WAY BACK in the mists of time, when Beggarsdale still had a village school because parents could afford to have children instead of both working to pay off huge mortgages, a war-hero teacher once had his class laughing with a strange tale.

He had been wounded in the Battle of Britain as an RAF fighter pilot and invalided out but he was one of a rare breed, a man who had been a pilot before World War Two.

And once, whilst a new British bomber was being presented to a crowd of overseas businessmen on the tarmac at an air show, someone opened the bomb bay doors - and a Japanese engineer fell to the tarmac with a resounding thump. He was, you see, a spy trying to steal the latest RAF secrets.

As children, we all laughed at this story because at the time it was told, in the late 1940s, Japan was notorious for producing cheap and nasty goods like toys which rarely worked and, if they did, fell to bits in a matter of days.

We wouldn't laugh today, would we, now that the Land of the Rising Sun is the world's leading producer of hi-tech quality goods having killed off shipping, motor-cycles and cars as staple British exports?

Now, a reader may well ask, what on earth has that got to do with country life in Beggarsdale. So I must tell you the tale of the new gizmo at Curmudgeon Corner, to whit a water pressure washer which we got as a bargain in Mar'ton 'cos the Curmudgeonlets had given me some birthday gift vouchers from the DIY store.

There were good reasons for this purchase. It will clean up the green algae which flourishes on the flags in the back yard, making them lethally slippery after a long wet winter. In the past, we have used chemicals for such a task - but Mrs C is into a green phase and doesn't like poisons leaching into her plants.

It would also making cleaning the car pretty easy, I reckoned, as I forked out the extra cash to take the purchase price up to £70. I was also reckoning at the time, you see, that the damn thing would work.

We tried and tried and tried again, but every time we switched on the power, the hose shot off its connection and sprayed the both of us with near-freezing water.

Now, like many gardeners over the years, we have bought several trillion hose fittings for various lengths and sizes of hose. But most of them are incompatible because we are the family that bought a Betamax video before it was killed off by VHS (ask the kiddies, grown-ups).

Without being too clinical about it, the .. er male bits never fitted into the ..er.. female bits and so join two bits of hose together. But Mrs C, who is the technician in this house, has saved every last little clip and socket and washer saying that, one day, they would come in useful.

And they did. Because, you see, the problem was that our power washer was made in China. And its, er, male bit, wouldn't fit tightly into our English, er, female bit. But one of our long-discarded leftovers snuggled up nice and tight to both.

And this is what brought the old war-hero teacher to mind. Our £70 gizmo was let down by a tiny piece of plastic which, in China, probably cost less than a penny to make. To use a phrase from the time when we Brits were good at making things, the ship was in danger for a ha'peth of tar.

I am sure by now that those wily Orientals have recognised this problem and put it right, which the Japanese began to do 50 years ago.

What will happen to our industry, what's left of it, when China gets its quality control right and becomes the biggest manufacturer in the world, God only knows.