Underground, overground, wombling free

We are very lucky in London to have such fabulous parks.  I’ve written before about Henry VIII’s favourite hunting ground, Richmond Park, and the gorgeous Lido in Hyde Park but we also have many, many less well known open spaces, most of them accessible by tube.

Wimbledon Common is a beautiful heathland stretching, with Putney Common, for over 1,000 acres, most of which are a site of special scientific interest (SSSI).  It is home to a wide variety of bird, animal and plant life and as a Common, it’s open to everyone 24 hours a day.

It is also famous to anyone who grew up in the UK in the 1970’s as the home of the Wombles.  These small, pointy-nosed, bear-like, creatures, whose names were chosen by sticking a finger in a huge atlas, were the original upcyclers.  They would creep out onto the Common when everyone had gone home and clear up the mess humans had left behind.  Uncle Bulgaria, Tomsk, Tobermory, Orinoco and friends would then turn the humans’ rubbish into all kinds of useful contraptions.

The Wombles were a huge phenomenon, with books and a TV series, Wombles clubs in schools, which went out at weekends picking up rubbish and every child knowing the words to the insanely catchy theme tune.  All together now “Underground, overground wombling free, Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we…”

We’ve got a couple of the books at home, so whenever we visit Wimbledon Common, the children go Womble hunting.  We haven’t found any yet, but the Common is spotlessly clean…

This post is part of Photo Friday at Delicious Baby. For more lovely travel pictures, click here

A quarter of sherbet lemons

The foundations of the British Empire were built on our sugar addiction.  Without the British people’s insatiable desire for sugar, we may never have colonised large sections of the globe and the world could be a very different place today.  One of the many legacies of the Empire’s sugar trade, is the dizzying array of sweets invented by the British.   Sugar has been fashioned into soor plums, kola cubes, rhubarb and custards, aniseed twists, sasparillas, dolly mixtures, gobstoppers, cherry lips and hundreds of other varieties of confectionary.

When I was growing up there were sweet shops in every neighbourhood, selling treasure by the quarter (4 oz) in little paper bags.  I can still remember the happy day my Grandpa gave me £1 to spend on sweets, a dizzyingly large amount in the late 1970’s.  Instead of my usual agonising decision over what to buy with my pennies, I had the wherewithal to choose some of all my favourites.

Nowadays proper sweet shops are a dying breed, but Lollipop Sweet Shop on St John’s Hill, near Clapham Junction is a nostalgic recreation of every sweet shop I remember from my childhood, with rows and rows of bottles full of brightly coloured jewels.  When you make your choice the shopkeeper still shakes the sweets in to the metal bowl of the scale with a satisfying clatter, and you still hope his hand will slip and you’ll get a few more than you paid for in the pink stripy paper bag.  And choosing what to have is still an agonising decision.

This post is part of Wanderfood Wednesday. For more travel food stories, head here.

Please could you sit on my suitcase

This week, my fellow blogger, the lovely Josie at Sleep is for the Weak asked in her writing workshop “You’re packing your bags and going off on an adventure with your children. Where are you going? How are you getting there? What would you pack, but more importantly, what would your children pack?”  Now I’ve pretty much covered the first three questions in my Gear, and Our Route pages above, so today I’ll tell you what I think our children would pack, given half a chance.

Packing is a subject which consumes many of my waking hours and a more than a few of my sleeping ones.  Carrying everything we will need as a family for nine months in two large backpacks and three small ones will be a challenge, to say the least. I go over and over the endless permutations, ensuring that everything we choose has at least two uses or is something we absolutely can’t do without.   A year before we depart, I already have a favourite brand of sock (Smartwool if you’re interested, you can wear them for days without smelling) and as a lover of most things gadgety, my head is home to a rotating tag cloud of electronic items which circle as I try to decide which we really need, and which would merely be quite useful.

The children will be carrying small packs, appropriate for their strength and size, into which I should be able to fit most of their clothes.  I know that my biggest packing problem will be preventing them from bringing sackfuls of their precious belongings.  The children’s packing list starts off easily, as we will most definitely be carrying a selection of ‘blankies’ that are essential for their going to sleep at night and therefore for my peace of mind.

