Before heading off to the Lucky Country my brother donated his bike - our prefab's one and only bike! - to the noble charitable cause of Don 'the angler' Protter's two kids who live in a plush council house up in Downie Combe.
In the heroic early post-war years generous acts such as this had been commonplace. The
Protters were themselves a case in point. On coming across a chap whose luck had run out and whose kitchen cupboard was almost bare and Spam-less they used one of their free British Railways travel passes to take him with them on a day trip to Dawlish in glorious Devon. He was even treated to a half pint of stout and a ham and tomato sandwich in The Black Horse public house!
By the late nineteen fifties a spirit of possessive individualism had begun to reach its furtive way into fraternal enclaves of Downie Combe. Today there is even a campaign to have it twinned with Lookafternumberoneville. The donation of our prefab's one and only bike to a council house in one of the sleeker reaches of Downie Combe is being seen as an archaic gesture from a bygone knightly age. Downie Combe is a cultural weather vane of the nation. This is where scores of once modest earth-bound one wage caterpillar households have awoken to find they have brightly-decorated two-wage butterfly wings. They are itching to leave their old earth-bound buddies a long way behind.
Recently Don 'the angler' Protter stopped me in the street and issued a warning against making
charitable contributions to causes which are other than one's own. Then he paused for a moment to brag that he had never been drunk in front of his kids. (In contrast - so the potentially slanderous allegation went - to you know who).
Don 'the angler' Protter's remark was uncannily emblematic of the cultural transformation that was to come.