1970s toys: What’s gone gets forgotten #8

[A brief history of me in less than 200 words.]

1970s toys

Mum took me one birthday, to the little row of shops in Heston so I could get an Action Man tank from Gallagher’s Toy Shop. Gallagher’s was an Aladdin’s cave of toys– packed floor to ceiling with stock. It seemed to me that everywhere I looked; on every shelf -
were Action Man toys. I pointed to a tank that was high on a shelf, and the shopkeeper brought out a ladder and fetched down an enormous box. Mum and I carried the box back to Heston Grange and once we were home unpacked it on the floor of the living room. Action Men toys always had an aroma of plastic about them (probably toxic - it was the 70s) and that smell really sticks in my head even today. I also had a toy electric train that you used to be able to put a drop of mentholated spirits into. The meths would then burn and the little train would look like it had smoke coming of its chimney, and even to this day the slightest whiff of mentholated spirits reminds me of that little yellow wild west locomotive.