Stuff you did as a child that wouldn’t be contemplated now

I travelled from Birmingham to Plymouth by train at the age of 9 . I was met the other end by my uncle.
My parents never had a car so we have been brought up with public transport . Nowadays it is rare that a child even knows how to hail a bus - hence posters at some bus stops

I was talking to a friend. She remembers, at the age of 6 being pu on a train, in the charge of the guard, who looked after her until she reached her destination, where she was met by her grandmother. The journey was something like London to Portsmouth and she sat in the guards van with the guard aand throughly enjoyed the journey.

Are there some converses though? As a child I was castigated for kissing our pets. Nowadays you see it often on Youtube etc. in quite extreme form. And I still do it.

When I was about 9 I used to play on the railway line and down by the canal. Playing on the railway line was stopped as soon as my mother found out about it, but she never did find out about the canal. When I went to grammar school I had a three mile journey home, which I could do in a variety of ways involving bus or train or walking. Once I had left school my mother would never know where I was, or what route I had taken until I turned up at home.

My experiences were just like everyone else’s. But it wasn’t all wonderful. My younger brother and his friends were approached by a man who took them to a den he said he had built. My brother came home but I’m not sure if his friend was assaulted because I remember the police coming to our house. In a separate incident a 9-year old boy drowned when he was pushed into a canal because he couldn’t swim. But generally we were ok and this type of childhood made us more resilient than today’s children.

Bus to school everyday on my own and playing out with other kids all day. Going butterfly collecting on derelict land next to the railway and sewage works.

Like others, I was put in charge of my sister, and took her to and from school at the age of 7 (me) and 5 (her). My mum had just had my brother, or I assume she would have carried on taking us, but still. I was also sent for 'messages' to the corner shop, and expected to know what to get if things on the list were unavailable, and to hold my baby brother on my lap on car journeys (there were no seatbelts).

We'd be sent out to play, with instructions not to go beyond certain streets, but of course we did, as streets don't make interesting playgrounds but woods do. When I was a bit older I had to take my sister with me to a large municipal park. Maybe we were 9 and 7. The only instructions were to be nice to her, not to talk to 'strange men' and to be home before dark.

Oh, and the 'messages' would often include getting my father's cigarettes , and knowing the right substitutions if the Gold Leaf ones he liked were out of stock, which was rare.

When I was about 6 we lived in Carlisle, which gets dark in winter a lot faster than it does further south. I would be sent out, after dark, to go down to the bakery on the corner and buy bread for tea. it wasn't far, and there were no roads to cross, but a 6 year old, running errands after dark these days? My mother would be have social services on her like a ton of bricks.

Going places alone by bus or by train or in charge of my sister was quite usual. Our long group treks via slag heaps to climb and a canal to cool your feet when we were around 8-9, were stopped when a boy was attacked near where we walked.
I remember well walking babies though.
My friend and I would each collect a neighbour’s baby and promenade the prams along the local poolside, pretending to be mums. We fooled no one but ourselves, but it was great fun.
More simple -playing Kerb. Trying to get the ball to hit exactly the right angle to bounce back to you. Roads are generally too busy now, but I did see some lads trying it in a curl-de-sac near work.

Squiffy, when no more than 6 or 7 I used to take the bus about 3 miles to school - with a fairly long walk at the home end, too.

One day I missed my usual bus home (dawdling) and didn’t realise that there’d be another if I waited, so I began the long walk home, stopping to look in the pet shop I’d passed so many times on the bus.

My poor mother was frantic! IIRC she’d been on to the police already.

Kate1949

I walked miles to school, walked home for dinner and back to school. One thing I find unimaginable now is that my friend and me used to knock on people's doors and ask if we could take their babies out. The mums would put the babies in the pram and off we'd go for the afternoon. Some of them had never set eyes on us before. I cringe when I think about it now.

I remember children coming to my door when I had my first baby,wanting to take her out in her pram, I always said she was asleep or was being fed, I remember during school holidays going off on our bikes, having picnics, making fires to put potatoes in till they were black, then eating them, parents would never allow their children to do that now..

A friend and I travelled on the North London line on a Saturday we were 8 or so at the time. We both liked Richmond and wandered about. We also pushed various babies around our local area. Parents seemingly not worried. We all walked to school, if you missed the crowd you walked alone. My brother and friends were out on their bikes from an early age.

I collected stamps and postcards and spent my wet weather days doing that or painting kids wouldn’t do that now would they
I did go on the town bus to school alone from 7 onwards about 3 miles other than that I didn’t do much different except being an only child I didn’t have the excitement of playing out till I was 7 when we moved to a prefab on a council estate and loved that although I did go to a different school to all the other kids so was not really in the ‘in crowd’ but they put up with me so it was better than nothing
However I didn’t ‘find my voice’ till I was much older

