Favourite Childhood Toys

Being born in 1969, I enjoyed a 1970s childhood and my teenage years in the 1980s. I was an only child throughout these years. In fact, it was only in 2000 that my half-sister from my Dad’s second marriage was born – a month before my 31st birthday!

Being an only child was a bit of a mixed blessing. I was lucky to have my own bedroom and many of the toys I wanted, as both my parents worked, and we had regular holidays, both abroad and within the UK. I was able to take a friend with me on several family trips, which I enjoyed as well.

But I was occasionally lonely and wished I had a sister (usually) to share my troubles and happiness with. (I believe this is why I always wanted a big family myself and am now mum to four children.) I did have dogs though (Lee-Lee in the 1970s, Lady Olga from 1982 to 1990 – both Cavalier King Charles Spaniels) and these fulfilled a bit of that confidant role.

I credit my status as being an only child with many positive characteristics though, including some which I still appreciate today. I have no problems occupying myself and I am perfectly happy in my own company. As a child, I spent many happy hours reading books and writing (stories, poems, lists, diaries, letters and so on) and these remain two of my favourite hobbies.


So my top toys – in no particular order – would be…


BOOKS

I read many books and collected around eighty Enid Blyton ones. I especially loved the Malory Towers series and read them over and over again. Other favourites included Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis (I had the whole set of Narnia books, but only really enjoyed the first one.) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl.

I inherited my love of Doctor Who from my Dad, who would read me the Target novelisations until I was old enough to read them myself. At the time, the role was played on TV by the great Tom Baker and I was unaware of the earliest incarnations, so as far as I was concerned, all the novelisations starred Tom Baker in my mind. It was only later that I discovered William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton existed!


COMICS AND MAGAZINES

I used to get various comics (and later on magazines) throughout my childhood and teenage years. It would be an exciting trip to our local newsagents to pick up all our orders. Dad would get The Stage and World’s Fair, while I would get a gymnastics magazine and some comics.

I remember getting quite a few over the years – Twinkle, Bunty, Tammy, Misty, Jinty, Penny – where I loved following the comic strip stories and seeing what would happen each week. (Being an only child also meant these were treated well and I later sold all the issues of Misty on eBay, some for up to £7 each!)

Girl was the first of a new kind of magazine I got, aimed at young teens and sporting glossier pages and a colour cover of a smiling child model. I enjoyed the gymnastics column they had in it too, written by Suzanne Dando and the free gifts were a welcome extra too.

As I got older, I remember getting Jackie and Blue Jeans where photo stories amused me and I learnt a lot from problem pages, beauty tips and plastered my walls with Debbie Harry posters. Look-In was another good one for posters of Charlie’s Angels, the Famous Five and other TV series I loved.


LEGO

I spent many hours playing with Lego and it lasted so well, that we still have some of these bricks in our household! As well as the basic bricks in different colours, I had some of those green bases, which I inevitably built houses on. I had other bricks for ‘CINEMA’ and ‘KIOSK’ and ‘GARAGE’ but I always went back to the houses. Sometimes these would last a while, displayed on my desk until I got bored of them.


OUTDOOR TOYS AND ACTIVITIES

I spent many hours outdoors too, amusing myself. When we lived in Lincoln in the 1970s, I had a swing in the back garden and used to spend ages on it, swinging and singing, lost in my own little world.

In the 1980s, we moved to a village seven miles out of Lincoln and had a bigger garden, along with a safer area to grow up in. I would skip, play ball games, play hopscotch and go off cycling alone or with my Dad.

I loved gymnastics from the age of eight and would practice it most days. I eventually bought my own floor beam, which was kept in the garage. I would take it into the garden, put it on the concrete patio and endlessly repeat routines and new movements, trying to copy what I had seen the top Soviet and Romanian gymnasts do on the telly.


EARLY COMPUTER TYPE TOYS

In the 1970s, we had the game of Pong on the big TV set in my parents’ bedroom. It was the height of technology at the time! For those not old enough to remember, it was like a table tennis or tennis game where you had two bats and a ball, which you hit between each other to win points. I don’t remember much else about it, except you could increase the speed to change the level of difficulty and I had great fun playing it!

In the 1980s, our school’s computer room consisted of huge BBC Micros on which I usually did “goto” programs to write “I love gymnastics” on the screen. A few geeky lads in our year had ZX Spectrums, but I persuaded my parents to buy me an Oric 48K. I think the most impressive thing I did on it was create a program where the names of the 1984 Romanian Olympic gymnastics team popped onto the screen, accompanied by a variety of sound effects!


ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT

I loved TV in the 1970s and 1980s and was lucky to have my own portable TV set in my bedroom sometime in my teenage years. My parents bought a Betamax video recorder in 1980 and I would record any gymnastics that was shown on TV and rewatched them countless times afterwards.

Dad would tape Carry On films, James Bond, disaster movies (The Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, etc.), St. Trinian’s and Ealing comedies and I would watch this over and over too. I also loved musicals and regularly taped these. Some of my childhood favourites were Calamity Jane, The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz. When I was around ten or eleven, I listed my favourite actresses as Doris Day and Betty Grable!

I also used to listen to cassette tapes a lot and taped the Charts once a week too. Rather a primitive method, I remember literally holding a microphone to the radio speakers and experienced many an annoyed moment when I was taping, only for Mum to come in and ask me something, ruining that particular song!

The first record I bought was Geno by Dexy’s Midnight Runners, followed fairly swiftly by Eighth Day by Hazel O’Connor, Babooshka by Kate Bush and Too Much Too Young by The Specials. Abba and Blondie were big favourites of mine too – and still are.


SINGING AND DANCING

Following on logically from that, I also spent a lot of my childhood singing and dancing to pop music. I remember my friend Anita used to come round to my house and we would sing such songs as Nicole’s A Little Peace (winner of the Eurovision Song Contest in 1982) and I Know Him So Well by Barbara Dickson and Elaine Paige.

Being a gymnast, I also listened to a lot of instrumental and classical music, making up floor routines to them and tumbling across our living room. I would also dance and do gymnastics to modern music, especially things like Irene Cara’s Fame and Toto Coelo’s I Eat Cannibals.

No wonder I never had any weight problems as a kid. I was always on the go!


GAMES

Playing games was a big family past-time. We had a static caravan on a site in Ingoldmells on the Lincolnshire Coast and we would go there most weekends. We played cards there and a variety of board games, with Chinese Checkers being a big favourite of ours. I also played chess with my Dad on a little travel set we had.

We had lots of big family gatherings over Christmas and New Year, taking it in turns to host parties which included my grandmothers, uncles, aunts and cousins. We would play cards at my Gran’s house, Colditz at my Auntie Christine’s, Scrabble at my Nanna’s and Monopoly at our house. Trivial Pursuit came a bit later, Sorry! And Ludo were good games and we could always fall back on Charades if need be.

I played games on my own too – Solitaire, Round The Clock patience and Frustration (where you had to fit all the shapes in the right holes against the clock or they all popped out!). I had a Rubik’s Cube in the 1980s, of course, which was a huge craze, though I never did any better than finishing two sides.


SINDY DOLLS

Besides from books, my big favourite childhood toy was my collection of Sindy dolls. I received my first one for being brave at the dentists – Ballerina Sindy – and following that, every Christmas and birthday would include a new doll. I always gave my Sindy dolls named which began with S. I seem to recall a Stella, Svetlana, Sally, Susannah, Sherakee, Sharron and Simona.

I ended up with quite an impressive operation going on. I made a set of gymnastics equipment in woodwork classes at school and my Gran made leotards for my dolls. I soon had a regular set of competitions going on with judges, scoreboards and medals. I must have spent hundreds of days of my life doing these gymnastics competitions with my dolls and I loved it all. What a lovely, quiet daughter I was!!


OTHER DOLLS

I had other dolls in my collection too, including a couple of Mary Quant’s Daisy dolls (called Daisy and Dasha), a Princess Leia doll, Bionic Woman, Doctor Who (Tom Baker), Charlie’s Angels and Matchbox dolls (Tia, Britt and Dee). I also had a few Barbies once they became popular and (of course!) these all had names beginning with B – Barbie, Babette and Boriana!

As an adult, I began collecting Charlie’s Angels dolls and have about eight different ones now, I think. I loved Farrah Fawcett, Cheryl Ladd, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith, they were big childhood idols of mine (Girl power!) and the wonders of eBay have made all these childhood toys accessible again.


TOYS I NEVER HAD

Finally, a section of toys I never managed to own, despite regularly asking my parents for them at Christmas and birthdays. I don’t know why I never had them, but the fact I still remember them must mean something!

I really loved Weebles (Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down!) which were kind of egg-shaped plastic figures. I think they had slides and houses and things they fit in, but it’s all a tad hazy these days. I craved them, but it was not to be.

Similarly, Shaker Makers. This was probably because they could be quite messy, as you put lots of liquidy things into a pot with a mould, shook it all up, left it to set and then I guess you painted it afterwards. They were various themes like cartoon characters. I see these made a brief resurgence a while ago (I was tempted to buy myself one!), but their popularity didn’t seem to rise too much. They were a huge hit in the 1970s.

