WHEN you were young, exhibits at a museum were about distant eras, provoking your imagination about what it must have been like to wear a suit of armour or discover a mummy’s sarcophagus. Now it is a sign of growing old when items in a museum are simply things from your own past.

I first noticed it at the Transport Museum in Glasgow where versions of the first four cars I owned are fastened to the walls. Now even the toys I played with are in glass display cases at a museum in Motherwell. The publicity material for the new exhibition “The 1950s: Having It So Good!” at North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre describes it as for lovers of all things “kitsch and retro”.

So that’s what my childhood was I now know - kitsch and retro.

“I had that” I murmur as the toy display has a version of The Amazing Magic Robot, a stern-looking green plastic robot with one arm in the air and the other holding a metal pointer to pick out the answers to questions on the paper surrounding him. It was all done with magnets so the answer was always in the same position depending on the position of the question, so it took you about two minutes to crack the code. Still remember it though.

Muffin the Mule, who launched a thousand schoolboy jokes is also there - a white quadruped with a red saddle who would dance awkwardly around until you inevitably got his strings hopelessly tangled.

The fifties though, with plastics and mass production, were changing toys from what your parents had from their youth, which was usually metal soldiers and crudely carved wooden models. Airfix kits were introduced in 1952, Scrabble came out in 1953, and Corgi, with its flash windows and steering-wheels in cars, hit the market in 1956 to challenge the more sedate Dinky cars.

It’s not just about the children though. The curators in Motherwell have created tableaus of rooms from the fifties. The kitchen area has a Hotpoint with a wringer attached on the top. The cabinet has a large tin of National Dried Milk with its distinctive blue lettering. Used to drill holes in the empty tins, put string through them and use them as little clanking stilts.

Fitted kitchens, and kitchens with bright colours other than drab brown, were being marketed for householders with a bob or two to spend after the dull austerity of the Forties. Didn’t come cheap though. The exhibition includes an advertisement for the British fridge company Frigidaire. It now looks quite ridiculous. There is a drawing of a pompous man with a moustache showing a goggle-eyed woman how the fridge works while her husband looks on approvingly. However the price lists puts the average model at about £100. That’s a huge amount considering wages then. You can still get a basic fridge for that even now though wages are about 25 times higher.

The living room area has an early television with its tiny screen, and a record player in a veneered cabinet. That was hedging its bets, putting something modern in an old-style box. In fact the blue plastic Pifco clock on the mantelpiece stands out amongst the browns, but that’s what happened. Folk in the Fifties didn’t just throw out all their old furniture. Instead something modern was introduced a bit at a time, even if it meant a garish clash between the old and the new.

Fashionable dresses from the Fifties are on view at the exhibition which is open until the end of August. As an information board states: “Glamour replaced wartime austerity at the start of the decade. Narrow waistlines and full,wide skirts made women look feminine again.”

But we don’t want to get too nostalgic about the Fifties. A short film at the exhibition reminds you that Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain died in 1955. Yes, we were still hanging women back then. And the Great Smog of 1952 killed 4,000 people in London. After the War people were still inured to such large-scale mortality.

Sport is also mentioned with a display about the swimmers from Motherwell in the Fifties who competed in the Olympics and how the local water polo team from Motherwell was amongst the best teams in Europe. Now that’s a memorable fact, but if you spent your day in the heat of the neighbouring steel mills, water polo would have been blessed relief.

Ironically, North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre is actually built on the site of Motherwell’s baths where the water polo team would have trained in the Fifties. Quite a magnificent swimming pool it was too in the town centre near the railway station, but it closed in 1984 and demolished two years later.

There is something called the Aquatec in Motherwell now which will be all slides and flumes, and all good fun I’m sure. Not the same though.

North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre - it used to be simply Motherwell Heritage Centre but North Lanarkshire Council presumably wanted to give it the same clumsy name as itself - is out of sight up a side road. Worth looking for however. It has an odd concrete chimney sprouting out of its side which is actually stairs up to an outdoor viewing gallery that gives you vistas stretching for miles. This part of Lanarkshire is really quite flat and the contrasts between the old industrial areas and the lush green parklands are eye-catching.

There used to be a camera at the top and folk could direct it remotely to see points of interest. It was discontinued as too many folk used it to look in windows. That’s Motherwell for you.

So did it depress me to see my childhood in a museum? Not at all. Someone once wrote: “One is always at home in one’s past.” Not sure who said it though. Perhaps I should ask The Magic Robot.