By Mark Green

Last updated at 14:36, Friday, 16 December 2011

Christmas is for kids right? Ask anyone to recall a favourite festive time and they’ll dive into their bran tub of memories and pull out something to do with a sparkly tree and a big box wrapped in colourful paper.

Tommy and Trevor Mattinson

And inside that box...

It used to be so much more fun then.

Up at the crack of an unearthly hour, unwrapping presents in a blizzard of shredded paper, beating your mam and dad and brother and sister at all the games in the morning, then the afternoon spent stuffing your face with selection boxes as you read the annuals.

For most of us, these are glittering days long gone, but two Cumbrian brothers refuse to let go of their past.

World champion gurner Tommy Mattinson and his older brother Trevor have done the impossible and have steadily recovered their lost youth.

They are spending a small fortune recreating those lost days – by collecting the toys and games of their childhoods.

They fizz like a bottle of pop on a picnic talking about them, as scores of memories bubble up.

They bat the bygones back and forth, remembering little bits, extra bits – all the bits – until the bygones are no longer gone, but are alive and here in the room.

And that’s the whole point of the daft pleasure of collecting the past.

Making all that carefree and careless fun come back to life.

Their shared memories of Christmas and the toys they used to play are relived again and again as they fire up an old tin plate helicopter, play with boxing puppets, fire sucker darts at Tom & Jerry and try yet again to win at Crossfire.

Glow-in-the-dark Frankenstein models, football games, cars and trucks, slide projectors and board games.

A selection – just a small amount – are ranged across the kitchen table in Tommy’s beautifully kept home in Aspatria, ready for the photographer.

There’s more toys and annuals in his shed and loft and Trevor has even more.

He has gone beyond just collecting the toys and books of all his childhood Christmasses.

A natural born hoarder, he has his own mini-museum of toys, gadgets and cars and, well, just about anything.

It’s all kept in a barn near Aspatria and you need a special invite to see it.

Back in Tommy’s living room there’s a Crossfire game – a hardboard pitch with a plastic gun at either end behind a bent wire goal that fires ballbearings at a puck.

The idea is to blast the puck through the opponent’s goal to score. Both men agree that was the best toy of all when they were young.

It is big brother Trevor, 53, who takes centre stage with his encyclopaedic memory of which toy was bought which year and for how much – down to the last pence.

“People say Crossfire did not live up to expectation, but it exceeded ours!” insists Trevor of Oughterside.

“It is absolutely the best game we have ever had.

“It was the big present of 1973, it was £3.15 and I was 15. Young lads these days, they don’t play with toys, but I thought that was fantastic.”

“In them days it was a big present, a big main present,” adds Tommy.

“It was a huge thing wrapped up.”

Tommy, 50, reckons the Crossfire game sitting in his living room cost him “around £30 quid” off eBay.

Finding the toys has become a lot easier thanks to the internet.

“We have nearly got everything we used to have as games,” says Tommy.

Youngest brother Gordon also has his own stash of toys – but he couldn’t get time off work to come and play today.

Mention boyhood games and Tommy launches into a breathless catalogue of memories of favourite games.

His collection started a couple of years ago when he found a long-lost target game on eBay.

“There was this Tom & Jerry one, we loved it,” he explains.

“I decided to look for it and spent ages before I found it. I knew I would never see another one, so I put a bid in for £100 for it to make sure I got it. I eventually got it for a fiver.

“I’ve looked for it again and I’ve never seen it since.

“But whoever had it before, they wrote their scores on the box and now it seems like it was always ours and they were our scores.

“We used to play with our toys until they broke. The idea of collecting them all again was to get all the things we had lost or broken. We loved anything we could play, anything with a competitive edge, with three brothers, we were always in competition,” explains Trevor.

“We were all very competitive and very close as brothers and absolutely fanatical about playing games. That was Christmas for us.”

“We just loved toys so much, that was the thing, and it has never altered to this day,” adds Tommy.

“Another favourite game for us was the football game Striker, it was wonderful, better than Subbuteo,” says Trevor.

“Oh aye,” agrees Tommy, “You pushed his head and the player kicked the ball, not like Subbuteo where you had to push to kick.”

Trevor smiles: “With me it was all about playing the games. With Tommy it was all about winning.”

Tommy is known across the globe as the World Champion gurner, but long before he claimed that honour, he had another, more important title as a youngster: Tommy the Tester.

He’d be the one who would be fired at to see if the rubber suckers stuck after being fired from a gun or a bow, he would say if the electric shock was strong or not...

Trevor dissolves into tears of laughter as he bubbles up stories of innocent torture.

Tommy’s face moves from shock to sorrow to a full-beam grin as he listens.

The presents would be loaded into pillow cases for the three brothers and three sisters by mam and dad Mattinson, Jean and Gordon and hung at the end of the beds.

“And we would have long socks full of sweets and a tangerine and loads of nuts,” says Tommy.

“We used to wake up around 1am and open the presents in the early hours of the morning.

“As soon as one of us opened our eyes, we would wake each other and say ‘Santa’s been!’

“We would be in full swing by five in the morning, playing with all our toys in the bedroom!”

The power of Christmas was so strong that the two boys had their own ways of making it last all year long.

Tommy tied a scrap of tinsel round the curtain rail: “I would leave it there throughout the year, it was a little bit of Christmas.”

Trevor taped the still silence of Christmas Eve.

“He would get his tape player out later in the year, press ‘play’ and there would be silence. ‘That’s Christmas night’ he would tell us,” grins Tommy.

“Christmas was so big, such a big event – there was the build-up, not just Christmas itself.

“There was Halloween and Bonfire Night, but it all led up to Christmas.”

The question ‘what did they like best about Christmas?’ is an easy one for both men.

They’re asked separately, in different rooms, but the answer is just the same and comes without too much thought.

“Just Christmas Eve, really,” shrugs Trevor.

“Christmas Eve – for the anticipation of Father Christmas coming,” grins his younger brother.

Best of all, Tommy has just learned that he’s going to be a granddad in a few months (or Pops as he wants to be known) and Trevor will be a great uncle.

So the two big daft lads will have a new generation to play with their cherished toys of yesteryear and to be a member of their old games gang.

“ Oh aye, can’t wait!” says Tommy.

First published at 14:07, Friday, 16 December 2011
Published by http://www.cumberlandnews.co.uk