To Put Away Childish Things #15

I was never what you might call a very practical child. You may be wondering what kind of child I was, given that we have already established that I was never very sporty either. Well, to tell the truth, I was the spotty bespectacled swotty kind who would rather sit in the library and do his homework than hang around in the schoolyard.

Be that as it may, I wasn't practical. There were lots of other things I couldn't do very well either. One of the choices we had to make was between art, music and woodwork. The music teacher didn't want me as I couldn't carry a tune and had never shown any inclination towards learning an instrument. The art teacher didn't want me, presumably because he had seen how badly I drew. (I couldn't draw anything but I was worst at feet. If I had to draw a figure it was always standing behind a rock or a box so that I didn't have to attempt them.) So I ended up in the woodwork class where I was predictably useless. In my time there we made two things. There was a footstool with mortise and tenon joints. Mine fell apart in about a month. It would have been quicker had it not been precariously held together by the raffia-work top. The other project was the subject of a mystery. It was a clock with a wooden case with dovetail joints and when we turned up for the lesson one day mine was missing. I have always suspected that the teacher thought it was so bad that he threw it away.

As you can see, not a practical child at all.

So it's all the more mysterious that I miss making Airfix models. You can still buy them, of course, and I suppose I could if I wanted to but I was just as useless at them as everything else. I think every kid has made them at some time or another, plastic kits that could, with time, patience, glue and paint be assembled into aeroplanes, tanks, battleships, cars and so on. My family used to buy them for me as birthday presents and I would dutifully build them although there would always be bits left over that didn't correspond to the bits that were missing. Moving parts, wheels for example, never moved, and my painting was especially sloppy so that the ones that were supposed to be in camouflage colours would only be adequately hidden if they crashed into an exploding paint factory.

Quite late on I discovered, however, a series of models that even I could handle. The Airfix range of historical figures. There were various kings and queens, famous soldiers and sailors and so on. These had the advantage that there were less of the fiddly little pieces to work with so they could be managed even by someone of my ineptitude.

   

I had about a dozen of them, though the only ones I can remember now are Henry VIII, Richard I and Oliver Cromwell. I even managed to paint them reasonably well*  and for years they stood on top of the cupboard in our living room. 

Sadly, like much else that I have been nostalgic about, I have no idea what happened to them, no idea if they were thrown away, given away or put away. It would be nice to find them again. I was especially fond of the Richard I which had a removable helmet and sword which I managed NOT to glue permanently in place.

As a brief aside, in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I am no more practical now. I expect that given an Airfix model and some glue I would still end up with pieces of it glued to the table and several of my fingers stuck together. Some things never change.

(*reasonably well by my standards of course, which is pretty poor by anyone else's)