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The tabloid newspapers were the Daily Mirror, Daily Sketch and the Daily Herald.

There was a paper called the Daily Worker which was published by the Communist party.

Cereals like corn flakes and sugar puffs gave away small plastic toys, the best ones were the small submarines which you put some baking powder in and placed it in a bowl of water, it sank and surfaced repeatedly until it ran out of powder.

My granny had a big chest of drawers in her living room which had a secret drawer that only the two of us knew about, well ok, perhaps granddad knew as well, after all it was his house.

On top of this chest of drawers was the big family Bible, granny said that it contained all the names and dates of the Wood family going back for ever.

She promised me that one day when I was old enough she let me see it and eventually it would be mine to keep and look after.

It wasn’t until I was about 15 that my dad asked my uncle where the Bible was and he said that he had buried it in the garden when they moved out of the cottage 6 years earlier.

I don’t know why he did that, but I would dearly love to see it now to confirm all the facts I discovered when I researched the family tree.

On reflection I was probably quite a good lad, I certainly enjoyed my childhood.

I didn’t crave attention, I wasn’t particularly naughty, I never got into trouble with the law and I always did well at school.

Water pistols were always a favourite, you could never run out of ammunition and the worst end result could just be that you would be soaked to the skin.

Conkers I’ve talked about before so we’ll leave that for now.

Shotties or marbles, I was never very good at this.

I always lost mine, much to my parent’s disappointment.

It wasn’t for the lack of trying it was just a lack of skill, I used to have a permanent piece of skin missing off my thumb where the shottie had rubbed it raw.

At one point I had amassed a collection of around 20 shotties and decided to swap them for bird’s eggs.

In those days nesting was not particularly frowned upon by most people, unfortunately for me, my dad was not among those people.

I stored them in a metal box lined with cotton wool and half-heartedly concealed them in my bedroom.

They were spotted by my mum and then she reported the find to my dad.

I explained that I hadn’t actually robbed the nests, I had just swapped them for the shotties.

So, two wrongdoings here, one for wasting my shotties and one for receiving illegal goods, I never got my shotties back and the eggs went in the bin.