In age order we have Eve’s blankie, a stinky grey rag which started its life seven years ago as a new white muslin and is now, much sucking and sniffing later, half its original size, frayed around the edges and NEVER to be washed.  If, in a flurry of tidying up, it mistakenly gets put in the machine, expect tears and recriminations for at least two weeks.

Edward must have two things.  The first is a grubby pram blanket with a silky edge, which gets tucked under his body when he sleeps.  The second, his beloved white and pale blue Miffy, which Eve chose for his first Christmas.  She is about 20cm high and he likes to suck her ears.  I once made the horrendous mistake of allowing Dickon to take Miffy to nursery (I know, I know, I was busy trying to get them all shod and not paying attention) on the Friday before the start of half term.  When I broke it to Edward that Miffy was sitting in a suitcase in the home corner and we wouldn’t be seeing her for a week, big, fat, sad tears rolled down his cheeks and he sobbed “I love her Mummy, I love her as much as I love you”.  We shan’t be leaving Miffy behind.

Dickon has those rabbits that are specially designed for small children to love, with their soft heads and limbs knotted in the corners of the handkerchief body.  We’ve probably got through about a dozen of these creatures, as he used to take them everywhere, and are now down to four, who mostly live in his bed.  He shows them affection by biting their heads.

Now we’re moving into the trickier area of toys they want to bring, but don’t absolutely need, and I don’t mean the ones which will keep them usefully entertained on long journeys.  Eve is a soft toy type of girl whose bed is home to an ever growing menagerie of furry animals, all of whom are interrelated.  So if we take Birthday Bear, we have to have Valentino as well, because they’re cousins, and Mummy Penguin and Baby Penguin obviously can’t be separated.  Then there are  two Otters, Big Bear, Gabriella, Teddy, Deer, Lucy and Angel, all can’t-live-without toys, which she is going to have to live without otherwise we’ll need a separate seat on the plane.

Edward is turning into a caricature of a testosterone-driven boy, with Power Rangers, Ben 10, swords and guns as his play things of choice.  There is no way I’m carting his precious red-Power-Ranger-on-a-motorbike all the way around the world and I’m very glad his only guns are those he’s made himself from milk cartons and kitchen roll tubes.  I don’t fancy our chances at getting even a not very realistic looking toy gun through security.

Dickon is still in the intractable toddler phase, with no concept of luggage weight or compromise.  When asked what he’d like to pack he announced firmly “my rabbits, all my dinosaurs, an umbrella in case it rains and a baby elephant”.  I think he meant a toy baby elephant, but I can’t be sure.  Given half a chance, they’d probably also bring their Looping Louie board game with it’s aeroplane flying on a rotating arm, a singing dog hand puppet, a giant bucket of Duplo for tower building, a roaring dinosaur torch and their bikes.  Aside from the absolute impossibility of squeezing all of this into anything smaller than a steamer trunk, I think it would be a good idea to leave some space in our backpacks for the souvenirs we pick up along the way.  Did I tell you we are planning to visit the Hello Kitty theme park in Tokyo…?

Instructions for assembling ‘Small Boy in his Natural Habitat’

1. First remove the realistic forest floor from the box (part A).

2. Empty bag 1 and assemble the trees, making sure you match the correct leaves and trunks.  You should have 10 silver birch, 3 oaks and 20 beech trees.

3. Place the trees on the forest floor according to diagram 1.2.

4. Next attach the rain-swollen stream (part B) to the forest floor making sure it clicks in properly.  Your realistic-looking natural habitat is now ready.

5. Remove the small boy (part C)  from box.

6. Empty bag 2, and place wellies on boy’s feet.  Next put cosy fleece on the boy.  This can be tricky as he tends to run away shouting “I don’t want a coat”.

7. Bag 3 contains spare clothes.  Put these to one side as they will be needed later.

8. Place large stick (part D) into small boy’s hand.  If the weight of the stick makes him fall over, substitute smaller stick (part D1).

9. Switch on small boy and insert him into rain-swollen stream.  He will make realistic splashing noises and yells of delight.

Other children sold separately.

