Dad’s Thursday Helper

New month old post (first posted 18th August 2014)

Thursday afternoon was half-day closing. The whole town seemed to shut down. Retail businesses got the afternoon off in part-compensation for being open on Saturdays. So, Dad came home and Mum went off to Grandma’s leaving him to get on with his Thursday afternoon jobs. I ‘helped’.

 

We cleaned and brushed his boots and shoes, black and brown, with Cherry Blossom polish from a round tin with cherries on the lid, and Wren’s waterproof dubbin with a little bird. 

We replaced brake blocks and pumped tyres, and mended punctures by immersing the inner tubes in bowls of water to see the bubbles, marking with chalk, and sticking on puncture patches with stringy rubber solution. I learnt about tyre levers and tubular (box) spanners. We polished the wheels and handlebars with rags (old underpants were good) and mustard coloured chrome cleaner, transforming dirty grey to silver shine. We smeared on vaseline for protection from the weather – a magnet for yet more grime. 

We soaked the chains in trays of petrol to remove the oily grit, and then disposed of the petrol by setting it alight. Dad once just tipped it on the garden but had to stop after Grandpa came for tea one day and complained: “This lettuce tastes of petrol.” 

We cleaned Dad’s pipes, scraping out the burnt black ash with a gadget barbed like a miniature medieval mace, and soaking up the evil-smelling gunge with fluffy pipe-cleaners.

Then it was time for nicer smells and sounds: the matchsticks that rattled in their flat green and red box with a picture of a swan on the top, the firework hiss and smell of sulphur when he struck one, and the clouds of sweet St. Bruno smoke. He would pack the pipe bowl with tobacco from a black and white metal tin (with new tins, you had to pull a rubber vacuum seal from the bottom before you could open the lid), put the stem between his teeth, suck a flame down into the bowl, and blow smoke from the side of his mouth with a satisfied expression and popping ‘p’ sound.

“Can I have a puff?” I begged. “Let me have a puff”. I was only four.

“Oh all right,” said Dad reluctantly. He held the stem of the pipe near my mouth. I was instantly sick. 

And then there were the fun jobs – playtime. We had a model steam engine, the “steam boiler”, which drove a flywheel through dual pistons, exactly like the one pictured. It had a brass water tank heated by a methylated spirit burner that slid underneath. Dad loved to take it out of its oily cardboard box and fire it up on the back room table. Once steam was up, it could be set in motion. The flywheel revolved at a fair old pace, puffing and rattling, spitting out a lethal mixture of hot oil and boiling water. It had a screeching whistle and a safety valve that blew like a railway engine when the pressure got high.

It was important the pistons were always oiled and that the water tank did not run dry. The spirit burner needed topping up frequently. The smell of methylated spirit mixed with hot emulsified oil is unforgettable. Once, we spilled methylated spirit on the table and it caught light. I watched fascinated as a lucent blue pool of flame spread slowly across the surface, Dad flapping it frantically with his hands, looking panicky.

A move to another house brought a whole new set of Thursday afternoon jobs, sanding and painting skirting-boards and staining wooden floors around the edges of carpet squares before fitted carpets became the norm. 

We painted the garden shed banana yellow. It leaked, so we mended the roof. I sat up there with Dad, ‘helping’ him tack down new sheets of roofing felt and painting it with hot black tar. Dad heated the tar to boiling point in an old paint pot on the kitchen gas cooker. Then, holding it with just a wooden cane through the handle, carried it bubbling and the smouldering tar acoss the kitchen floor, across the garden, and up on a rickety stepladder and on to the shed roof. It must have been a thoroughly hazardous operation. There were splashes of black tar on the yellow paint for years.

But there was still room for play-jobs. 

