories of the 1963 winter are not doing our regular trip to Swindon works on the Sunday around Christmas/New Year because after fresh snowfall the local branch train got stuck in a snowdrift, and having an extra week off school. I remember the 1978 winter because we were - literally in places on my patch - up to our necks in snow and the entire town of Taunton was a disaster area. I remember the bad winter weather at New Year 1978/79 because I spent the whole of New Year's night out steam lancing and trying to keep points clear in temperatures well below freezing while cursing those who had not maintained the switch heaters. I remember seeing my first ex LNW 0-8-0 (on Oxford shed)and my first 'Patriot' (at York) and my last 'Castle' cop (Dn ML just East of Ealing Broadway) but I haven't got a clue where I saw my last 'King' cop and can't even be certain which one it was. I can vividly remember my first attempt to pull a signal lever, over 50 years ago, but can't remember the last time I touched one.

 

I do miss the way we were as people, am hot happy with the fact that in this town (where I was born and grew up) I now recognise hardly anyone and the place seems full of incomers with more money than manners or sense, and I regret the way many things have gone in our country including the current state of many things in an industry to which I devoted my working life. But then I think back to things I was told years ago - to a Shunter in Reading West Jcn yard 43 years ago who said to me 'I can't understand why you've joined this lot, the job's had it son'. Or to one of my Chargemen in a yard in South Wales who said 'the Great Western was the best railway of them all, my old dad worked for the Taff and he said it all changed for the better when it became Great Western'.

 

Nostalgia is what we make today of yesterday, not exactly how it was back then.

[skipepsi]

I think Mike has a point, of my time in the navy I remember the good bits easily friends I still have etc but more thought brings up the stuff that encouraged me to leave. As for living in the past probably around 1973 was one of the happiest of my life looking back we seemed to start to acquire things like TV my dad bought a car I had no responsibilities etc

[Peter Bedding]

As far as living is concerned, I'm more than happy with the present, and I hope for a bit more future to come. But I like to re-visit the past as often as I can. Hornby, Oxford Diecast, and Pocketbond provide some of the means.

 

Rover cars were mentioned earlier. The first Rover I consciously admired was a P2(?) belonging to a neighbour of my parents, registration FLY 2. Later, my first car (1957) was a 1925 Morris Oxford registration DL 4082, followed by a succesion of pre-war cars the last of which (1961) was a 1933 Alvis Speed 20 registration JJ 5608. Salad days, all sadly had to pass.

 

My first flight in 1953 was in an Anson (PH 769), closely followed by one in a Tiger Moth (DE 145). My final flights as a cadet were in 1955 in Sunderlands (RN 284 and VB 889). I guess that when I left the RAF in 1994 I may have been one of the last persons serving with logged Sunderland experience.

 

Air Raid Precautions, bombs, V1's and V2's became first hand childhood experience, as well as the phrase "It's one of ours". And the snow of Winter 1962/63 fell whilst my newly-aquired wife and I were on honeymoon, and the journey home (extended by 24 hrs) included a last leg by foot through 8ft snowdrifts from Newport to Freshwater IoW). The previous leg of the journey had been by train from Ryde Pier Head to Newport. Hence the 02 remains, for me at least, the most evocative steam loco.

 

My DVD collection is centered on such gems as "Went The Day Well", "The Small Back Room", and semi-documentaries such as "Coastal Command" and "For Those in Peril".

 

I hope that I don't live in the past, but I do like to re-visit, with a glass of single malt.

 

PB

[John M Upton]

My DVD collection also shows that I am very much a child of the 1970's, lots of group jeopardy type movies (Posiedon Adventure etc) plus the complete box set of The Sweeney!

 

Going to be settling back later this afternoon to watch Beyond The Poseidon Adventure, total and utter tosh of alarmingly bad proportions but I grew up with it, always liked it and its not availble on DVD anywhere

 

I know I must be getting old, ten years ago I would have eagerly embraced new gadgets such as I-Phones but now I really don't want to know. A computer is a tool for communicating, writing, maybe listening to a bit of music and nothing more. To me it is not the be all and end all, certainly not a must have item at any rate and I have no idea about all these so called social networking fads like Facetwit which supposedly you are no one if you are not into it but I really couldn't care less and certaintly don't want to know.

 

Is there an app for that? Yes, it's called a carrier pidgeon....

 

We have just been informed that I and all my fellow Conductors are to be issued with Blackberrys in the very near future, cannot get excited about it, happy and can do my job just as well with my knowledge, common sense and the currently issued ten quid company mobile telephone!

 

There are those who knew me as a small'un that said I was a grumpy old man when I was at Primary School!!!

[Rugd1022]

Interesting posts there Mike, Mick and Peter, I feel as if I'm becoming nostalgic for times I never even knew!

 

In a way this is actually true.... recently I've been digging into my family history and doing so has shed some light on what my parents lives were actually like before I came along - looking at family photos and putting them in context against a backdrop of the end of WWII, steam era BR, black and white TV and pounds, shillings and pence etc puts a new and very pleasurable light on things. They came from very different backgrounds but lived through the 40s, 50s and 60s soaking up some things, ignoring others and no doubt looking back to their own very different childhoods.

