21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) (12 page)
Read 21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) Online
Authors: Steve Stack
At this point we opened all the doors at the back of the train, ready for our less-athletic friends, or those with teachers who had not let them leave on time, to make ambitious, courageous, and foolhardy attempts to jump on.
Their legs would be going nine to the dozen, they would sometimes throw their bags ahead of them (a very risky strategy), and then they would make the leap of faith, ready for us to drag them on board. There were some casualties, of course, with people getting left behind and the occasional grazed knee, but it did make the journey home that little bit more exciting.
And the fun didn’t stop there. The doors had slide-down windows and despite the warning not to stick your head out of them, we all pretty much did for most of the journey home. Of course, this meant dodgy half-eaten sandwiches (and often worse) lobbed out of the front windows in the hope of splatting some unsuspecting kid further down.
I have no idea why they no longer run such trains. No idea at all.
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As recently as 20 years ago, most mornings would start with the electric hum of a milk float making slow and steady progress down the street, the clink and clank of bottles as they were carried by the milkman, and the sight of a pure white pint of milk on pretty much every doorstep on every street.
Today you will be hard pressed to find glass milk bottles in front of a house. You will rarely be caught behind a slow-moving float. You probably can’t remember the last time you were woken by the cheerful (but slightly annoying) whiste of your milkman. Or the last note you wrote for him.
The daily milk delivery at the crack of dawn was a national institution. Red top, blue top, silver top, gold top, even the weird long-necked bottle of non-homogenised milk could be found on the doorstep. The classic image of a blue tit pecking away at the foil bottle top was a regular sight back then. As was the array of empties left at the end of the day ready for the milkman to collect, often with a rolled up note sticking out of the top with ‘NO MILK TODAY’ or ‘ONE EXTRA PINT PLEASE’.
The big national dairies such as Unigate and Co-op would advertise on television (see the entry for Humphrey in a few pages’ time) and their milkmen would sell lots more besides milk, but more on that shortly as well. They were all over the country, six days a week (no delivery on Sunday), and were part of the dawn chorus.
But sadly no more. There are still milkmen, and there are still door-to-door deliveries, but nowhere near the numbers there once were. A couple of years ago, during a fit of nostalgia, I signed up for a milk delivery after many years without one. It turned out that the milkman would only deliver every other day, and even then wasn’t 100% reliable. I ended up cancelling after less than a month.
That sort of decline, and the simple fact that milk in cardboard and plastic cartons can be purchased from every corner shop, newsagent, and supermarket, means that the end of the milkman may be only a few years away.
This, when you think about it, is a bit odd. We are constantly being berated as an increasingly lazy nation, we have everything delivered nowadays – books, shopping, vegetable boxes, electronics – and yet the one thing that was traditionally always delivered to our door is something most of us don’t want any more. Quite peculiar.
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Your milkman didn’t just deliver milk, of course; he could deliver eggs, butter, cheese, bread; and, most exciting of all, fizzy pop.
But we are not talking cans of Coca-Cola or 7up here; oh no, these were own-brand glass bottles of cherryade, orangeade, limeade, and, most special of all, cream soda.
Waking up on a Saturday morning to find a lukewarm bottle of brightly coloured pop on your doorstep was more exciting than you’d imagine. Sometimes the rich kids would have a veritable rainbow of fizziness outside the door, soon to send them into spasms of hyperactivity only cured in those days by a jolly good clout round the ear.
Life was so much simpler then.
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Boxing Day gets its name from the small earthenware boxes that the poor would use in medieval times to save for Christmas treats. They would smash these open and spend the contents on something special in the festive season.
This idea changed somewhat over the years, and became the name for gifts given to tradesmen on or around Christmas time. Households would put aside a few coins or a bottle of booze for the milkman, postman, and other regular callers, and hand them out during Christmas week.
The practice has pretty much died out in recent years. When I handed a bottle of wine to my postman a couple of years ago, he said it was the only gift he had received that year.
So why have we stopped rewarding those who deliver to our doorsteps, come rain or shine? Are we less generous than our parents and grandparents? Are times tougher? Are people less deserving?
I think the answer is quite different. We get fewer door-to-door callers, and those that do come are not always the same people. Think about it, how many of us still have a milkman delivering to our door? And when it comes to postmen and women, we used to have the same person delivering at about the same time every day. If we wanted to give the postman his Christmas box, we knew we could catch him at 7.15 on Christmas Eve morning (or whatever time he usually delivered). Mum would lie in wait with a pound note or a bottle of plonk, and hand it over with words of Christmas cheer and best wishes for the year ahead. Nowadays my mail can-arrive any time from 7.00 in the morning till 4.00 in the afternoon, and I rarely have the same postman twice.
We no longer have friendly relationships with the people who deliver to our door – milkmen used to be notorious for knocking
up bored housewives, but I bet that doesn’t happen all that much any more, either – and, as a result, we don’t feel the need to offer them a gift at Christmas. I think this is a shame, and is a tradition that I would love to see restored.
As would my postman.
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Where we shopped, banked, parked, and hung about …
You’d pull up at the petrol station in your Rover 3500, Ford Capri, or perhaps Austin Allegro [insert your own nostalgia-inducing make and model here], and onto the forecourt would waddle a chap in overalls.
‘Fill her up,’ you would cry cheerfully from behind the wheel. And fill her up he would, as well as checking the oil, water, and tyres, while he was at it.
You may find it hard to believe, but this was how
everyone
got their petrol until the onset of self-service stations in the 1970s. You didn’t even have to get out of the car to pay. The attendant would take your money, pop back to his kiosk, and return with a fistful of change.
That, my friends, was proper customer service.
The idea of the petrol pump attendant actually harks back to a time before the garage forecourt, when fuel would be delivered to the homes of the privileged few who could afford to own a motor vehicle. It seemed natural for that personal service to extend to all customers when cars became more affordable and widely available.
One of the last attendants in the country, Dudley Oliver of Bentley’s Garage in Exmouth, finally hung up his nozzle in 2010, not for lack of business, but rather because the ancient pumps were beginning to fall foul of health and safety laws, and would prove too costly to replace. The garage continues to trade for repairs and, in a nice touch, for free oil, water, and tyre checks, with Mr Oliver, kept on the payroll to valet cars.
So it isn’t all bad news, although for one elderly lady customer it did truly mark the end: ‘I’ve never had to put petrol in my car myself and I’m not going to start now.’
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