Memories - early or general

Perhaps because many Bedduth men were miners - and down the bottom of a mine our eyes don't see colour like we do in daylight

It might be because brown boots were associated with the very poor and the charities which used to supply them Kaga? A derogatory term in common use at the time was "brown boots and no breakfast".

By the time of my childhood, skipping games were still in but the songs had become less well known. Our third line for Weasel song was 'That's the way the money goes' but yours makes more sense. We played hopscotch too. But new games had come it. There was a jumping game which was a cross between cat's cradle and skipping and involved two static assistants and a very long loop of elastic. If the jumper got it wrong everyone got a twang from the elastic. There were Clackers which were two hard plastic balls on a string. When you wiggled the middle of the string up and down the balls started whizzing up and down, clacking together at the top and bottom of the arks. There was no point to it but you stopped when you lost control of the rhythm and ended up with a black eye. Funny, most of the games ended up with pain of some sort.

Helen F Yes I remember those games, but the Council House was a good place to place five beer bottle tops and send them spinning with a hard sponge ball bounced against the wall, there was a rim around the wall that gave you a selection on how hard you wanted to make it for yourself. Then those long skipping ropes and kiss in the middle, and Tin-it Tin-it, all good fun. But I have a vague feeling that the grown-ups on a certain day of the year used to kick a large football full of paper through the streets of Coventry? Anyone remember?

Does anyone remember those infernal tubes that made a ghastly howling noise when children swung them around?

Does any one remember those three sided glass lengths that held bits of coloured bits of paper that gave fantastic shapes?

Do you mean a kaleidoscope? Quite amazing before we had colour TV and computers.

Helen F. The very word I was looking for, had it on the tip of my tongue for hours, just couldn't spit it out.

I don't think I've mentioned this before but in the late 60's my grandma saw an advert for something to turn a black and white TV into a colour one. As it was only a few coppers she sent for one. When it arrived it turned out to be a piece of coloured transparent paper the same size as the television, the bottom third was green (grass), the top third blue (sky) and the middle third brown (?). She persevered with if for about a week before agreeing she'd been conned and sticking it in the bin

I went to a house once who had a glass screen in front of the TV like that, I think it was just blue and green. I think they liked it but I didn't. They had the horse racing on!

They use somewhat the same principle to give you colour pictures on your 21st century digital camera. No matter that your camera may have 16 million pixels each individual pixel is covered in a red, green, or blue filter.

What about the school songs that were handed down to us. The raggle taggle gipsies-o The three little fishes, they swam and they swam all over the dam Green grow the rushes-o Incy wincy spider The birds of the air, went a sighing and a sobbing when they heard of the death of old cock robin Ring a ring of roses, we all fall down (from the plague) And many more, that shaped our lives in Coventry.

I visited my friends in Coventry yesterday and as usual we mull over old times - Coventry and the things we got up to. I mentioned the photo on Broadgate thread and referred to the wartime open air "shanty" West Orchard market, that I sometimes visited during lunch time from school, I don`t know what date the photo is, but I think it is later than 1947/51 when I was about. My friend immediately mentioned the static water tanks that I think were alongside the old Woolies, funny because I had been looking for them myself and couldn`t see them on the photo, so perhaps they had gone under the new Smithford Way building. The conversation then drifted on to what were the attractions on the stalls and we all immediately said "Home decorating". I don`t know if every front door had to be wood grained after the war, but there used to be a chap on the market demonstrating in front of a small crowd. He had a flat block of wood in front of him, on which he painted some brown scumble (he called it) then he applied a tool that was like a block of wood shaped rounded, like an old fashioned ink blotter. He pushed it up and down the block oscillating it as he went and lo and behold a wood grain finish appeared. The talk then turned to the perils of redecorating living room walls just after the war - no wallpaper available, so some went for a stipple finish which used to imprint the shape and colour of flower foliage in stripes up and down the wall. Does anybody remember those days of make-do and mend.

I do certainly Roger, My mum's shop was stippled from top to bottom. One in King Richard St. also the one in Batsford Road. Awful it was but served the job when needed (with a sponge). Thank heavens you don't see it now - or do you?

The fake wood kit and scumble were still being pushed as late as the mid 90s (if not still going). The people presenting it on TV and in markets were very good. Whereas most who tried it, weren't. It and other texturing techniques fell out of favour with the advent of The House Doctor, as far as I can tell. People started making places much more neutral, adding patterns in cushions and feature walls. Those things can be easily changed when you get bored or move. People who tried neutralising to attract a buyer, discovered they quite liked the effect. Through the same period bathrooms went white and carpets lost their patterns. The various design industries despair because people aren't changing big priced items like bathrooms as fast as when a colour/pattern was either in or out. Whether busy forms of decoration will ever return I don't know. Whenever I've had to strip a wall of paper, especially woodchip I swear I'll never go that way and there has been a boom in people buying un-modernised properties to do up and sell. Sadly it's part of what has priced youngsters out of the market. In the past, a property with scary decoration was a bargain. People often lived with the design mistakes until their income matched their taste. Now those properties are a sought after investment and many young people are so used to pristine properties they reject places that don't fit their idea of habitable. I was lucky that my university digs prepared me for the worst - rats, hot and cold running slugs and holes you could see daylight through. My first home (in Coventry) was perfectly sound under multiple layers of regrettable decorating fads.