The Little World

Walter, I see your Mum has written a column about you and your life – I just read about your first visit to the dentist. I’m glad it was a good one -I used to be a dentist a decade ago myself.

This column is about what I like to call the Little World – scale models, toys, little scenes, dollhouses, and all sorts of things that you can make with your own hands.

It also has some memories – toys I played with as a boy, models that were built, experiences that the hobbies brought. Good times, and writing about them helps me to remember them…and then I get to have the good times again.

But, enough of this banter. Now down to the serious business. You need to start building your own Little World.

You can start out with toys, if you wish. I did, and I still have some of them. The best ones are the ones where you get to do something with them, and if you can be involved in the actual making of the toy it is even better. To this end I recommend a building kit. It doesn’t really matter which one, as long as there are a lot of parts and most of them fit together.

Here’s my first building kit – I got it at Easter in 1953. Unfortunately it is long gone but I found an internet picture of it.

It was an English product imported into Canada and it was made of real rubber – little red rubber bricks with pegs on one side and holes on the other. Rather like LEGO but only two pegs rather than four. The bricks were hard rubber but you could squish them.

There was a rubber mat with pegs that you could build things on and green rubber roofs to cover the buildings – white bricks were provided for door frames and the doors and windows were printed plastic sheets with little nubbins to attach to the rubber bricks. Believe me, it was one tough construction set! sometimes we helped the bricks to go together by wetting them a little – but if you licked them eventually your spit would rot the rubber and stick the bricks together – my Mum always gave me a damp sponge to do my building with.

I had the Number 2 set and could build small houses. The Watson kids next door had the Number 6 set and could build skyscrapers – but I don’t think they valued their Minibrix very much because there were parts of it scattered all over their basement and I bet they lost a lot of them in the garden. That was sort of a lesson – I took care of my building set.

Well, Minibrix are long gone, and new building sets are on the market. It doesn’t really matter whether you have LEGO or any of the others – they are all really good fun – particularly if you get a universal set that doesn’t restrict you to any one particular model to build.

Which reminds me, Walter…I must tell you about the Dux set…