Muriel

After another breakfast-with-a-view in a sunny Sheffield garden, we took flight, smiling for a last time at the artwork on the road below us. I got curious: when and how did this strange pottery decoration become such a loaded cultural icon? I'm grateful to a New Zealand blogger called Moata Tamaira who got there before me and compiled a neat summary

To begin with Hilda Ogden...

"I’ve come in here more times than I care to remember. Cold. Wet. Bone tired. Not a penny in me purse. And seeing them ducks and that muriel… well they’ve kept me hand away from t' gas tap. And that’s a fact." Coronation Street, 1987

By that time, the ducks had been appearing on the fictional Ogdens' wall for 11 years, a tragi-comic symbol of working-class aspiration to achieve a middle-class lifestyle that the contemporary middle class already, in 1976, regarded as passé and embarrassing

In that year, I was a bearded, long-haired student in bell-bottom jeans, and that would certainly have been my view. But did they actually feature on a wall in my childhood, as I feel they did - or have I reconstructed the memory from not only the Street, but other dramas of the time that used them as a convenient cultural shorthand?

The Beswick pottery company - the same people who made Beatrix Potter animals - began manufacturing wall-mountable pottery mallards, in five different sizes, in Stoke-on-Trent, in 1938. Other birds were available but, for some reason, it was the mallards that were wildly successful. Sales took off (sorry) after the end of the war when, when in an age of austerity, these were an affordable way to decorate the walls of the post-war housing boom

I wonder when a cheerful bit of trivia tipped over into being such a powerful symbol of limited vision and thwarted ambition. I don't think it's fair to pin that on Hilda; I think the serial was exploiting an already existing understanding of just what it meant to still have ducks on your wall. My money is on that legendary Larkin moment between the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP, when the children of those post-war new home owners began to doubt, question and despair of the country their war-weary parents had settled for, and declared beyond doubt that the times were a-changin'