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How did we survive……
CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL MY FRIENDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE
1930's 1940's, 50's, 60's and early 70's !
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos...
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.
Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints.
We had no child proof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.
As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds , KFC, Subway or Nandos.
Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn't open on a Sunday, somehow we didn't starve to death!
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy Toffees, Gobstoppers, Bubble Gum and some bangers to blow up frogs with.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because......
WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O..K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with matchbox cars.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii , X-boxes, no video games at all, no 999 channels on SKY ,
no video/dvd films,
no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no
Lawsuits from these accidents.
Only girls had pierced ears!
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns at Easter time...
We were given air guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays,
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!
Mum didn't have to go to work to help dad make ends meet because we didn’t need to keep up with the Jones’s!
Not everyone made the Rugby/football/cricket/netball team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!! Getting into the team was based on
MERIT
Our teachers used to hit us with canes and gym shoes and throw the blackboard rubber at us if they thought we weren’t concentrating .
We can string sentences together and spell and have proper conversations because of a good, solid three R’s education.
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.
They actually sided with the law!
Our parents didn't invent stupid names for their kids like 'Kiora' and 'Blade' and 'Ridge' and 'Vanilla'
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO
DEAL WITH IT ALL !
And YOU are one of them!
CONGRATULATIONS!
You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.
And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.
PS -The big type is because your eyes are not too good at your age anymore
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Brilliant! I'm one of those - I also drank Tizer, ate Wagon Wheels and was always told to eat plenty of butter, because it was good for me. In the holidays I went off with my friends early morning, either to the beach or downs, and didn't return home until late afternoon. Those were the days!
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you are soooooo right we had friends played and lots of fresh air it was really good then
now the kids get bored [with all there games ]
and dont they just do your head in
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Nostalgia. Good Init.**M**.
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Marilyn I had a den down in Langdon Woods.Spent many a day down there with my friends.
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I think I've probably said it before, but I'll say it again.
Me and my sibs were born in the 50s (and one in the 60s).
I fell off a piece of dangerous playground equipment when I was seven. I spent three months in hospital. It was three months no child - no one - should ever have to experience, and it had a profound effect on me, and on the rest of my life. If anyone had ever sued the city over an accident on a playground, the city might have been more careful about its playground equipment, and my whole life might have been different.
My brother was doing that lovely, carefree childhood thing of bouncing on a bed. There's a reason parents (at least some) tell kids not to do that. He fell off and suffered a head injury that he could have died of. For another three months, he had to visit hospital three times a week to have the shunt drained. He should have been in hospital, but my mother decided to live with the worry (and the six bus rides, three times a week) because she couldn't live with another child going through what I went through.
My parents were born in the 30s. They spent their childhoods playing in the sun. My dad died of melanoma, and my mum has had so many skin cancers treated that she's lost count. My other brother has also had melanoma. He spent his summers outside every daylight hour. I spent mine reading books in the basement. ;)
We had a creek nearby. My brother and his friends spent a lot of time in it. One of his friends died as a young adult, of stomach cancer. The incidence of cancer in people who lived around that creek is statistically high. After we grew up and moved away, it was discovered that a factory had been discharging PCBs into the stream for years.
The principal of our school was an arrogant, nasty man. My brother sometimes got the strap at that man's whim. That was child abuse. It is not something to be glorified and to wax nostalgic about. It happened to real people like my brother, not characters in some idyllic children's book, and it was rotten.
Yes, kids don't play as much as they used to. They would be better off if they did.
Anybody who's concerned about it might consider unplugging their kids' computer and hiding their cell phones and electronic games and television remotes, and sending them outside.
And be grateful that someone somewhere did sue a municipality about dangerous playground equipment, so there's less chance your kids will ever go through the nightmare of spending three months in traction in a hospital bed, isolated from friends and family and school, like I did.
Oh. And.
I was one of the kids nobody picked for sports teams. I hated sports and was worse than lousy at them. But I also hated being the kid nobody wanted. Did somebody actually enjoy this? Why would it be a good thing that I and all the rest of us non-athletes got to feel like crap throughout school because we were different?
And newsflash.
A lot of women don't work "to help dad make ends meet" or to keep up with any Joneses, any more than men work to help mum make ends meet. A lot of women work because they're grown-ups who take responsibility, and because they enjoy living their own lives as grown-ups every bit as much as men do.
And glorifying the cage that women lived in when they were forced out of the workforce if they married (and all the rest of the economic inequality women "enjoyed") is just, well, dumb and unpleasant.
Oh. And.
The ones who actually did suffer ill effects because there were no childproof lids on medicines, and no seat belts in cars, and no lots of other things that we do to protect kids today -- well, funny how they're just not here to tell the tale of how great their childhood was. Because they're dead.
And the others who did suffer ill effects from things like their mothers drinking while pregnant, well, they just don't matter, I guess.
... I just keep noticing more nonsense. "Didn't get tested for cervical cancer"??? What, I should have just died of it? That's what happens when you don't get tested and treated for what they find, the wag who wrote that praise for bygone days might want to consider. Unbelievable.
Anybody know what lead poisoning does to children? Lead poisoning they often get from eating lead-based paint? (Many other sources, too, but that's one.) It's horrible. And interestingly, it's been statistically demonstrated that in areas where children are most exposed to lead, the rates of juvenile crime are higher ...
And speaking of cots: how awful that health and safety standards are now applied to the construction, so fewer children are strangled and suffocated in their own beds.
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I was going to say that we/they survived despite the freedom and the way we lived not because of. But Janey has said it for me. I burnt as a child as there was no suncream to speak of and we lived near the beach. So far I have had five rodent ulcers, so far non malignant thank goodness, at least three friends in my age group have had problems one with a malignant melanoma the others with rodent ulcers like me, so those who burnt and got as brown as berries with no protection are lucky if they have had no problems.
I don't like the compensation claim culture, I think it has gone too far the other way but in some cases it has proved beneficial. So maybe it should be curbed a little and somebody should be looking at the no win no fee guys.
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And how many children didn't live to regret not wearing a cycling helmet or being restrained in a car. And how many hitchhikers now regret doing so because they were raped, or are not alive to tell the tale.
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Ann, you have just reminded me .
Talking of suncream......do you know I used to put olive oil on my skin !!!! and sit on the beach sunbathing.
Now where was my mother when I did that ?
She must have known I had the olive oil , but thats what we all used to do ,OR did WE ????
Shudders about it now .......
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I do remember having some cream rubbed on my back and Shoulders before setting off to the beach.I don't know what it was.I did get burnt one or twice down on Wembury beach and then being plastered in Calamine lotion.Oh the relief !!! if only for a short while.I am far more careful now as I am quite moley.I did have one removed from under my eye years ago after I had been working in Greece and it started to grow.It wasn't malignant but was the type that could have turned.
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Hi Jane ,
Went on Wembury beach last night as Son had a BBQ and we nipped down while the sun was out , the car park was full , never ever seen it so packed.
I looked for your Den in Langdon woods ......but couldn't find it ..LOL
Did you enjoy your hols ..?
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My Den was down the bottom of the woods near the stream.I loved it.
Hols were lovely although our cottage was tiny.It was built in 1480 as a farm labourer's home.I sat there and tried to imagine all the families that had lived there over the centuries.Hard times for them I think.
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