To no particular purpose, I found myself thinking the other day of some of the brands I have known since childhood. To my surprise, a good many of them are still around, a tribute to their durability in an era in which many artifacts hardly live up to their vaunted billing and many more are as evanescent as rainbow gold.
The house in Kabba was full of brands.
Dad drove a Mercury V8 sedan, shaved with Gillette razor blades, wrote his journal entries in Lett’s Desk Diary with a Parker 51 fountain pen with a ceramic cobalt-blue barrel and a gold clip that used only Quink ink, squirted Peak milk into his occasional afternoon cup brewed from original Lipton tea leaves that came in a yellow can, sweetened it with Tate and Lyle sugar, did his official correspondence on a portable Remington typewriter, followed world and local news on a Bush radio powered first by Exide car battery and later by a bulky Berec battery pack, and litup the family lounge at night with a Tilley gas lamp.
Fuel for the car and for Dad’s trucking business came, first, in 44-gallon steel drums, and later from the Mobil filling station, the only one in town. Sunflower Kerosene came in squat tin receptacles holding four imperial gallons.
Back then, the BSA motorcycle was a big status symbol, even if it came with a single ‘silencer’. The double-silencer model was capital. Even a Raleigh or Rudge bicycle got you some attention.
I cannot recall when I last saw or used Tate and Lyle’s cubed sugar. It dissolved far too slowly, but that was no accident, I would gather some decades later. The manufacturers had taken into account the tropical clime in which it was marketed. If it did not stand up to the moist and damp air, it turned deliquescent and messy. The British were ever so thoughtful.
Not so the French. They made their St Louis cubed sugar dissolve almost in an instant, and it soon supplanted the British brand.
I used to gaze with envy at two older brothers holidaying from high school as they spread Blue Band margarine on boiled yam at breakfast or lunch.
Star beer was the beverage of entertainment; in fact it was synonymous with beer, and its pitch man was the delightful cartoon character Sammy Sparkle, who thought nothing of stopping cricket matches because it was time for Star. They said the beer went well with Bicycle cigarette.
Talking of beverages: In the beginning there was Krola, which looked and tasted like what would later enter the market as Coca cola. From a distance, Guinness Stout, with its dark like Kola could well have been another name for that line of beverage was just another name and would taste just the same.
One day I pilfered a half-pint bottle from a crate Dad kept in a store for his visitors from out of town. Unable to open it, I drove into the crown a sharp iron stake, the type the women of the house used for checking whether the yam in the huge cast-iron kettle that stood on three legs was ready for pounding.
As its content burst forth in a foaming cascade, I seized the bottle with both hands and took a mouthful. It tasted like cascara sagrada, a popular purgative in those days that was almost as repellent as liquid quinine. I spilled it out immediately. Since then I have not touched Guinness Stout.
Ovaltine was far and away the favourite family beverage, with or without milk and sugar. Surreptitiously shoveling heaps of the brown powder into the mouth was always a delightful even if illicit and hence punishable pleasure. Nescafe has been just as durable.
Remember Trebor peppermints? Whether rectangular or round, it kept your throat agreeably tingled, and freshened your mouth and your breath. I haven’t checked them out lately but they were in the market up to several years ago, handed out to shoppers in place of small change the paper currency could not accommodate.
Good old Vaseline must be one of the most durable ointments ever manufactured. Usually standing on the shelf beside it was Mentholatum in the white and blue container that looked like a snuff box. It was balm you used for almost every purpose. Thermogene, in the white and red snuff box, was for external use only.
If you bruised or sprained your knee or ankle, there was always Dr Sloan’s liniment, bearing Dr Sloan’s lean, mustachioed visage on the pack in which the bottle came and on the bottle itself. Are you by any chance reading this, Professor Remi Olatunbosun, alumnus of Igbobi, formerly of the University of Lagos, and most recently of the University of Birmingham?
Talking of medications, there was the analgesic of first resort, APC, which the former first lady Patience Faka Jonathan, having regard to the contemporary political formation of the same name, dismissed as an expired drug? In the event, what expired was the debauched kleptocracy over which her husband gleefully presided.
For tough laundry jobs, there was Key soap, which came in long bars. More delicate laundry called for Sunlight, which came in tablets as did the pinkish toilet soap Lifebuoy. I haven’t seen Sunlight soap in a long time, but Lifebuoy is alive and well. I recall buying a tablet from a supermarket in the United States last summer, more from nostalgia than from pressing need.
If you wanted to add some sparkle to white fabrics, you soaked them in water containing a pinch of Robin Blue (aquamarine), rinsed gently, and put them out to dry. The stuff is still very much around.
If you wanted your skin to be as lustrous as that of eight of every ten film stars who regularly used it, then Lux toilet soap was your brand, though I had no idea who a film star was. Lux is still on the supermarket shelf. Is Pepsodent still there? It was the toothpaste you graduated to after dispensing with your chewing stick. Yardley’s was the obligatory face powder for men.,
The first men’s designer shirt I recall noting was Aristocrat. Later came Rael Brook and Arrow and Double 2 and Van Heusen, made by the finest European clothiers. Of these, only Arrow and Van Heusen are still highly visible in the stores, but they are more likely to have been made in the sweatshops of Thailand or Vietnam or Pakistan.
Cecil Gee leather shoes with two-inch high crepe soles were à la mode. Does anyone still wear them? Then there was the quiet elegance of Clarks sandals, of which the quintessence was perhaps the Cross sandals.
Even today, we still think of Afghanistan as a remote, inaccessible place that might as well be on the other side of the moon. But it existed back then in our daily life through the indelible ink Kandahar, probably made in that city, now a metaphor for the mayhem that always places that country in the news focus for the wrong reasons.
Asepso, the tablet soap containing mercury iodide, was a favourite among those bleaching the skin or those who wanted to make their faces picture-perfect. Lather it on to the face, leave for several minutes, then wash it off, and you got the desired result. If you let the lather stay on the fact for too long it could turn your face into a puffy mess.
The Singer sewing machine has run the entire gamut from manual to electric and to electronic, apparently without compromising whatever it was that made the brand synonymous with sewing.
Back then, Hoover used to be the first and last thing, indeed the only thing, in vacuum cleaning. So much so that one of the officials of the Abacha regime grew up bearing that name, on account of his predilection for gobbling up every good thing in his sight.
He was the original obtainer.
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