Dear June 

Here are the toys I said I'd send down. 

The jigsaws are all 1960s vintage. As you can see some are related to TV
shows. They were owned by my grandmother and were presumably for her
granchildren to play with, though I certainly don't remember ever having
done so (she had about 30 or so grandchildren and a host of
great-grandchildren). The Enid Blighton one's box is in a sad state.

The exception is the wooden map of the British Isles. This dates to about
the 1940s I reckon.

The plastic toy soldiers are all from the 1970s. They were mine. There are 
a number of different sets: 
	Aussie WWII jungle troops 
	Japanese WWII jungle troops 
	British WWII desert troops (2 lots, green and brown plastic) 
	British WWII commando troops 
	Polish WWII troops 
	German WWII mountain troops 
	German WWII desert troops 
	German WWII European troops 
	US WWII GI troops 
	US WWII paratroopers 
	US Vietnam or Korean troops 

Plus a small selection of various cheapies (they are not so well formed
and don't stand up by themselves well, or at all sometimes). These are
mostly US WWII GIs.

There are also 2 US frontiers men (I think). 

How to play with them. 

Well, the whole "collecting" thing aside, there was the painting. As you
can see some of them have been painstakingly detailed. The paints were all
original military colours and the boxes these things came in told you
which one's use.

Unfortunately, unless you leave them under individual glass domes the
paint tends to chip off.

At one stage when I was about 8 or so my mother made a battlefield in
small in a certain section of out garden using bits of sandstone, other
rock, and cement (it as after all the era of rock gardens). I used to set
the soldiers up on this diorama and imagine battles. Though I was never
one for roleplaying out actual fights and tipping over soldiers with
appropriate dialogue (I don't know if other kids did this sort of stuff,
but I didn't).

One of the better games we played with these was to set them up on rocks
and shoot them off using medical syringes. One of the kids at school had a
father who was a doctor and so he had a tone of syringes to give away one
summer (No needles of course). These were mostly used for water fights,
but, we also used them for this shooting game. Much like the target
shooting computer arcade games except it was a bit more 3D. We had a
number of different sized syringes and these we pretended to correspond to
different calibre machine guns. The biggest bore syringe was of course the
.50 cal.

When they were all shot off, you'd set them up again. Didn't cost a cent.

This was before the days of Space Invaders, et. al. Beside which we didn't
have enough money for arcade games or the pinnies.

Later on we progressed to more expensive military model, as made by Tamiya
- soldiers, tanks, aeroplanes, battleships, etc. These were definitely
only for gluing together, painting and applying decals to. Too expensive
to play with and the plastic was more fragile, and the glue did not hold
under any stress.

Anyhow, I hope you can use them.