Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Old pictures...



This is a Wolseley, and it's the car that dominates my memories of childhood. Even though my father tells me it gave him "nothing but trouble", as I suppose you'd kind of expect from a British vehicle this old...cars nowadays may have less character, but my goodness they work.
I can remember long overnight journeys from Glasgow to the south of England, one sister asleep in a carry cot, the other on the rear parcel shelf, me on the floor, on cushions packed either side of the transmission tunnel. Seatbelts? You must be joking...
I had these pictures on 35mm slides (boxes and boxes given to me ages ago by dad) and before Christmas Tesco in Aberdeen, without fuss, transferred 30 or so onto CD and provided two sets of prints for a tenner in total. Not bad, I thought. the pictures themselves were all taken on a Braun Paxette, a lovely wee German camera from the 1950s. I still have one, though the winding mechanism is broken.
The other picture illustrates the defining influences on my childhood, apart from internal combustion engines, that is: Religion, in the form of Bethany Hall in Troon, and its Sunday School, plus music, which was an integral part of life in the Brethren. The picture shows, circa 1962, one of the summer open-air Sunday Schools at Troon prom. I am not the lad in the kilt belting out (probably) Store Your Treasure In The Bank of Heaven. I think that's someone called Alistair MacHaffie.
Ahem: let me see if I can remember the words, though:
Store your treasure in the Bank of Heaven
Where no thief can steal away
There you'll find it safely waiting for you
When you get to heaven (stamp stamp)
One day.
I could go on for hours in similar vein...but I won't. That's enough nostalgia.

2 comments:

sperrman said...

hi there
what a lovely car the wolseley is ,can you remember what model? it looks like a big one , ie, not an oxford /cambridge derivative.
I think it must be an age thing , because I was packed off to the glasgow city mission on a sunday ,but there were a lot of days oot and singing to auld people to break the monotany of being stuck indoors on a sunny sunday afternoon

Tom Morton said...

It's a 6/99 or a 6/110...both based on Austins, alas.