Globe Girdling

My great grandfather had an extraordinary life.  He was born Meshe Osinsky in a small town in the Kovno province of Russia, which became Lithuania after WWI.  The large Jewish community was severely restricted, being confined to the area known as the Pale, prevented from practising most professions and denied both the vote and access to secondary school.  As a scholarly child, Meshe’s only option for further education was to become a Rabbi.  During the latter part of the nineteenth century, a new wave of anti-Semitism sparked pogroms in towns throughout the Pale resulting in the widespread destruction of property, infliction of injury and murder on a largely helpless Jewish population.  My great grandfather talked little about why he left his home, but it is not difficult to guess.  It is estimated that despite severe restrictions on travel, over 2 million Jews left Russia between 1880 and 1925.

In 1900, aged 15, Meshe arrived in Hull on the East Coast of England.  The family story goes that he wanted to go to New York, and ended up in England by mistake.  It was often the case that immigrants speaking no English were easily fooled, with the boat crews pocketing the difference in their fares.  Whether this is true for Meshe or not, we don’t know, but we do know that he ended up living with a family in Chesterfield, working by day as a tailor and teaching himself English by night using the school books of his host’s daughter.  People who remembered him from this time later talked about how hard he worked.  Within four years he had set up his own small tailoring shop and changed his name to Maurice Burton, which was later to become Montague Burton.

He continued to work hard and by the time he died in 1952, his empire covered 600 shops and 14 factories and he was clothing an incredible one in four men in Britain.  After World War II,  he was a major supplier of de-mob suits to returning soldiers.  The expression “the full Monty” is believed to refer to the fact that they were given one of his three piece suits.

He was a generous employer, making every effort to keep his staff happy.  His factory in Leeds had the largest works canteen in the world, along with a comprehensive pre-welfare state health and pension scheme and Christmas parties for workers’ children which are still remembered today.

As well as working hard, he also enjoyed his success, being an enthusiastic and frequent traveller.  In the 1930’s letters written to his daughter, my grandmother, were published in two volumes called ‘Globe Girdling’, giving a detailed record of his trips, often with hour by hour descriptions of his itinerary.  The list of countries he visited is impressive, including almost every single country we are planning to visit on our round the world trip and many, many more in Africa, South and Central America and Europe.  It makes fascinating reading, and not just because he’s my great grandfather, although it is a wonderful insight into the character of a man I never knew.  He obviously took great delight in his family, reporting word for word conversations he had with my infant aunt, and he clearly had a close and loving relationship with my grandmother, a woman I remember as being rather distant and strict when I visited her grand, gloomy house.  He had a very dry sense of humour, saying that a Broadway show “would have been tolerable had it only lasted an hour” instead of the two and a half he sat through.  He enjoyed meeting fellow industrialists around the world, but took just as much, if not more pleasure, from meeting their children and grandchildren.

He is naturally interested in manufacturing and shops in other countries, and visits establishments of all sizes, describing what they sell and how they are managed, from the department stores of Ginza, the main shopping street in Tokyo, to Army and Navy shops  in Delhi and Hong Kong and a Gastronomic Centre in Russia.  He’s a keen observer of all he sees, writing detailed descriptions of amongst other things, the burning ghats in India, the Yanggona Ceremony in Fiji, the outfits of US Customs Officers and schooling in Sierra Leone.  He visited Palestine a number of times, where he met with many Jews who were instrumental in founding Israel.  He also revisited the country of his birth, then part of the USSR, searching for evidence of the region’s Jewish history and visiting the Yiddish University in Odessa.  He also enjoyed doing typically touristy things like a ‘Houses of the Stars’ tour in Hollywood and visiting the Waitomo glow worm caves in New Zealand, which he thought magnificent.  I like the thought of using his books when planning our itinerary, I’ll have plenty of ideas to choose from.

The two volumes together total about 1,000 pages and I am working my way slowly through them.  Some of the letters are perhaps most useful to historians of industry, with comparisons of wool prices in each country and detail about American department store leases.  But I am determined to do the whole book justice.  At it’s best, it is a wonderful snapshot of the world in the 1930’s with its growing political tensions, rampant modernisation and traditional cultures and religions.  As he said, “While I am interested in historic buildings, ancient monuments and beautiful things and scenes created by man and nature, I am still more interested in living people, their circumstances and manner of life, their efforts and achievements, their striving and struggles, their frequent defeats and occasional triumphs.”  I have a lot to thank Montague Burton for, not least that he is part funding our big trip.  I like to think that our plans would have met with his approval.

 

This post is part of Photo Friday at Delicious Baby. For more lovely travel pictures, click here