#but Alice did all those lovely drawings of Oxford in the comics and no one else in the group seems to be going there?

[mablikethequeen]

I kinda feel like Charlie is going to go to Oxford

[ancientbrit]

Natter # 6     7/26/2020

I love books. I have a passion for them - always have. My parents were the catalyst really. My Dad would read to my sister and me when we went to bed; stories from a huge volume of The Brothers Grimm and Aesops Fables with fine, thin pages and wonderful, colored plates by Arthur Rackham, protected by sheets of parchment. You could lose yourself in the tales and those wonderful illustrations; we did and I wish we still had that book. We would go out for long walks in the countryside and always packed along a couple of books on birds, plants, and animals for identification purposes. My Mother would take us to the public library, a 213 bus ride away to Worcester Park and we would ride back home triumphant with tales about Mumfie the Elephant and others. Books were always welcomed as birthday and Christmas gifts amongst others and when a public library was set up in our village I was one of the very first to join and I took out a book entitled “Tropical Aquarium Fishes} by William T Innes I had that ook exclusively for over a year. The library was within walking distance along Anne Boleyns Walk so it suited me very well. At school when the class was made to stand and read aloud one by one around the room, when it reached my turn I could never find the place because I was always about three pages ahead. I couldn't stand the slow pace that reading out loud produced. I began to develop a taste for adventure books where the same characters were repeated in subsequent volumes, such as in Arthur Ransome's children's book series, starting with "Swallows and Amazons." I always thought the illustrations were sort of crude sketches but the stories were great. I bought a set for my kids but somehow they never seemed to appeal to them. During the war, American comics were really desirable and they were hard to get. A little girl who lived just around the corner had relations in the States who would send her most of the popular comics of the day - be worth a fortune now no doubt. We found out about this and soon we had developed a bartering system - English comics for American comics. One of the American comics characters was a boy who was always getting into adventures  & scrapes and getting out of them by building various things. What used to fascinate me about this was at the bottom of the pages were instructions on how to build the things that he had used. How to build a passenger rail car with lighted windows from an old shoebox, or a searchlight from a shaving soap container. That phrase "how to make...." has stayed with me for all my life and it still has the power to draw me in; I love to make things. Much more on this later. I became involved and interested in mechanical things and my Uncle Jim next door had a wealth of interesting gadgets which he used to shower on me. Old clocks, crystal sets, old firearms and on. I loved all of these and started taking them apart to see how they worked. Some I even returned to working condition. But eventually, prime movers and engines of all sorts started to take precedence and it peaked when our next-door neighbor on the left, at whose engineering company I later worked on Saturdays, took me and his daughter, Mary, to the Model Engineering Exhibition in London. I don't think Mary had any interest what so ever but I was in seventh heaven, looking at all the model steam locomotives, engines and everything mechanical - and they all worked, they weren't just pretty static models, they were actually miniature pieces of engineering and not long after this I started to subscribe to the magazine “Model Engineer” which I would read avidly from cover to cover, even the ads.This quite naturally led into yet another type of book and ended with my favorite author of all time - Neville Shute.

Mr Shute was a qualified engineer who was involved in the disastrous R-100 & R-101 airship designs between the wars at the same time as the Hindenburg was flying between Germany and New York. Airships turned out to be dead-end technology and the only thing remaining of it in England are the two massive hangers which used to house them. When I joined the RAF I visited this station and at that time they were the biggest single-storey buildings I had ever seen. Mr Shute continued in the aeronautics field by starting his own aircraft manufacturing company - Airspeed, which produced one twin-engined aircraft  - The Oxford. This was a conventional passenger aircraft and was quite successful, but it wasn't what he was looking for really and he started to write fiction. His early works did not involve engineering, but I guess that the old saw - write  what you know, finally enabled him to write winners, with four of his books having been made into winning films, all of which I have seen. In one period he flew his own aircraft to Australia, which became special to him with some of his best stories taking place there. But in my opinion, his best by far was his final story, completed and published not long before he died. It was serialized in the national press and a few months later the book appeared on the street, it was "Trustee from the Toolroom." This book had everything for me. It centered around a humble little guy, Keith, living in a suburb of London, whose mission in life was designing and building engineering miniatures and describing the building process in a model engineering magazine.His sister had married well to a wealthy naval officer and they had a little girl.

Just after the war, England was still rationed until about 1954 and the whole economy was geared towards earning dollars to pay off the huge dept owed to America for all the munitions and food they had sold to England when our backs were to the wall. One of the strictures placed on Brits who fancied traveling abroad at that time was that you couldn't take more than $500 out of the country. This naval officer and his wife wanted to emigrate to Canada in their yacht, leaving their little girl with Keith and his wife to be sent for when they arrived.They had a problem in they had converted his wife's jewelry into negotiable diamonds and wanted his brother in law to help him hide the diamonds in the yacht, which he did. Making this a bit shorter, the yacht foundered off an island in the Pacific and Keith considered it his job to get out there to try and recover the diamonds for the little girl. Not having the money, through contacts he had made writing for the magazine, he was able to scrounge a trip by air to Honolulu, from an airfield just along the road from where Jean & I lived. From Honolulu he picked up a lift from a weird guy who had sailed from the USA in a boat he had built himself. There is a lot more to this story, but after locating the diamonds he ends up landing in Seattle and driving down to Portland where he helps a timber tycoon with a problem he was having building a clock that Keith had designed. The whole story was extremely satisfying for me, touching so many points with which I was familiar and I must have read it at least a half dozen times. The films that were made from his books were:- "A town like Alice", "No Highway" (starred Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich), "On the beach" (Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner) and "The Pied Piper" (Monty Wooley). "On the beach" was a rather grim story about the aftermath of Global Nuclear War, which was a distinct possibility at that time. I have almost all of the books he wrote with the exception of a couple from very early days - still searching for those. Yet another writer of future aftermath stories was John Wyndham who wrote The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken wakes and Chrysalids - all cracking good yarns which I happen to have as a book containing all three stories. This is another that I have read multiple times; I also have  Kindle, a present from my son, which I have used occasionally, but it is not the same as holding a physical book in my hands. Books are - special and I like the fact that I can go to one whenever I feel like it and take down an old friend and feel instantly at home. All you need is a comfortable chair and enough light to read by and you are satisfied. I also like the fact that there is no battery to go down! Your fearless leader, trying to maintain some sort of contact with you all. Stay safe and hopeful - it WILL all come right one day! Gordon