Letters
After Christmas, my brother and I would be required to write letters to our relations who had send presents. These gifts were invariably (except from my Rhodesian uncle) of a very practical kind. They were socks, or home-knitted, matching gloves and bobble hats, or sleeveless pullovers with gaudy, horizontal, zigzag stripes that were too big for us but which we would "grow into". Fine gifts, but very difficult for small boys to raise any great enthusiasm about for letter writing.
Not only did we have to show appropriate gratitude, but we also had to add some other "interesting" news about our lives. [It didn't seem likely that that description of the great mud gang fight would go down too well. This was when, at the start of the Christmas holidays, the rumour went round that, on the Saturday, the notorious Knowle Gang - we had never heard of them before - were going to descend from their high ground above the allotments and rampage, looting and pillaging, through the streets at the bottom of the allotments. So all of us eight year olds in those streets formed ourselves into the Brislington "Black Hand" Gang. We took the lids off our houses' metal dustbins to use as shields and set off for the allotments on Saturday morning. We hid in a couple of the abandoned, overgrown allotments and ambushed them as they came down the hill, pelted them with lumps of earth, and saw them off in a famous victory. But this was not really the stuff of Christmas letters.] So we had to think of some school achievement to mention.
Letter writing was thus a difficult chore. Since my father was a schoolteacher, the letters had to be written in our best, fountain pen, handwriting and contain no spelling mistakes. If not they would have to be re-written. Teaching us that you always have to pay for your pleasures.
