Dear LPG readers, 

I would like to tell you a little story from my very distant past.  Like every other person who is now in their seventies or eighties, my brother and I when young, grew up in a world that appeared to be changing just as quickly as it is now.  The war had not long finished and people were just beginning to be influenced by the era’s mod cons.  I can remember the day that my dad came home with our first television, the installation of the telephone in our home, and then there was the car. 

It was a time when we had acquired so many new-fangled things, but weekends were still the days when the family spent a bit of time together. I suppose we were a pretty average family.  My mum worked in an office all week and dad was a mechanic who luckily knew a lot about what goes on in a car engine. 

You could say that having a phone at home brought us and friends together like never before but once the car materialised, there was no turning back.   Our family Saturday afternoons would often be an excuse to visit a family friend who we had not seen for ages because of the distance between our houses and, on the particular day that comes to mind, we were off to see Winston Harvey, an old friend of my father’s.   

But cars went wrong in those days as well, and I remember one day in the mid-1960s when we set out to see one of Dad’s old friends who lived a whole nine miles away from us in west London.   Armed with an address, my Dad’s driving prowess and with my mum in charge of his copy of the A to Z, we all piled into the car and set off.  It was not long before my mum started mentioning a funny little noise she could hear between her direction instructions.  In those days’ wives provided the advice asked for with an added but much smaller voice of reason than the wives of a decade later, and my Dad just told her that she was worrying about nothing until there was a loud bang.  He managed to get the car to the curb before we came to a complete standstill. 

It was not the brightest day in the calendar and I can see him now, in his suit under the car working out what had gone wrong.  In the meantime, my Mum and I left my brother handing him the necessary tools while we went off to make contact with those waiting for us at our intended destination.  There were no mobile phones at the time but we did have that not-to-be-forgotten mod con the telephone box to fall back on and they too came equipped with that ever important forerunner of the contact list; I am talking about the four volumes of the telephone directory which hung upside-down in the box.   

All you needed was the Surname and initial of the person you wanted to phone and you were in business.  So we swivelled the E-K volume up and started the search.   There were lots of Harvey’s and we got to the ‘W’s quickly enough but the address was the problem, it was nowhere to be seen in the list.   

After about half an hour, we finally found the right number but it was listed under N Harvey which was both a good and a bad thing.  Good, because it gave the car fixers plenty of time to complete the job, but bad, because the look of his suit and all the extra time my Dad had been afforded to think about the mishaps of the day, while waiting for our return, left him in a particularly bad mood while my Mother and I could not help but smile at the state of it.   We eventually got where we were going and a lot of the evening was spent listening to the reasons why Mr Harvey had unofficially changed his initial. Needless to say that we now see him in a completely different light. 

It turned out that my Dad’s close friend Winston (that he had known for years because they worked together) was not the biggest fan of the name Newton; the name that his parents chose for him, and decided to be known by his middle name.   

We can’t blame Mr. Harvey for the state of that suit but his dislike of his first name gave my Dad a lot more time than he really needed to get really mad about the state of it on the day. 

Perhaps the moral of this story is that your chosen name is one of the first things that your parents give you.  It goes on all your official records, while not being a fan of it can cause all sorts of issues…  

EK, Crofton Park,