Another aspect of this thread is how we all managed to amuse/entertain ourselves without, of course, screens, they were light years down the line and children's tv was very sparse. So it was outdoor activities, the making of dens. I lived near a pond so, vegetation, bushes and low hanging branches of Weeping Willows were a great help. Other pursuits, lots of time spent in the recreation ground of a nearby park, bike riding roller skating. Pocket money was spent on trips to the local swimming pool, Saturday morning children's cinema. I ordered my favourite books (Enid Blyton) from my library, always delighted when the post card came through the door to advise my book was ready for collection. Cut out paper dolls was a favourite indoor amusement, those would keep me entertained for hours. I remember aged about 10, a friend and I got the train a couple of stops along from our town, to a local beauty spot, Box Hill practically a mountain where I came from and spent all morning climbing to the top, where there views are wonderful. I have memories of the winter of '63 my brother and I building a huge snowman in the back garden and my father complaining about us perpetually coming in and out of the house in Wellington boots covered in snow, his refrain was "stay in!, or stay out!, but stop coming in and out all the time"

Like you tanith I was put in the care of a complete stranger.
We lived in NZ. My mum put me on an overnight train at Wellington for Auckland. I had the top bunk and the woman in the lower bunk was asked to keep an eye on me. I do remember she shared her chocolate with me.
I was met by an aunt I didn't know and spent the Summer holidays with her and her DD who was a year or 2 older than me and very bossy. They ran a poultry farm and I can remember rats.....
I was 7.

That bossy cousin has been a wonderful help and surrogate gran to my DS, his DP and their son since my DS emigrated to NZ nearly 20 years ago.

I gave my own kids responsibility. They went shopping to the corner shop regularly and took themselves to school and back from ages 5 or 6.

I'm sure they got up to mischief but I wasn't told about it.
Once DS3 aged 6 was carried home by his 12yr old DB with concussion and a broken arm. He'd been doing wheelies on his BMX. After a night in hospital being spoiled he didn't want to come home.

My family moved into a brand new house when I was six.

Building continued around us for several years and the building site was our playground throughout most of those years.

We played amongst all the piles of building paraphernalia, made cement balls from the left-over mixed cement when the builders left for the day and had battles with them,as well as throwing them against the house walls.

We also played in the half- built houses, and remember us accidentally knocking down a newly- built internal staircase wall on one occasion. It was totally unintended and shocked us - our fear of what might happen if it was discovered that we were to blame led to us being more careful after that!

It's not hard to see why building sites are securely fenced off these days, though I can't help looking back on our escapades with nostalgia.

Those werent the most dangerous thing we got up too though!

Yes! Building sites - brilliant playgrounds. I did one time though slipped on the scaffolding and ended up hanging by my trousers. My friend Susan had to run home - a good mile or so - to get mum to get me down.

My granny who had never been to college sometimes was asked to teach at her friends small school. She took me there on her bike and one of the older boys looked after me.All the children were in the same room.

Activities without screens

Outdoor - Roller skating, out on our bikes, building dens, climbing trees, the local children made teams and played rounders on the local golf course tee. (hiding when the golfers came through - in fact we peeped watching one golfer relieving himself - giggling) all sorts of made up games - one was based on The children of the new forest on tv, another was based on boots and saddles I think it was called. We lit fires and cooked eggs and bread - full of bits of burnt wood etc, - delicious.
We made plays and dressed up, in fact I have a photo of us in full costume mode when we did “Heidi” I was grandfather.
Indoor - yes! Cut out paper dolls - I loved them, I would read by the hour and had the ability which I have lost as I get older to let nothing distract me. I remember cutting out lots of “products” from magazine adverts and playing shops. Our play was only limited by our imagination I think. My parents lived in dread when I said “I have an idea”😊😄

My sister and I walked to our tiny village school every day, she was five and I was three. Our mother was divorced, unusual then, and had a full time job in London. We lived in deepest Surrey next to a field where the shire horses were kept. We used to lure them to the five bar fence with Polo mints and jump on their backs. They didn’t seem to mind and were beautiful gentle giants. We roamed wild and free and only came home to eat. Unthinkable today. I once fell through the ice in a pond, fortunately not very deep, but I can still remember the cold as I walked home.

I was watching an ad on tv which shows two small kids swapping a piece of Toblerone. It looks like they are sitting on a really high wall. Then the camera pans away and you see they are sitting on one of those curved walls in a skateboard park. So not all that high.

I was thinking of how my best friend and I used to climb onto the wall of a railway bridge and walk along the top til we got to the middle. Then we would sit side by side with our legs overhanging a steep drop down to the lines.

We climbed over brick walls to get into bombed out houses that were full of broken glass, twisted metal and debris.

I shudder t think of it now but we were fearless!

MayBee70

Whitewavemark2

I was thinking after writing about a favourite walk about what I did as a child that you simply couldn’t imagine being allowed now.

When I was 6, my parents lived in Plymouth. I remember a holiday when my mother saw me onto a train in Plymouth on my own (I assume the guard was keeping his eye on me) I changed at Oakhampton and travelled into Cornwall to Delabole ( our family village) and spent the school holidays with my aunt and uncle. I was 6 years old!!

I also travelled from my family home in Plymouth two bus stops away which included crossing a main road to my grandparents home!

Wasn’t there a station just outside Delabole?I seem to remember walking past it.

It was down Pengelly - the bridge that was there has been filled in and houses built on the land. The railway also served the quarry. The line eventually stopped at Padstow - going through Wadebridge.

Just thinking back even to the play parks of our youth - very high metal slides which got very very hot in the height of summer, those witches' hat things, the metal roundabouts, some strange kind of long metal rocking horse thing. And if you happened to fall off or anything, it was onto hard ground on concrete - no safety matting or bark beneath them in those days!