Looking back . . .

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Leo M’s email hit my mailbox yesterday with a collection of pics gathered under the title “Oldies, Can You Remember?”  Thanks, Leo.

I looked through his collection of pics and remembered a lot of the items, although they would probably be strange, unidentifiable objects to young people today. Some of the items raised memories of my own childhood but more of that at the end. Here are Leo’s pics and comments . . . 

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Some additional pics and commentary by moi . . . 

Before this . . . 

. . . and this . . . 

. . . there was this . . . 

Remember these? 

I certainly do, it was what my mother used to punish my brothers and I. Being of Dutch parentage and birth, it was known by the Dutch name “matteklopper”, which literally translates to “carpet beater”. In our house it was more accurately a “kinderklopper” since there was decidedly more klopping of kinder than of matte. 

Here are some Dutch pics of carpet beating using the traditional cane beater. I don’t know if we were particularly bad or whether my mother thought she was moving to the Antipodean wilderness when she, my father and my 3 brothers moved to Australia but she took her matteklopper with her from Holland. 

Don’t get me wrong, I still think they were the greatest mum and dad in the world but things were different, the world has moved on since then and most of us have moved on with it. 

This was my twin brothers and myself before leaving Holland: 

This was on arrival in Australia, with my father’s first car here, an Austin. Note how my mother dressed us in the frilly European style clothes! 

There are some things better not remembered.