Finally, the Game of Life. My friend Anita had this and when I went to her house, we played it quite a lot. She had a brother and two sisters (The same amount of kids and genders as my own children!), so there were always plenty of people around to play games with. At my house, it was just the three of us, which was no good if you needed four players!


So, there you have it, a trip through the toys and games of my childhood and teenage years. Admittedly a rather lingering trip, but hopefully one that may have rekindled some of your memories too and I look forward to hearing about them in the comments.

Meeting Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult is 43 years old, an American author with seventeen published novels. She is married to Tim and they have three children. They live in Hanover, New Hampshire in the United States.

I first read a Jodi Picoult novel two years ago. I have read and thoroughly enjoyed three of her novels so far – Nineteen Minutes, Perfect Match and Plain Truth - with a couple more of hers on my shelves, waiting to be read. She is definitely up there in my list of favourite authors.

I like how she tackles difficult subjects – euthanasia, child abuse, date rape and so on. She does not shy away from controversy, but faces it head on, encouraging the reader to examine their own beliefs, values and responses to such dilemmas. How would we cope? What would we do?

Her characters are wonderfully written and very believable, so you can always find someone to empathise with in the story. The relationships feel true too – husband and wife, parent and child, ex-lovers are all described in a way which makes you feel you know and understand the characters and their motivations.

I looked on her website a few weeks ago and discovered that not only was she coming to the UK (She’s American), but she was even going to be doing a talk in my hometown of Bristol. So I got tickets for my 17-year-old daughter (also a fan of her books) and myself. They were £12 each and for that, you were allowed entrance into Jodi Picoult’s talk, her Question and Answer session, plus you were given a free copy of her new hardback title House Rules, which she would sign afterwards. Bargain!

I was even more pleased to discover House Rules concentrates on a teenage boy with Aspergers’ Syndrome, as my 14-year-old daughter has Aspergers’ as well. One of the most surprising things about Jodi’s talk was when she asked for a show of hands in the audience as who knew someone with Aspergers’ and at least half the audience did!

Jodi read out an extract from the book and it was great, I could really see the characters and got into the plot very quickly. I was certainly left wanting to read the book myself to find out what happens.

Jodi was very entertaining and the time passed by too quickly, as I was left wanting to hear more from her. She used to be an English teacher and said she couldn’t resist a quick burst of Shakespeare, as she was standing on the stage of the historic Bristol Old Vic!

A fascinating, intelligent and inspirational woman, I was especially interested to hear her talk about how she structures her working day around her responsibilities as a mother. She explained she keeps her work and home life quite separate and leaves behind her characters and their emotions when she leaves her office and comes downstairs to her life as a wife and mother.

She commanded more admiration from the audience when she detailed the research she has done for her novels, which includes spending time talking to prisoners on Death Row and visiting a remote Eskimo village in temperatures I just can’t contemplate existing! I was also pleased she had consulted many teenagers with Aspergers’ Syndrome in researching House Rules and that she was very happy to change things, if the kids believed it sounded wrong.

She also talked about her novel which will be coming out in 2011 – Sing You Home – which deals with gay rights in the US, the opposition from the right wing religious groups over there and who owns the rights to embryos. It sounded another great read and I was very impressed with Jodi’s passion, as she explained the time she spent amongst a group of right-wing religious fundamentalists who try to ‘cure’ gay people. She said it was difficult for her in this case to understand their motivations, but felt she had to, so she could present a balanced view of the argument.

Sing Me Home will also be a different kind of novel, as it will come with a CD of songs that tie in with the story and Jodi explained that when she tours next year, she will be accompanied by a singer. This will be another talk I hope to go to.

After the talk and Question and Answer session, we then queued up onto the next floor of the building and waited to get our books signed. This was efficient, well organised and moved quicker than I had expected. We only had a brief moment with Jodi herself, but we got our books signed to us and had a quick photo taken with her, so I was pleased.

Overall, meeting Jodi Picoult and listening to her talk on stage has certainly made me more enthusiastic about her and her work. I loved her writing style anyway and feel she offers something a bit different to other authors, but now I have become even more of a loyal fan and I would urge everyone to try at least one of her books.

My favourite of hers so far is Nineteen Minutes, which is about a teenage boy who shoots some people in his local school. However, House Rules sounds wonderful, so I am looking forward to starting that today.


Don’t forget to check out her website which is www.jodipicoult.com