We found some old lead piping in the shed. Dad melted it on the kitchen cooker in an empty tin can, and then, holding it with pliers, poured the molten metal into toothpaste tins which had originally contained hard, flat, tablets of ‘dentifrice’ wrapped in red cellophane. You rubbed it with a wet toothbrush to form a lather. The empty tins were just right for moulding make-believe medals – possibly something Dad had himself made in this own childhood. After pouring the lead, the medals were dropped into a bowl of water and sizzled as they cooled. The embossed ‘Gibbs’ lettering transferred perfectly to the moulded medals. No one knew about lead poisoning then.

Perhaps it was just as well Mum went to Grandma’s on Thursdays. 

‘Dad’s Thursday Helper’ would have continued for me until I started school, but Dad was then able to do it all over again with my brother.

A Body Like Mine

I was always a thin and awkward child, and not very strong. It might have been genetic, but I also put it down to having had whooping cough at six months, a serious illness at that age. Whichever, it left what would now be called self-esteem and body-image issues, although, of course, such things did not exist in those days.

You could count each rib individually, and my sternum ended in what looked like a hole in the centre of my chest. My collar bones were lumpy protrusions jutting from the tops of my shoulders like razor shells, as if I’d been pegged out on washing line. School swimming lessons, scrutinised by the masses of girls watching from the balcony each week (how did so many manage to get out of it?), were humiliating. I grew to 6 feet (183cm) tall but weighed only nine and a half stones (60.3kg or 133 pounds), a body mass index (BMI) of 17.5, very much underweight in other words.

Who would want a body like mine? Not me. I wore jumpers all year round, kept my jacket on, and avoided beaches and swimming pools. I couldn’t gain weight whatever I ate. That might sound enviable, but not when you’re too thin.

I revived the sadistic games teacher’s gym exercises, puffing and panting through press-ups, sit-ups, heel-lifts and squat-jumps. Press-ups were particularly difficult, but starting with just one or two several times a day in secret, I gradually built up to five, then ten, then more. But I looked just as thin.  

I sought salvation in the small ads discreetly scattered throughout the press, and sent off for details of the Charles Atlas body building course. The ads omitted to mention the price, which was £8, too much, even after starting work. They sent reminders, and after a while reduced the price to £6. They sent more reminders and the price fell to £4, so I went for it. Someone told me if I’d waited longer it would have dropped to £2.

Charles Atlas, Angelo Siciliano (1893-1972), claimed to have transformed himself from a scrawny, seven-stone weakling into ‘The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man’ after having sand kicked in his face by a bully. Thus began one of the longest and most memorable advertising campaigns of all time.

In one unforgettable ad, a frail young man is taunted in front of his girl friend with “Hey, Skinny! Yer ribs are showing!”. When he protests he is pushed in the face and told “Shut up you bag of bones!” It could have been me, except that I didn’t even have a girl friend.

The course consisted of exercises to help gain strength by setting muscles in opposition against each other, trademarked the ‘Dynamic Tension’ method. One exercise was to form a fist with one hand, and press downward against the other hand in front of you for several seconds. This was then repeated with the other hand on top. Another exercise involved pulling hooked hands against each other.

It is not difficult to see how regular repetition might build muscle. However, to gain weight the course included diet sheets touting overpriced food supplements. It was also padded out with tips on jujitsu, wrestling, boxing and feats of strength to amaze your friends, such as tearing a telephone directory in half and lifting a pony into the air. A triumph of advertising over substance. Perhaps I did gain a bit of muscle, but nothing like Charles Atlas. I wouldn’t have wanted to be like him anyway. I decided against a trip to the beach to check whether my physique was now more of an attraction than a curiosity.

In the end, I just got used to it. My BMI gradually crept up to the lower end of normal and more or less stayed there. I still do a few exercises each morning, not Atlas ones but bending and stretching, and lifting a pair of 2 x 5 Kg dumb bells, not to get fitter or stronger, but not to get worse. They nearly killed me carrying them from Argos.

Take note of Gillian Lynne, the ballerina, who was still carrying out a daily exercise routine (more demanding than mine) and teaching and demonstrating dance moves at 90. She said that just one day off because you feel a bit tired is one step down the slippery slope to oblivion.