Do you remember calling for your friends to come out to play? What did you do??

Playing Cowboys and Indians in the Bluebell woods. Hopscot h, skipping and my favourite, my whip and top. Really enjoyed chalking designs on the top.

I lived out in the country, so no, never called on friends to come out and play, as they all lived in the village too far away to walk to when I was young.
And back then, parents didn’t seem to exist as a taxi service for their offspring. Well, mine didn’t anyway.

My daughter’s nine and she and her friends all play out. In the nicer weather they all troop off over the field behind us and play - we might not be able to always see them, but we can hear them as one of them is very loud!

Across the road from us is a new estate and the children play out there too.

We do organise play dates, but as we are rural my daughter’s friends come from many local villages and towns. For example, her best friend is from a town five miles away; another lives about three miles away deeper into the countryside and has no opportunity to play out as there house is quite remote.

I lived in the country and me and my best friend and her lovely dog used to walk for miles and miles, this was when we were 13 or so, and talk and talk.

I lived on a tough estate by the seaside and we seemed to spend most of the summer on the beach.We would take down old tires to play with in the sea and white sugar sandwiches. Don't know what my mum was thinking with food ! Out all day without a care and told to come home before the street lights came on. Often we would wade through the golf links looking for stray balls which you would be given sixpence for at the golf house. Also the place to find frogs and crested newts,think they are an endangered species now.
Funny how you look back and think it was so idyllic. But still remember the many accidents . I fell and broke my arm, my brothers had cracked heads and multiple cuts. The sadness of a child from the estate drowning at sea and the head of our primary school telling us not to eat the oysters as they were polluted. Funny how the town has now become famous for its oysters !

Sadly from what I can see they have 'playdates' nothing spontaneous - it's all arranged between the parents whentheir children are going to play with each other at one of the houses. Everything else is a no no. Can you imagine todays children being allowed out to play during the war. What fun we had. If a bomb was going to get you there was no avoiding it.

Yes! In our street, all the kids would stand at the end of the path, or at the front gate, and just yell out the child's name who they wanted to come out to play. If nobody came out after a few minutes, they'd move up the street to another friend's house and do the same. It was exciting to be in your house and hear a friend calling your name, then ask your parents if you could go, and rush to put your shoes on!

I played lots of these old fashioned games and pastimes with my grandchildren who thought I was genius to 'think them up' and played for hours?

Played in the street, the woods with stream running through it, and the pit bing! The street had a bus, baker and butcher van and a very rare car travel on it. The most memorable is the ice cream man with his horse. The woods had sloping grassy areas used for running or rolling down aiming to stop before ending in the stream. The pit bing was like mountaineering up for the great slide down. Could never deny being on the bing as my rear end was covered in black dust. Now kids beside me have to have the school bus come along little windy streets to collect them as parents complained the treasures got wet walking 500 yds to the end of the estate to the official bus stop. Currently live on the edge of a woodland park, no children allowed to go on their own to play for fear of predators. Yes,they do call on one another to play- on their illegal electric scooters!

BigBertha1

We used to play on the 2 bomb sites in our road - ah happy days. NOT!!!

But you probably thought at the time these are happy days. Getting older and more 'sensible' can be a bit boring! We used to go off for the day, went 'miles away' but I now see that we were never more than 300 yards from home.

nananet01

I played lots of these old fashioned games and pastimes with my grandchildren who thought I was genius to 'think them up' and played for hours?

I recall my mother and her sister chalking a hop scotch grip on the drive and demonstrating the game to my astonished children, they'd never seen their grandma and auntie hop around.
Did anyone else take new babies out for a walk in their pram? Their mothers were grateful for a half hour of peace, we fought, metaphorically speaking, for the honour of taking the twins out, such a thrill to have a double Silver Cross to push. Looking at the other websites you're not allowed to even look at a new baby these days.

Sadly from what I can see they have 'playdates' nothing spontaneous

Children don't seem to be allowed to do anything in their lives without parental intervention, the more intervention the better their parenting apparently. My grandchildren are quite happy to play with jigsaws, lego etc but when their father arrives he has to take over to show what a good Dad he is. Sad really.

