Learning from age and Experience

I often say that I’m teetotal because I don’t drink tea. Yeah, not exactly Oscar Wilde, I know. As it happens I don’t actually drink alcohol either. When you get right down to it I don’t really like the taste of either of them. However, I do have a particular fondness for Brooke Bond PG Tips that has nothing to do with the taste of the actual tea.

From the 60s right through into the 1990s, Brooke Bond used to issue collectors’ cards with their packets of tea. In the early 70s I think they made successive sets on The Race Into Space – Prehistoric Animals – the History of Aviation and a couple of others. I think that each set consisted of about 50 cards. Each card was of a comparable size to those you might get in a packet of cigarettes in days gone by, and each one had a rather lovely illustration on the front and a write up about it on the other side. You could buy an album in which to stick them. In fact, why would you collect the cards without the album? I’ve written in the past about the so-called collector gene and I guess this would have been one of its earliest manifestations within me.

The albums themselves were about A5 sized and landscape oriented. The covers were thin card but for all that they were rather lovely things. Even without the cards they were nicely illustrated and full of juicy information.

Of course, there was a problem to any would be collectors of the cards. Getting hold of all 50 of them to complete the set was difficult. There seemed to be always 1 or 2 you just never got, however many packets of tea you bullied your mum into buying. The Race into Space set was my older brother’s particular favourite. Prehistoric Animals, the next set, was mine. Now, complicating matters was the fact that I have a brother a year older, and another one 18 months younger and as far as I recall, all 3 of us collected the cards. My mum and my nan, in whose house we grew up, were no slouches when it came to tea consumption, but even they found it hard to drink enough to feed our card collecting habit.

I was two short of a full set of The Race Into Space. Neil was one card sort, the one showing Yuri Gagarin in his Vostok. I was one card short of a full set of Prehistoric Animals. It was one of the earlier cards in the set from the eras before the dinosaurs appeared. I never got it.

I think that I should add that Brooke Bond PG Tips did advertise that you could send off to them to buy the cards that you were missing. Whether it was the hassle or the expense, my mother was not keen on doing this for us, and she used what I look back on as an unusually cunning tactic, telling us that buying the cards you needed was cheating and it would only be a valid complete collection if you found all of the cards in tea packets.  Now, there was a woman who understood all about the collector’s gene, which is all the more remarkable considering that she did not possess such a gene herself.

Now, don’t misunderstand me, I still find dinosaurs and prehistoric and other extinct animals to be pretty interesting. Not as much as I did 55 years ago, but then that just goes with the territory. But I can’t say that in normal circumstances I would have experienced a desire to own an old card album from my childhood. Which makes me think.

I hung onto my Prehistoric Animals card album for quite a few years. In fact it is quite possible that it finally went in the great clear out of ’86. Basically, I left home to go to Uni in the Autumn of 1983. I came back for the holidays, but it was never my permanent home again. By the time I finished my degree in the summer of 1986, I was 21, a dad, soon to be a husband, and moving to Port Talbot. So it was a case of take anything I wanted to take to Wales, then what was left was chucked after my brothers had had pick of anything they wanted. But I can honestly say that I didn’t really think about it again until last week. If you’re a Facebook regular like me, maybe you’ll too have experienced the way that it often peppers you with adverts when you’re catching up, and one of these was for a PG Tips album from the 70s, complete with cards. Intrigued I made a search on ebay, and nearly, very nearly bought a complete album and cards set. Well, age and experience are amongst the best teachers I have ever known, and so I did what I’ve learned to do whenever I have a sudden collector’s urge like this. I went off the website and put it to the back of my mind, with the intention of coming back to it in a few days to see if the buying urge was anything like as strong.

Thankfully when I did come back to it, the urge was a lot less strong, in fact, non-existent. I really didn’t want it. I didn’t know what I’d do with it, where I’d put it and whether I’d even ever look at it again – probably not. You see, when you get right down to it, I wouldn’t be buying it for me. Not for the 61 year old me, anyway. I would have been buying it for the 7 year old me, and essentially, buying the whole set for that one card I never got when I was a kid. And the ironic thing is, there’s no way I can give it to that kid – because however much I might deny it, I’m not the same kid as I was back then.

Had I given in to that initial, misleading, siren-like compulsion, then the danger is that I’d start buying up other things I missed out on in my childhood. These include the friends of Major Matt Mason. I had the good major for my 7^th birthday, but the only accessories I ever had for him were the space sled and the ‘jet pack’. I remember writing about it in a ‘what I did at the weekend’ paragraph at school, and Miss Hall, my teacher, correcting it, and adding a ‘ge’ to the word sled. I had a mini rebellion against this, but Miss Hall, of whom I was very fond, would not accept that sled is an acceptable alternative to sledge. Which maybe was what led to the first tantrum I ever had about having something which I felt was so obviously correct marked incorrect. It wasn’t the last. Now, I’ll be honest. Even now, when I can look back on a career of more than 3 and a half decades of teaching, I find it difficult to understand why she wouldn’t accept my arguments that

a)   Space Sled is what it was specifically called on the packaging – and –

b)   Sled is a perfectly valid word anyway.

Mind you, if I was upset then, I was livid 5 years later. It was my first year at the comprehensive. Our English teacher asked us to write a story. The point, the title or the broad sweep of the narrative escape me now. However I do recall that in my story a ne’er do well was telling his accomplice to stop my hero from escaping. I wrote this small piece of dialogue.

“Get ‘im!” he shouted.”

The teacher put a big red circle around the apostrophe and the letter I, and wrote “Get him!” across the top of it. I was furious. To me, the apostrophe made it clear that I was fully aware of the missing ‘h’ and had left it out deliberately, as a phonetic rendition of how a ne’er do well would speak. Far from being an error it was, in fact, the sort of precocious display of using punctuation for stylistic effect that should have earned a little recognition, or possibly even a round of applause. I totally understand why I got so worked up about it then. I don’t understand quite so well why I still feel worked up about it today.

Still, for all that I guess that learning that even the people who you think should know that much better than you do actually occasionally don’t is ultimately a valuable life lesson. I think I’ve shared this last story with you before but what the hell, it’s a nice one to finish on. I had a student teacher once taking my class on the Scottish play when I was observing him. He was a good guy, and I have no doubt that he went on to have a very successful teaching career. However on the lesson in question, he fell foul of some of Shakespeare’s use of rather archaic terms – in this case the word ‘barque’, meaning ship. The witches in the Scottish play at one point cast an evil spell to inflict harm upon the husband of a woman who refused to share chestnuts with them. At the end of the spell they say

“Tho’ his barque may not be lost

Yet it shall be tempest-toss’d.” Which means, more or less, though we can’t sink his ship, we will make his life miserable with continual storms.

After our hero the student has given it a good old reading a hand shoots up in the front.

“What does that mean, Sir?” the pupil asks. She is not trying to catch him out.

“What?” he replies.

“His barque may not be lost, sir.” Now, I can see from the sudden panic in his eyes that he does not know. How he handles this will be interesting. Will he a) be really smart and tell the kids to look in a dictionary- or – b) be sensible enough to  look in the notes on the other side of the page – or c) gamble and bullshit?

He goes for option C

“Well – his barque may not be lost – means they can’t kill the ship’s dog.”

For the rest of his time with us he swore blind he was just joking. But I saw his eyes. I know the truth.