Naughty things we did in childhood

You are a naughty lot!

My family owned a small farm, which had quite a big pit. My older brother decided to make a raft using some railway sleepers.
My two brothers and I, along with friends, used to sail round the pit, with frogs jumping aboard, and newts around.
Real Tom Sawyer stuff!
There were some bushes surrounding the pit, and we once decided to make some chips. Building a fire, and filching some lard from the kitchen, we nearly set the bushes on fire.
My parents were always busy on the farm and their business, they didn't realise half the things we got up to.

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I wanted something from the back of the garage - so I moved a pile of panes of glass that were going to be used in a cloche if I remember rightly.
Of course I forgot to put the glass back and when my dad got home he drove the car into the garage, right onto the glass and it cracked every single one of them! He was livid! I was babysitting down the road at the time and my mum came and told me what I'd done and not to come home for the next hour or so. I can't actually recall what happened when I got back home so my dad must have calmed down by then.

My friend and I dressed her toddler brother as a guy and pushed him round in an old pushchair to all the houses on the estate collecting pennies for the guy !! My mum was furious but his mum seemed to think it was a good way to raise funds !

My friend and I caught a couple of frogs and put them into the local letterbox!

I know sweets only came off ration in Feb 1953, and I wondered if that is why so many Gransnetters mentioned that they ‘helped themselves to them’ in local sweet shops. After no sweets for so long it must have been almost irresistible. (I was born after the rationing stopped So never experienced the hardship of rationing)

How precious

Oh Whingeingmum, that brought back a memory for me.
My mum also had a bottle of Chanel No5, that was precious. She used to put a couple of drops in her bath, so one day I thought I would do the same, and emptied the whole bottle in.
?

At the age of 11 I collected stamps and had to walk home from school through town before I could catch the bus home. One of the shops was Woolworth's and I would go through the store every day looking at the packets of stamps for sale. It was very easy to crumple up the cellophane packets in my hand and just leave without paying. One day the assistant spotted me and said I was not supposed to crumple them up in my hand. I never did it again but managed to build up my stamp collection.

I did a number a things myself as a child, I was far from perfect, but the thing I most remember was something my sister did. She had a large doll and she took it upstairs one day and when she had brought it down she had coloured it all over with a purple crayon, even the face. She is often reminded of it and she has no idea why she did it.

Where I lived as a child there was a lovely park opposite with a golf course to one side, which was separated by a little brook. My friends and I heard that if we retrieved golf balls from the park the golf club would give us money for every one that we retrieved. I told my parents and they said it was OK but we were not to go into the brook (my mother had had a brother who drowned in a river some years earlier). Of course, many of the balls were in the brook so we defied our parents and paddled in the water to get the balls. Yes, you guessed it, I fell over and got absolutely soaked. I never did it again, but of course couldn’t hide it from my parents!

When I was about 12, my mother sent me for some lyril soap. I’m afraid I stole two bars and kept the money.
I’m also a bit naughty now, if I’m playing scrabble with Orlin and get a Q late in the game and don’t have a U I have been known to palm it back in to the bag and pick another letter. Trouble is I then giggle uncontrollably and have to make up something funny to explain that.

My younger sister [by 14 months] was the really naughty one - I always got the blame for allowing her to do it - even when I wasn't there!
I still resent it.

Apple scrumping - I don't know anyone that grew up in our village that didn't do that in the farm orchard - found out many years later that the farmer was well aware of the fact it happened - apparently whenever he planted new trees closest to the road, he made sure they were either cooking apples or ones that ripened later in the year !
I also put a little knitted mouse in my pocket while at a friends house, fully meaning to give it back the next time I saw her but I was never asked to her house again and as she changed schools, I didn't really see her after that. I did post it through her letter box a few weeks later, with a note apologising though.
One of my friends was involved in "the great gate swap" - where they removed and swapped gates around the village after the annual village fete.(Much mead was drunk in the evening!) Funny thing was, some home owners never even noticed for months!

I asked my parents to sign a blank piece of paper at the bottom, which they did. I wrote a letter to my mother's friend above asking her not to come back to the house as we didn't like her or her children. I then added my own signature and posted it. Life was wonderful without her then one night I came back from school and my mother was waiting to greet me with the letter. Sounds bad for a 7 year old, but there were good reasons.