We tended to meet up in a certain place - either in the park around the corner or in one of the fields pre foot and mouth.
The one time I can remember calling for a friend, I got bitten by their German Shepherd and spending the rest of the afternoon at the GP's surgery!

School holidays were brill. Hide and seek, up to the river with your net to collect sticklebacks, hopscotch and skipping with a massive rope that 3 of you were jumping at the same time. Mum used to make jam sandwiches for us and we were away all day, up in the fields playing, no parents watching over us. I remember when I got roller skates, the falls I had and just running in to get a plaster on a cut knee and away out doing it again. Fab times.

Traffic, activity and social lives organised with military precision, fear of paedophiles, both parents working and children institutionalised until 6pm are all factors that have put paid to that for many children today.

Salt Vinegar Mustard and Pepper" we used to say when jumping "double time" in skipping. Children were much fitter then. They miss such a lot these days

We always played out in the street and sometimes in the back field. There was a stream at the bottom of the field where we used to go 'jumping brooks. This entailed jumping from a high point on one side to a lower one at the other, We were always in search of new jumping places. In the street we played 'farmer, farmer, may I cross your golden bridge'. The second line was 'not unless you have a certain colour', then 'what colour?'. All those not wearing that colour had to try and run across without being caught. Lots of other games too. Happy, happy days.

We lived in a village right by the sea and had a guesthouse, my brother and I had to do chores in the mornings but after that we hopped over the wall down the fields and spent most of the day on the beach with a bottle of squash we were about ten and eight at the time and completely unsupervised, used to go swimming, .....

It was an indyllic childhood.... also my best friend and I used to ring the operator(when you had to put pennies in and press button A or button B!) and sing the latest pop songs down the phone to her and they used love it.....??

I grew up in a ‘rural’ area sandwiched between Leeds and Bradford. We spent our days roaming the countryside, fishing in the local beck which we traced back to its source - an industrial slag heap, catching tadpoles, climbing trees, collecting lost golf balls from the local golf course and selling them back to the golfers. One friend lived on a farm and we used to bring in the herd of diary cows for milking when we were about 8 and make dens in the hay bales, lucky to be alive really. Our GCs don’t play with their neighbours, they have play dates with parentally selected school friends.

Brought up in post-war Coventry we used to play on bomb sites. But we called them the bombuildings - all one word. Probably very dangerous but no health and safety then.

I wish my DD had the freedom I had as a child. Our gang walked miles over hills and through woods with our sandwiches and bottles of water or squash, as we’d be gone for the day. It was safer then.
Climbing trees, making dens and playing hide and seek in the ferns/bracken.
We usually made a dam in the little river to make it just deep enough to swim in or if we couldn’t be bothered to do that we’d swim in a little lake that was a little further afield.
The football field had a steep bank to one side of it and we would collect cardboard boxes and open them up and slide down it.
Sometimes we would just sit in the fields and make daisy/buttercup chains and just chat about things or just lay back and enjoy the sunshine on your face. I can still remember the smell of the fields it was an earthy, floral, fruity kind of smell. Butterflies and bees were busy visiting the flowers and the sound of grasshoppers filled the air. The summers were never ending then.
Looking back my childhood was idyllic. Such lovely , chilled days with not a care in the world.

I lived in a block of flats, not high, ground and two more stories, 3 blocks. They had some grass areas around and two air raid shelpters left from the war, These were locked but raised and made hills, which we could run up and down. A long drive way for cars went the length of the estate and at the back were garages. Children mostly came out and joined in with each other. It could be a group of 10 or so of various ages. I did have one best friend, a girl my age.

My 11 year old granddaughter telephones or texts her friends to meet on the park now.

Such happy memories of good childhood. We played all the usual games but spent
hours in the back yards,with our dresses tucked into our knickers doing handstands against the wall.If we were feeling a bit braver we also tried a handstand to end up in the crab position and then tried to walk.

Yes, all those WW. I remember taking a bottle of water with me for a whole day at the park with my friends, we came home when the water had run out!