Jumble Sale Toys

On having a conversation – and how I came to do so was by most diabolical means indeed – I was returned to a world in my head that I had almost forgotten. This was how the conversation:
“I remember getting a Sylvanian Family when I was little. I got it at a Jumble Sale.”
“Oh?”
“Yes – it was just one Sylvanian Family. It was a child Rabbit.”
“So you only had one member of a Sylvanian Family?”
“Yes.”
“Does that still count as a Sylvanian Family? Is it not, then, a Sylvanian Orphan?”
“No, that’s awful. Anyway later at another jumble sale I got a Sylvanian Family to go with the Rabbit. He was meant to be a Dad I think and had a chequered shirt. He was a Bear.”
“He was a Sylvanian step-father!”
“He wasn’t!”
“He was! How do you explain him having an anthropomorphized child Rabbit when he is an anthropomorphized Bear? How complicated was this Sylvanian family tree? I bet there were other Sylvanian skeletons in the closet too. We need the Sylvanian Family anthropomorphic Shrew Jeremy Kyle to get to the bottom of all this!”

So, yes. The Jumble Sale. Now generally out of fashion, years ago when the local jumble sale was announced – not to be confused with the similar appearing Sale of Works [notable difference: an old women sitting with a hat made of doily, selling bars of tablet? You are attending a sale of work] – it was real excitement round where I grew up.

Usually held in church halls or community centres with the different colours of tape lacquered onto the floor, there would be long bench tables filled, piled high – stappit fu – with every conceivable type of thing one could ever hope to put onto a shelf: Dog eared books, cracked china plates, LP records whose album covers had been scrawled with teenage graffiti, old dust choked computer monitors and small electrical items with copper wires dangerously exposed, paint splattered ornaments, engrained ash trays and so on. There was a huge amount of clothing, stacked high where nervous little ladies unable to see over would wonder about it all tumbling down to leave them crushed under a tonne of tops, skirts and sequined scarves. Then there were the chairs, curtains, televisions, welsh-dressers and gardening equipment held at the side for the mid-sale auction. And, of course, the big draw – the table of household sheets.

For me at that age, it was the toy bench that was obviously always going to be the main attraction. While the old folk were all about the heaving through piles of kitchen towels and bed linen, I was carefully picking through damp smelling cardboard boxes of cars and figures. It was truly exhilarating.

These boxes, full of used, broken and somewhat dated toys, to my mind, were treasure troves. If Willie Wonka had gone into the second-hand brick-a-brac business he would have found it hard to compete with the excitement I felt about a Jumble Sale Toy selection.

In amongst the My Little Ponies, Smurfs, Sylvanian (abandoned) Families and trains, invariably there would be Star Wars figures with limbs missing [these already damaged figures were invaluable in scene setting while playing out a particularly robust game in your bedroom – storm troopers lying with only one leg at the side of Yoda, light-saber drawn] or a Han Solo with his face chewed [simply incorporated into your play with the line, “Why Chewie! Why!”], chipped lead painted metal vehicles and an Action Man in just his blue y-fronts with his patented gripping hand clutching a revolver [as if they had made Have Had Better Meetings in the Office and Now Waiting Quietly In On The Wife Action Man], perhaps an E.T. with extending neck would be caught up in the string of a yo-yo, or there would be a slightly granulating rubber Boglin. A myriad of small, plastic things which were mostly given away free in cereal boxes would often be at the bottom. If you were lucky, a rummage to the sides of the box would yield a ball-bearing game. And if you were very lucky the game would be a portable pinball game. These pinball games were great.

If I went home with a Marvel annual from 1978 with a major comic strip of the Incredible Hulk in it and a word search only half completed, a mauled star wars figure and a pinball game with a space/robot theme then that Jumble Sale would live long in legend.

Kids these days would be all about going to jumble sales to get MP3’s to inject up their i-pods and happy slapping an old PlayStation 2.

I doubt they would care much about finding a Boglin.

Changed times.