Toast And Television

It has been a while, but I am once again the little Spanish girl navigating herself around a new life, a new culture and a new language in an unfamiliar land called England. The year is 1971 and soon it will be 1972. I am now seven but soon I will turn eight and along with me is Mama, Papa and Sis who is not yet three. A whole year has passed since I left my beautiful Tenerife Island home (see post  Share The Moon), and with each day that passes the memories of my previous life fade one more degree. In the daytime the little Spanish girl within me is slowly eradicated as Maria del Carmen is gradually replaced by Marie (see post A Girl Named Marie), but at night I escape on my magic carpet and return to my beloved island. During these precious twilight hours England cannot touch me as the mountains, the beach and the blue Atlantic waters all rush to welcome me home, enveloping me in their warm blanket of comforting familiarity. Once the first light of dawn begins to break outside the bedroom window my bewitching nocturnal adventure slowly concludes, and by the time the sun has risen into the morning sky I am once more on the emerald island of The English (see post Watching The English Part III). 

We are no longer living on the chicken farm in the village of Bloxham near to Banbury, and Richard, the English boy with the cobalt-blue eyes with whom I shared that magical first kiss has disappeared from my life forever (see posts This Lion Can Talk and B Is For Bullied); Papa has found a new job on a pig farm in a place called Ingatestone and we will now live in a nearby town called Brentwood just outside London. He tells me that London is the capital city of England and that means the biggest town in the country. We also no longer have to live in a mobile home and Mama, Sis and I are very happy; the owner of the pig farm is called William and he rents us a small terraced house in Brentwood. At first we live at number 37, and after a few months we move to number 51. This becomes our new home, and unbeknown to me at the time the enduring residence for the rest of my time in England.

In the beginning, Papa travels to work on the pig farm on his scooter, after while he has saved enough money and we have our first family car, a Hillmann Imp with number plate EUD-244C. While Papa does that, Mama stays home and looks after Sis and I go to my new school, the second one of my life in this strange new country. The house we now live in is a lot better than the mobile home; it has two bedrooms upstairs, and downstairs there is a lounge, kitchen and lavatory. It also comes with some basic furniture; two beds, one for the grown-ups and one for us girls, a sofa in the lounge and a table in the kitchen. The kitchen also has a cooker and a variety of kitchen utensils most of which I have never seen before. One of them is called a toaster. 

At the front and back of the house there are small gardens. Sis and I love the grass in the back garden, this is something we never had in Tenerife; for us it feels and looks like a luxurious green carpet, and we race one another from one end to the other as fast as our little legs will carry us. The back garden has a fence on either side separating us from all the other similarly sized back gardens, which are all in turn attached to houses similar to the one we live in. They all look the same and are bunched together in a long row. Papa tells me that the English call these homes 'terraced'. There's not a chicken in sight in our new neighbourhood and I am very happy, but I think that Papa is missing his previous charges, because he soon sets up a hutch at the end of the back garden and after a while it is inhabited by an adorable family of rabbits. From the other side of the fence a luscious plum tree overhangs our garden, and in the summer-time our luxurious grass carpet is covered with crimson-coloured, ripe and juicy plums. In the summer months to come we will have our fill of this delicious fruit. We even have our own address, 51 Crescent Road, and after having spent the past year living in a rudimentary caravan surrounded by chickens at every turn, this new home feels like opulent luxury.

Living next door but one to our home is a wonderful elderly lady and her name is Kathleen Robinson. When she finds out that the only family Sis and I have in England are all resident in the house next to her, she takes pity on us and declares that since we girl do not have a grandmother of our own in the whole of England, we will just have to call her Nanny Robbie. We also have other elderly ladies living around us: to our right and directly next door between us and Nanny Robbie we have Mrs. McCabe, and on the other side we have Mrs Hunter. They are all nice ladies, but none are as special as Nannie Robbie. Sis and I fall in love with her and she becomes for us the much-loved grandma that remained behind on our Island in Tenerife as we departed for this new land called England. 


Some time has passed since Mama first introduced us to English sliced bread (see post Watching The English Part I), and by now we are eating it morning, noon and night. We notice that it tastes a lot better if you toast it and especially if you spread on some delicious sausage paté that Mama buys us from the new local food store called Sainsburys. For Sis and I, toast and English paté becomes our staple breakfast. One day Nannie Robbie comes by for a visit as Sis and I are half way through our delicious feast. Horrified by the sight that greets her, she shrieks to Mama: 'Heavens above, Francis, you're feeding the girls raw pork sausages, you'll be lucky if they don't end up with worms!' We don't understand exactly what she is saying, but we sort of get the drift that we're eating something we shouldn't and this spells the end of our toast and paté for breakfast. 

We soon get out first ever television. It's black and white and rented. Once a week on a Saturday when Mama is not working, Sis and I walk the short journey from 51 Crescent Road to the King's Road Rental shop where we faithfully pay our one pound seventy-five pence weekly rent. Mama pushes Sis in her pushchair and I dutifully walk alongside her. On the way, we pass a shop called Larry Morgan's that is really two shops in one; part of it is a photographer's studio, but there is also another part to it which sells a variety of bicycles all displayed in the shop window facing the street that Mama, Sis and I walk past as we slowly make our way to our destination. The photos in the windows do not interest me, but I cannot say the same for the bicycles. They captivate me and I gaze longingly at them each time I pass by. I have never seen such wonderful things in my short life, and there is one that particularly enchants me, it's called a Raleigh Chopper. I want one more than anything, but for me it feels like a far-away fantasy with no hope of realisation; Mama need not tell me, my young mind comprehends that that we do not have the money for such a luxury. I any case, even were I to be the lucky recipient of such a marvel I would not know what to do with it, for I do not know how to ride a bicycle and cannot in my wildest seven-year-old dreams ever imagine being able to do so.

I love the television rental shop; all around me are televisions galore and all simultaneously tuned into the same program creating an immense sea of repetition which mesmerizes me. Mama could leave me here all day and I would be happy as a lark, watching the same program hour after hour on all the sets around me until she finally stopped by to pick me up and take me home. Sprinkled in-between the black and white sets dotted around the store are also a few colour televisions but they are way too expensive for us. Maybe one day if we have enough money we can afford one. At home, we all sit in front of this marvellous thing called The Television, captivated by a new world opening out before us and in a language that we don't really understand. One of my favourite programs is of a simple picture: In this picture, there is a girl with a red dress and long brown hair sitting in front of a blackboard with a funny clown for company. She is called the Test Card Girl and is on television in-between programs when there is nothing else on. There is a piece of chalk in her hand, and on the blackboard beside her she is drawing circles and crosses that never seem to get anywhere. There she sits motionless hour after hour, with a never-ending stream of peaceful music playing in the background. And by jolly does she need the calming influence of that music; it must be excruciating sitting still in front of that blackboard for eternity and never getting to the end of your game of noughts and crosses! No-one else wants to watch this program but I like this girl and the fact that she remains inert. I'm only seven turning eight but have undergone so many changes in my short life that watching her frozen in time makes me feel safe and anchored. 

Next post published on Sunday, 1st March:  Toast And Television


Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some additions from private family archives.