 

Such is life I guess!

 

Most of my DVD collection harks back to the 60s and 70s but the classic British war films from the 40s and 50s are etched into my childhood too.

 

Nidge

[bike2steam]

Standing in the queue at the Post Office, and 2 'senior' ladies in front were bemoaning the fact that life now isn't as good as it was in the 1950's, when the guy behind quietly said " automatic washing machines, wide screen tv's, central heating, computers, life's bleedin' tough now innit ? ".

[Penlan]

..... Later, my first car (1957) was a 1925 Morris Oxford registration DL 4082, followed by a succesion of pre-war cars the last of which (1961) was a 1933 Alvis Speed 20 registration JJ 5608. Salad days, all sadly had to pass. PB

Peter, the Avis is still out there, on the road with the original Registration, however I don't think the Morris has survived.

 

My first car was an Austin 7 (1959) and I still have it, plus a couple more which are on the road, especially in this weather , and a Rav4 Mk1 ..... one of a long line of 'moderns' that seem to fall by the wayside in regular succession.

 

Penlan

[Peter Bedding]

Peter, the Avis is still out there, on the road with the original Registration, however I don't think the Morris has survived.

 

My first car was an Austin 7 (1959) and I still have it, plus a couple more which are on the road, especially in this weather , and a Rav4 Mk1 ..... one of a long line of 'moderns' that seem to fall by the wayside in regular succession.

 

Penlan

 

Penlan, many thanks for the update above. I am delighted to learn that "Jo-Jo" (I used to name most of my cars) is still alive. Quite certainly someone has lavished much t.l.c. on it since I parted company. My modern Corsa (no-name) is a pleasure to drive, and somewhat more economical, but I can never find it in a car park.

 

PB

[Peter Bedding]

Penlan, many thanks for the update above. I am delighted to learn that "Jo-Jo" (I used to name most of my cars) is still alive. Quite certainly someone has lavished much t.l.c. on it since I parted company. My modern Corsa (no-name) is a pleasure to drive, and somewhat more economical, but I can never find it in a car park.

 

PB

 

Penlan, further to the above. On another thread, fellow Forum reader Beancounter posted reference to the following:

 

http://www.modelenium.co.uk/models/models.aspx?P=1&SC=Oxford+Diecast+1%3a76&T=NR

 

Oxford must be inspired; they have announced two Alvis Speed 20s in their forthcoming programme. How did they reach that decision, I wonder. I hope to be early in the queue.

 

Have you pestered for an Austin 7?

 

PB

[28XX]

Had a slightly alarming conversation with my daughter's fiancee yesterday. Ed, 22, a politics & religion graduate, was bemoaning the state of the nation and the lack of community spirit. He expressed a wish to sample life in 1955. I put him right on a few things, as noted above, but if the rot has got this far, and young men don't believe they can make the future a better place any more, we are surely well on the way to Hell in a hand-cart.

[Rugd1022]

I've booked a seat on that very same hand cart already Steve, there's room for a few more yet .

 

My mate who's just turned 42 has sent me a text..."I'm now officially old. Just bought me first fishing rod". His mid life crisis is now well under way...... he's talking about sorting his loft out and building a layout set in 1971 with Deltics, Peaks and Brush 4s..... he spends as much time as I do watching The Sweeney and classic old films..... he pines daily for another 70s motor to appear in his garage.... it's rife I tell ya, rife!

 

 

Nidge

[coachmann]

....he pines daily for another 70s motor to appear in his garage.... it's rife I tell ya, rife!

Been there an' dun it! Tell him a Ford Fiesta would run rings round them. I bought a Mk.I Granada because the 'Sweeney' had one. I dont know how Jack Reagan's driver swung it around the streets of London.....the damn thing only wanted to go in a straight line! Cortina's were marginally better, but either car would scare someone used to a Focus or Mondeo half to death!

[28XX]

My mate who's just turned 42 has sent me a text..."I'm now officially old. Just bought me first fishing rod". His mid life crisis is now well under way...... he's talking about sorting his loft out and building a layout set in 1971 with Deltics, Peaks and Brush 4s..... he spends as much time as I do watching The Sweeney and classic old films..... he pines daily for another 70s motor to appear in his garage.... it's rife I tell ya, rife!

Which accounts for the success of retro-designed cars: Jag X, Mini (sic), Fiat 500 (sic), Beetle etc. Ford should dig out the Cortina tooling and re-start Dagenham, they make a mint!

[coachmann]

I've often thought a re-skinned Mondeo Mk.I Granada would look spiffin.

 

 

[Rugd1022]

Oh THAT Granada.... which is actually a Consul! NHK 295M is still in existance and is about eighteen years into it's full on restoration.

 

I'd love one, but good examples are scarce, also very partial to Rover P6s.......I want another one so bad it hurts

 

Nidge