This is probably a familiar story to anyone who is now, or has ever been a schoolboy.
When we moved into our new house we had gone from an overcrowded two bedroom ground floor flat to a three bedroom house complete with the luxury of a dining room, but not for long.
At length my elder brother got married and left home, initially this made very little impact upon me, I do remember having a day out for the church wedding which I found completely boring. I was introduced to relatives that I had never seen before and to this day I have never seen again. Later there was ‘the do’ and I was introduced to ‘the spread,’ tables laid end to end, covered with white cloths and mountains of the kind of sandwiches that you only get at a ‘do.’
There is something about the food that gets served, or rather does not get served, at a buffet. Somehow buffet food seems to have a strange capacity to last so long that people have to take it home wrapped in paper napkins.
After the wedding I was taken home and I was asleep before I knew it. In the morning I woke and went out to play until I got hungry and I popped back home for a drink of milk and a sandwich from the previous day’s buffet to find dad dismantling a bed, my bed, in the garden.
“You can have the big bed now,” dad said to be answered with that kind of grunting sound that implies a kind of confused questioning, “Ken won’t be coming back now that he’s married.” There was a pause, as if dad was thinking about something, then he announced, “It’s your room now, all for you.”
It was just the best thing that could ever happen I had a room all to myself and soon dad set about wallpapering my room for me and in what seemed to be no time at all my bedroom walls were covered with wallpaper. Dad was very proud of his wallpapering skills and one thing that always annoyed me was that he never allowed me to put pictures on the walls, presumably they detracted from his decorating which in the case of my bedroom was full to bursting with scenes of steam trains, racing cars, and authentic representations of some of the fighter aircraft that helped us win ‘The war.’
Not long after this we acquired a new table in the dining room, it was not what my mum expected, that is to say it was not what she wanted in a dining room table, but I’m sure that if she had given sufficient thought about it in advance it should have been exactly what she, at least might have, expected my dad to spend all of his free time assembling. It was actually a fine table, it filled nearly all the room except for the hole on the middle where dad stood while he built the most intricate electric train set complete with tracks, stations, platforms, sidings and all the miniature buildings, farmyard animals, passengers and British Rail personnel that you could wish for. There was a papier mache landscape with trees and bushes made of bits of painted sponge, rough sandpaper glued down and painted in various shades of green to make Lilliputian fields and a control centre to make everything work. Presently the various locomotives and carriages started to appear and the unmistakable smell of ozone from the electrical bushes under the locomotives making contact with the electrified rails took over from the smell of the lead paint that adorned every possible surface and all the plastic figurines that dad had meticulously hand painted.
Every day when dad came home from work he would plug in the 12 volt transformer, crawl under the table and pop up through the hole in the middle of the table and manipulate the trains to his heart’s content. When my various uncles came to visit he would demonstrate the workings of the train set to them, each new feature was explained in great technical detail and trains would travel from station to siding and back again, mostly going forwards and occasionally, with the magic of reversed electrical polarity, they would go backwards. Points would be changed, signals would go up and down, lights would flash, toot-toot noises would be made and I would sit on a kitchen chair, by the door, just inside the room with the expectation that I would be happy to watch dad playing with ‘my’ trains. As things turned out my expectations were somewhat different and I would slope off into the other room to watch television, or read a book. In fact anything rather than watch dad playing with the train set.
Naturally the train set was doomed from the start and mum was just waiting for a reason to get rid of it, and soon enough a reason, or something near to reason, prevailed. One day when dad was at work and I was at home I crawled under the table, popped up in the middle, plugged in the train set and started to play with it for the first time. I took the passengers off of the station and had them riding around on the trains, the station master was placed in one of the fields to ride a plastic cow and I had a great old time for most of the day. When dad came home there was uproar, there was evidence of the train set having been disturbed, the little men waiting for trains were in the wrong order, some were on the wrong platforms, presumably waiting for the wrong train and the station master had abandoned his post and was still riding on a cow. There was only one thing to do, and dad did it. A large tube of glue was brought out and all the little men (and animals) were glued down firmly in their rightful places.
I never went near the train set again.
Somehow or other mum eventually persuaded dad that the time had come to dismantle the thing and one day it vanished and a dining suite appeared.
The next Christmas dad gave me a somewhat more portable Scalextric racing car track that could be used on the floor and put back into its box after use. Dad didn’t seem too interested in racing cars, he would occasionally look in on me as various small, bullet shaped formula one cars sped around the room, their fuzzy copper wires emitting that ozone smell as they were making intermittent contact with the 12 volt tracks that were more than reminiscent of a model railway and he would mutter something to himself along the lines of, “You can tell that he misses his train set.”
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