This Is Guernsey

By Shaun Shackleton

(Illustration by Sheena)

I WAS never a big Easter egg fan. When I was a kid my mum couldn’t afford to splash out on expensive, flashy orbs of brown-coloured sugar and cocoa filled with plastic bags of multi-coloured sugar and gelatine.

I remember getting a tin of toffees once – it had a photograph of teddy bears in a haystack on the lid – and eating them on Easter Sunday while watching clowns on stilts brushing the roof of Billy Smart’s Big Top Circus with their orange wigs.

The toffees came in greaseproof wrappers and tasted of wax. But I ate them all.

What I was always partial to were boxes of toy soldiers.

I used to enter the Guernsey Evening Press and Star’s kids’ page competitions. They were usually to draw a picture of something poignant about Guernsey – litter on the beach, the island’s haunted past or the coastline.

Because my mum was artistic I’d do collages using real bits of newspapers and Bacofoil, and more experimental pieces with broken glass and bits of roadkill. (I lied about the roadkill, but they were a bit far-out.)

The person who was in charge of sifting through the entries must have gone to some radical art school and wanted to encourage a bit of really early junior Brit-art, because I used to win quite a bit.

All my winnings were spent on toy soldiers.

Airfix used to do (and probably still do) boxes of them and they were on sale downstairs at Creasey’s.

They made two different scales, 1/32 and 1/72. I usually went for the larger ones.

One of the things I loved about them was studying the boxes on the bus home. Living in St Saviour’s, I had plenty of time to do it.

The first set I ever got was British Commandos. On the box they had just scaled the White Cliffs of Dover (obviously on some sort of training day).

The second was American Marines. They were storming a beach, possibly in the South Pacific.

The leaders on the two boxes had very similar features. In fact, when I got the second one home and compared it to the first I discovered they were identical: heavy eyebrows, a hawkish nose, dark, determined eyes, square jaw and a five o’clock shadow.

The artist must have used the same model. Or, bizarrely, they might have been self-portraits.

This continued through the First World War Russian Infantry (strange, baggy grey uniforms and almost gangster-like machine guns) and German Stormtroopers.

On the Easter Sunday that I received a box of the smaller variety – which was cheaper – the weird self-portraits ended.

Which was hardly surprising as the new box contained Japanese infantry.

Try as he might, the artist couldn’t quite magic his Hollywood matinee idol looks onto the proud shoulders of Colonel Suzuki charging out of a bamboo field, sword aloft.

Aside from toy soldiers replacing Easter eggs (and, thank God, wax-based toffees), all celebrations that warranted gifts were taken over by action toys.

Action Man was fantastic: a doll lads could dress and undress without feeling all weird inside. Not all the toys were military-based – there was also Atomic Man, who was a pale rip-off of the Bionic Man, but with an arm that could be replaced by helicopter blades and a see-through, fish-eyed lens-orb you could look through. Okay, he might have been 12 inches high, but I couldn’t stand that level of far-fetchedness.

Then there was The Adventurer, who had a beard, a pair of jeans and a polo-neck jumper. That was it. He looked like Jack Hargreaves in Out of Town.

Get three bearded Action Man dolls together and you could form a folk group (imagine pulling out the cords from their chests and getting a three-part harmony: ‘Hey nonny, nonny, no, the fields are full of barley-o’).

Along with Action Man, weapons also featured heavily: metal cap guns, spud guns, machine guns that went ‘HHHHHNNNNNTTTTT’ and replicas that didn’t.

But there was always one toy gun that was unobtainable. It was the mother of all machine guns. It was called the Johnny Seven OMA (which stood for one man army) and it was brilliant.

It had seven functions, hence the name. It had a grenade-launcher, anti-tank rocket, armour-piercing shell, anti-bunker missile, repeating rifle, a Tommy gun and a detachable automatic pistol.

It looked awesome. A friend had one, but I never did. Looking back, I’m glad.

The grenade launcher plopped out a small plastic pineapple with all the force of a limp handshake. You could easily lose bits and a lass with a well-aimed toy iron could do more damage.

It was only when I grew up and started paying attention that I realised that war wasn’t simply an entertainment and that when people were shot, they didn’t just count to 10 and get up again.

All those American soldiers in the jungle and skies filled with helicopters on the news (Vietnam).

All those British soldiers wandering down terraced streets, their camouflage uniforms not camouflaging anything against red bricks, and their long, awkward SLRs (Northern Ireland).

Even more so when the battleships went out to that scattering of islands off South America and my mate Bob, an otherwise intelligent bloke, said that to avoid conscription he was going to run away and live in a shed he knew of up in Scotland.

Or when the tanks rolled along the Bosnian countryside, which looked not too dissimilar to the Yorkshire dales; the two desert storms; Afghanistan; the ongoing hell in the Middle East.

Do kids play with toy soldiers any more? Can you still buy boxes of them and paint them up? Is Action Man still on patrol in the backyard? Do they still make Johnny Sevens?

Or has something much worse taken over with interactive video games?

‘Aw mum, can I turn the news off? Me and Warren wanna play Super Sniper III.’

My two will be getting Easter eggs tomorrow (I think they’ve stopped making those waxy toffees in the teddy bear tin). And do you know something? I think I’ll join ’em.

Happy troughing.