BETTER DAYS

‘They were better days,’ we say. So often, it’s our childhood we’re thinking of, when the holidays seemed longer, skies seemed bluer and the sun was always shining. Moments in time are just moments, but memories last a lifetime.
For me, the sixties were better days. Crawley was a New Town then, freshly built, spacious and rural with fields and trees and up-to-the-minute town square, where the old mingled with the new, and each shop had its own character and smell.
The smell of fresh sawdust in the butchers, the dank smell of earth in the greengrocers, paraffin and dog biscuits in the ironmongers, and in the sweet shop, the glorious smell of sweet jars, blocks of chocolate and gently roasting peanuts mingled with the smell of newsprint. Outside, cigarettes were readily available from machines, without age limit.
You could buy anything you needed on the local parades, but they were closed half-day Wednesday, and all day Sunday.
Tizer, Corona and blue twists of salt in crisps. Stop Me and Buy One, Marshmallow Oysters and Saucy Tanners.
Television was only available for a few precious hours, the telephone was a red box across the street and somehow, we managed without a car.
I remember long, sunny days in the fields opposite my home, watching the steam train puff its way along the primrose-strewn East Grinstead line until it disappeared from view. Knee-high grass smothered with wild flowers, bees, butterflies and grasshoppers. The gentle, crystal clear ripples of the river.
I remember Novembers, dark, foggy and bitterly cold, the air heavy with the smell of burning wood and coke. Standing outside the chip shop with a Guy made of Dad’s old pyjamas and a cardboard mask. Taking the money into the sweet shop and picking fireworks from a loose selection. Watching the bonfire take shape in the field opposite my home and feeling the heat on the windows from its flames.
Christmas morning, the lumps and bumps of a Christmas stocking, Chinese Lanterns, crepe paper, tangerines, walnuts, Billy Smart’s Circus and Morecambe and Wise.
I remember 1962, looking out into the darkness of a Boxing Day evening to see the first few flakes of snow herald the longest, coldest winter. Icicles like javelins and thick ice on the inside of the windows.
Z-Cars, the original Doctor Who. Halfpenny bars of Cadbury’s chocolate, threepenny bits, big brown pennies and tiny silver sixpences. Saturday wrestling and football results, Sunday roast, Gardener’s Question Time, The Goon Show and Round the Horne. Sunday Tea on a crisp, white cloth, new mown lawns and creosote covered fences.
Better days? Who can say, but to me they’re irreplaceable.
© Christine Bryant