Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

In Rhoda’s 1962 Diary, my mother made a lot of preparations for Christmas, and had to make sure that her housekeeping budget could pay for all the Christmas presents. And then she had to prepare all the food and festivities. Moreover, children had a holiday from school, which meant she would have five boys disturbing her housework routines! So her entry was not surprising.

But, of course, children are egoists! They expect everything served on a silver plate, without exception. They never give a thought to the architects behind the scenes! Empathy is not a word in their ‘dictionary of life’. 

“The Automobile Book” by Ralph Stein (1961)

Looking back, I still have a bad conscience about the Christmas gifts I received as a boy. For example, I can remember being disappointed at receiving The Automobile Book by Ralph Stein (1961) on the Christmas Day my mother mentions above (the ‘festivities’). As a young boy – I wanted things that ‘worked’ like chemistry sets (forbidden by my mother), air guns, and so on! Not books, trousers and school briefcases! Of course, I wasn’t totally to blame. My mother sometimes gave me gifts that she would have had to buy me anyway.

Ralph Stein’s book inspired me to draw and ‘design’ many automobiles in my teens. Amongst other things, I ‘foresaw’ the modern-day streamlined cars, not to mention dual-engined cars. My idea was a ‘super-car’ that could also function as an economy car. However, I never became an ‘auto designer’, due to lack of self-motivation or the ‘non-encouraging’ British educational system. I only have two or three sketches left from this period of artistic automotive creation. But I can at least include one here – a drawing of a Duesenberg SJ.

Chemistry sets and explosive experiments

I can remember Christmas 1961; my mother had bought me the book, and a school briefcase that was quite smart! But, ungrateful child that I was, I wasn’t pleased. I wanted a ‘chemistry set’! But this wasn’t allowed, because my mother had had some unfortunate experiences with our eldest brother Sandy. He had been given such a chemistry set, and had had some ‘explosive’ experiments! 

In retrospect, I can understand this. I shared a bedroom with Sandy at 26 Hob Hey Lane. He was a cadet in the Air Training Corps at the Isis School. When he returned from ‘camp,’ I often ‘inspected’ his army coat pockets for cigarettes and small change. I was surprised one day when I found a large pink and sweaty-looking sausage that smelled of almonds. 

I showed the ‘sausage’ to my brother Alistair, and he told me to get rid of it quickly as it was gelignite, and that if it was ‘sweating’; this meant it could self-explode. So I threw it into the copse on the other side of the road, opposite the house.

In retrospect, I think Alistair was ‘exaggerating’ (as he often did) because I think gelignite needs a detonator. In conclusion, my brother Sandy had probably managed to ‘filch’ this explosive from some army store. In retrospect, it’s a wonder he didn’t blow up the whole house due to his interest in chemistry and explosives.