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The Spencer Family Web
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Every family has their 'funny stories' and ours is no exception, so here I want to tell you one or two of them. I'll print anything, so long as it's true..... or just might by a wild stretch
of the imagination be true. I'll also be showing some of my favourite 'Funnies', such as 'Word definitions' and 'Audio clips'. I hope you enjoy them and I'll add to them as time goes
along......
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Family funnies
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Did you grow up in the 50's? It was a wonderful time to be a child. Read on and find out what a great life it was ……
We had wonderful summers and us kids stripped off to the waist and ran around in the beautiful sunshine all day long. This was not only great fun but you also got really sunburnt and then had days of
extra pleasure stripping lengths of dead skin from yourself and all of your siblings. After which you went out and did it all again...Skin cancer ?? Never heard of it we said....
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On those days when it wasn't sunny you could spend hours on your bike or roller skates without having to worry about putting on a crash helmet or protectors, knowing that when you flew over the handlebars
there would always be your head or your elbows or knees to protect you as you hit that wall or tree or pavement or whatever other unmoveable object, just happened to get in the way.
And when you eventually came
in your mum would give you a 'lick wash' which meant she spit into her hanky chief and rubbed as many black marks off of your face as she could reach before you escaped.
Then it was down to the shoe shop to be
bombarded with X-Rays and watch your toes wiggling around in your shoes.
Back home hours of fun could be had filling the flit-gun with a couple of gallons of DDT and spraying every couple of hours to kill the
flies, it usually leaked half it's contents over your hands, but what the heck there was plenty.
Ah lunchtime, well back in the 50's manufacturers had discovered that adding things to food improved their colour
and taste and smell and so they did, adding copious amounts to everything. Over 80% of those substances are banned today as causing cancer or having other serious side effects but it all looked and tasted great,
certainly better than eating greens.
Then if your parents had a few bob you had a small TV. Your parents sat on the chairs and you sat on the floor as close to the set as possible, after all it was a very small
screen, radiation, 'what radiation' you would say. Anyway you had to sit close because your dad was puffing away at a packet of Woodbines and the room was full of smoke obscuring the view from anything more than a
few inches.
Off to your bedroom to play with your toys before bed, that's got to be pretty safe !! One of my favourite toys was a plastic case with a great blob of mercury in it, which you guided through a maze,
and if you broke open the case you could pour the mercury into your hand and watch it moving around. Still our skin was probably protected by the black layer of lead that we had got from spending hours playing with
our lead soldiers.
When we were older we received chemistry sets, all chemicals harmless it said on the lid, which may have been true but what about that Bunsen burner we used to heat them up with, 'don't worry'
says dad they've given him lots of Asbestos board to put everything on and it was great stuff always having asbestos dust on it which if you blew on the board would rise into the air in a great white cloud.
Then
of course you had to have a watch with a dial and hands that glowed in the dark, radioactive, radio what? Just what every boy needed to wear on his wrist. Still the American atom tests had increased our Strontium90
level 10 fold in two years so we would probably have glowed in the dark even without the wristwatch..
By all the odds we should never have survived into adulthood or if we did we should have become gibbering idiots, though there are many who say that this, is exactly what happened……
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I was 15 and pretty clever though unfortunately not very bright... I was camping with a friend in Cornwall and we had missed not only the last train but also the last bus from Liskeard to Looe. It was the
country, they all go to bed by 8PM but we were young and hip, well young anyway. The choice remaining was a long walk along endless winding country roads and it was a very, very dark night. So being
clever as I mentioned, I suggested that as the last train had left we could walk along the railway line, it would be a lot straighter and would get us there more quickly and with no chance of getting
lost. Oh boy, am I clever.
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Things went well, we walked and walked, it was dark but not cold and the railway line did indeed keep to a pretty straight line. We then both noticed a slight vibration in the ground and a low rumbling noise which
got progressively louder and the vibration of the ground gradually grew more violent…. A train was coming … A good time to make an exit, unfortunately this was one of those 'quaint' littl' ol' one track railway
lines with just enough room for a train to pass through and steep grass banks on each side, which when wet as now were un-climbable…. And believe me I know because we tried (very hard indeed). The noise got louder
and the vibrations more extreme and we were prepared to meet our maker when the noise started to diminish the vibration to lessen and we were left standing in pools of sweat and as Jasper Carrot once said, 'smell
it, we were standing in it'….. A walk round the next bend showed a small railway bridge across our line which the train had just passed over….. We exited from the line at the first chance and I've never tried to be
that clever again, well almost never…….
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During the war dad contracted Malaria very badly while in Burma. He was sent back to India and then back to the UK for some R&R (Rest and Recuperation). Of course there was a war on and so he couldn't
tell mum he was coming and turned up unannounced on the doorstep to see my mother and grandmother manouvering an old pram through the front door. They were going to collect a gas cooker (no Rent-a-van in
those days).
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So dad went with them. They collected the cooker, no traffic but lot's of people milling about so they decided to push the pram down the middle of East Ham high street. Then they heard the rapid putt, putting sound
of a V1 (Flying bomb) in the sky above them. Dad was pleased when it all went quiet but wondered why everyone had vanished by diving over walls, behind hedges into doorways leaving him alone with his gas
cooker in the middle of the high street. The jungles of Burma didn't have a lot of V1's and he had no idea why everyone had vanished. Mum and Grandmother didn't seem too worried that they had left him all alone in
the middle of the road and fortunately the bomb exploded some distance away so both Colin and I were not robbed of our chance to be born. Not long after they went all electric…
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Most of you knew Ivy, Julie's mum and I'm sure she wouldn't mind me telling you this story. You probably remember that if there was one thing Ivy
could do it was cook and so it was no surprise that when the local convent school was looking for a head cook, she applied. The only thing that worried her was that she was Church of England and not Catholic. Anyway the interview with the Revernd Mother went well but then came the dreaded
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question, "are you a Catholic"? but Ivy wasn't worried she was prepared for this question and without hesitation she replied "no I'm sorry, Reverend Mother but I'm a prostitute"...... Fortunately the Reverend Mother
was very broad minded and gave her the job anyway....
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