The conversation went something like this.
“Did you see that documentary about the Dam Busters and the bouncing bomb?”
“Yeah… yeah I did.”
“Did you ever build the Airfix Lancaster?”
“Yeah… yeah I did.”
“Have you checked out the Airfix website?”
After that, I went misty eyed at the thought, ah, Airfix. What a wonderful creation. To be honest I wasn’t even sure that Airfix was still that big, but after checking out the Airfix website, I was back into a world of nostalgia.
The website is great. In my opinion, it’s really great.
I did, of course have to look at my favourite kits from my childhood. My favourite kits were the Supermarine Spitfire, the Hawker Hurricane, the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Messerschmitt Me 110, all in 1/72 scale. When I was about 8 or 10 maybe even up to 12 years old, I must have made a squadron of these things.
With the Supermarine Spitfire and the Messerschmitt Bf 109, I use to fight the Battle of Britain over the duvet, because the duvet could form the shapes of the rolling landscape of Dover. Whether or not Dover had a multi-coloured rolling landscape, I didn’t know, but in my mind it did.
The Spitfire always won of course. Well, it would, it was after all a Royal Air Force Spitfire, and I would never let the ‘jerry’ Luftwaffe win.
Another thing I was glad to see was that they still made the figures, the little box of soldiers that my friends and I fought many a battle with. These came in two sizes 1/72 scale (small about 1 inch tall) and 1/32 scale (not as small about 2 inches tall). The detail was always great on these things, no matter how small they were. Faces had expressions. Hands gripped objects, whether rifles, pistols, machine guns, or mortar rounds.
I remember having small ‘skirmishes’ with the British 8th Army (The Desert Rats) and the Deutsches Afrikakorps (German Africa Corps). The ground was sandy and gritty, small boulders littered the landscape, there were no trees and no oasis. The troops hid behind the sand dunes and fired single shots at each other until the order came to begin the bayonet attack.
The order came, “Charge!”
A small number of khaki clad troops headed towards the enemy, Rommel’s elite desert troops, supported by machine gun wielding ‘Tommy’s’. Of course, the British Army won, yet again.
The desert landscape was obviously not a real desert. It was actually a piece of board about 2 feet wide by three feet long, covered with sandpaper, the boulders were just big stones and the sand dunes shaped by placing things under the sandpaper. My dad helped me make it and I thought it was wonderful. It may not have been a very accurate depiction of the western desert, but it seemed great to me when I was small.
This landscape also doubled for the Battle of Waterloo (it has to be said that 1940’s North Africa does not really look like Belgium in 1815, but it didn’t matter to me). The Scottish Highlanders and The British Infantry of the Line took on of the might of Napoleons French Imperial Guard. Obviously, they won, they were British, and there were more of them. That sometimes changed when one of my friends got a box of French Infantry of the Line (1815), but I still somehow managed to get the British on the winning side.
Anyway, that was part of my childhood, a misty-eyed nostalgic part, and a wonderful time. Why do we have to grow up? Although I have heard that just because we age, we don’t necessarily ‘grow-up’.
You have to excuse me as I have a website to check out… “Oh look, they do a full Battle of Waterloo set piece… the farm house and both armies… wow…”
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