Quote:
Originally Posted by Chuffer
One abiding memory I have to this day of those adventures was the snacks or lunch packs our mothers would prepare for us. Without fail and to a boy they would consist of a couple of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper the fillings would invariably be either cheese, spam, paste or egg. Also included would be, if lucky, a bag of crisps, Smiths with the small blue bag of salt, in those far off days crisps did not come in flavours just plain, if crisps were not included then perhaps a hard boiled egg would be added, this would be accompanied by a thermos flask of tea to wash it all down, the whole epicurean delight being carried in a duffle bag over the shoulder, I wonder now if they still make duffle bags.
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Memories indeed; personally, I carried my stuff around in a khaki bag designed for holding gas masks in WW2! Oddly enough, I worked on the IOW ferries 1973-86, and one of the blokes used to make great quality duffle bags out of sail canvas, and most of the ferry crews had one. As for crisps being only salted - when I was first introduced to trains, it was when my grandad used to push me to Tilehurst station on Sunday morning. After a while watching trains (c.1952-53), we'd go just up the road to The Roebuck Hotel, and he's park me in the covered bit by the door, and get me a bottle of Pepsi with two straws (which never emerged from the neck of the bottle), and a bag of OXO flavoured crisps! So they DID exist (although they weren't Smiths).
As for flasks - I never bothered; my dad was a chippy on a building site, and I'd drunk enough of the indeterminate brown stuff out of a flask to know that I could live quite happily without it. I always took a bottle of Tizer, a packet of Smiths crisps, a packet of Rolos, a pork pie, and the inevitable Lyon's Individual Fruit Pie (and possibly a banana or apple). I wasn't keen on eggs, but my mate Roger, with whom I did a fair bit of spotting, always produced a hard-boiled egg, which he then cracked on my head to get it started. I still occasionally go with Roger on spotting/photo shoot jaunts, even after all these years - in April we spent a week in Germany, and we're off to the Czech Republic in a months time. My grandad's pre-Sunday lunch pint's got a lot to answer for! Talking of which, in April 2008, I returned to Tilehurst station for the first time in probably 40+ years, in order to get some photos of the trains, and decided to actually go INTO The Roebuck for a pint myself; I was looking forward to explaining that I'd been waiting 55 years to see what the INSIDE of the pub looked like. It was closed for refurbishment.....