We went to a Victorian School, with lovely wooden floors - in which there was a trap door opening all screwed down. Over a couple of weeks we worked on these screws with screwdrivers we had brought in, as they were difficult to 'shift' and eventually got them all undone. The following day was picked for us all to go down there and have a look and we were all to bring torches etc so that we could have a look at what was down there...... Sadly that day, I was ill, so was mortified that I missed out, but they lifted it and all went down into the bowels of the school, and GOT CAUGHT!!!! There was a great hoo-ha about it, Headmistress who was one of those scary ones who walked around in a cape sent letters to the parents and got the parents in for a 'telling off' too!! I took my screwdriver home and thought myself very lucky!

The other thing I did was played 'dress up' with my Mum's Engagement Ring, went down to the nearby shops in her shoes and LOST it! OMG she was absolutely livid - fortunately some very kind man found it and handed it in to the Post Office and she got it back, but I really was not popular at all!

I was playing with a school-friend in the park near her house. We were five or six. We had both been forbidden to go on the roundabout - the kind you propelled yourselfl by standing with one foot up on it , holding onto the handles and running with your other foot on the ground. Remember those?

Some boys from our school got it going really fast and I scraped my ankle on the side of the roundabout.

It was bleeding, so we scrambled down to the burn (another strictly forbidden thing) and washed my ankle with our hankies.

Strangely enough, neither of our hawk-eyed mothers discovered either my scraped ankle or how I had come by it.

The local pet shop had bins of dogs biscuits etc. round the shop- all open. I stole a dog biscuit- just the one - for our neighbour's dog- we only had cats. My Mum found it when we got home & marched me straight back to the shop to return it & apologise. Looking back I am sure the man behind the counter was trying not to laugh! I never ever stole anything again.
We were naughty though. I was an only child but my best friend (still is!) lived opposite us & when we were about 8 or 9 we were allowed to ride our bikes 'round the block'. Needless to say we rode them to the local swing park, a big hill nearby & all over the place while pretending we had not gone any further than our block. Then Mum got a part time job when I was a bit older & I was allowed to stay at home alone or with same friend. We had every other child around in too though & as we got older boys too! We got very good at tidying up. Happy days!

I'm six years older than one of my brothers. When he was little, I used to take him into my bed and tell him a scary or a sad story to make him cry and then a happy story to stop his tears. Then I put him back in his own bed.

We lived in a small village and my best friend lived on the farm down the road. Every year her family made cider for the local community and the annual Harvest Festival which was a big deal back then.
Anyway, we knew the barrels were in the old tractor shed and decided at around 9 years old we needed to know why it made everyone we knew laugh so much when they drank it.
You can imagine the rest !

Our school playing fields were usually battered by wind across the Croal valley, in winter I used to write notes from my mother excusing me from games, she found out when I was 40+ and was furious! I was quite cunning, I bought a Basildon Bond writing pad and envelopes so they looked more authentic. My daughter, 40+, recently said that she and her friends wrote notes for each other!
In my late teens, 6th Form, a few friends and I worked on the packing line of a catalogue company, the orders would come through with address labels, we would pick the orders, pack and address them. The management decided they didn't need us and next Friday was our last day. The address labels often were duplicated or more so we mixed all the orders and sent random people odd things, eg a retired Colonel in Scotland got some snazzy lady's underwear.

We used to chase the ice cream van around the estate...we pestered the man for free ice creams, one day he lost it and chased my brother down the road with a rolled up newspaper ?

My mum had a treasured bottle of Chanel No 5 she had been given as a 21st birthday present, and it was only used for very special occasions and had stood in the box on her dressing table for several years.
I must have been about 3 years old, I opened the box and the bottled. It smelt wonderful so I proceeded to drink the lot. Mum was distraught and rang the doctor, thinking that I might be poisoned, to be advised that it was mainly comprised of alcohol and the worst that could happen would I would be drunk.
60 years later, I can still remember the taste.

My heinous crime was pinching a monkey nut from the greengrocer (no wonder we don’t have them anymore the number of us who pinched stuff from there). I was intrigued as to what they were and my mother would just say ‘no we don’t want those’ so on this particular day I pinched one to find out. The guilt was unbearable!

Granmajet l did a very similar thing, a group of 6 of us wanted to go to the radio one road show many years ago, one of the girls parents was very strict and wouldn't have entertained it but she was allowed to stay over at friends homes as long as a parent rang to confirm the arrangements, guess who, at 14 years old, got nominated to ring. Apparently l ended the conversation with 'thats great, thanks bye' her mum passed comment on it being the type of thing her daughter would say, with that my friend piped up 'her mums from Yorkshire they speak funny there' ? must be true, she let her go