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

When my youngest brother started school ( his school was further away than my senior school) I used to take him on my bicycle rack, with a cushion strapped in place to make it comfortable. He held onto the saddle! My twin sister ( without a rack on her bike so cycled directly to school) could cover for me if I was slightly late for class registration!
When we were in infants class we walked home together with friends from our class who lived closer. On one very wet day a man in a car stopped to pick up his daughter Jane, and tried to offer my sister and I a lift too. Of course we stuck to the rule that you never got in a car with a strange man- ( we had never met the father before) even if it was Jane’s dad! My mother was very cross but she saw the childish logic in later!
We too used to play outside afterschool and once slightly older ( about 8) we cycled miles - but of course we were always together if cycling and the roads were much quieter than today.

I walked to school at 6 on my own, and we were out from dawn till dusk playing with our friends in the park and fields. When I was 8 we moved house, and I walked to school through fields, across the new by-pass and down through footpaths to the school. We all used to walk together, knew how to look after ourselves and never fell out.
If it rained while we were out, we knocked on someone's door and asked them to phone our dads to collect us! We usually got given biscuits and squash while we waited.
When I was 13 I told my dad I wanted to go camping on my own with my 9 year old sister. He packed up the tent and some food and took us to a camp site, and left us overnight. His attitude was, if we were old enough to ask, we were old enough to do it. We were absolutely fine.

My father, born 1930, would get a bus from Sheffield and go to the Peak District when he was 12, and sleep rough in caves after hiking all day.

I did allow my own sons to play out from being 6 as well, we're in a quiet village and I thought that if I could do it, they should. We all learnt valuable skills.

From about the age of 9 I would go to the sweet shop two doors away to buy cigarettes for myself. They must have known it wasn't for my parents as it wasn't their usual brand. I didn't really smoke them properly, but all the same...

My old playmate and I reminisce about our 'free range childhoods' or jokingly was it 'parental neglect'. Out in the morning, maybe go home for lunch and then back out until it started to get dark or we were hungry. We lived in a rural area so no busy roads to worry about but with hindsight we did some pretty scary and dangerous things.

My dad was a farmer. After the harvest each year from when I was about 9 he would give me a home fashioned lit ‘torch’ made of a stick with petrol soaked rags and we’d burn the straw in the fields. I loved it and put potatoes in the ashes to bake!!
I also drove tractors around the farm from around 11 yrs old…

Aged 7 I walked to school on my iwn through our council estate. Aged 12 I used to go into Soho by bus and tube to meet my older sister for lunch. Aged 14 I went clubbing in the West End. My parents weren’t bothered or worried.

Magenta8

When I was still very little, during the 1950s, I regularly used to cross a very busy main road to get to the corner shop where I bought ten Craven A cigarettes for my mum and I was allowed to spend the change on sweets. I don't know of any shops that would not sell cigarettes to young children back then.

When I was about eight or nine I often used to travel on the London Underground from East London to the Natural History Museum in Kensington by myself.

Magenta8. I remember going for my parents' cigarettes too. They chain-smoked 60 plain Kensitas (dad) and 40 tipped Kensitas (mother) a day!. I guess I got the passive smoke. As you said, all the shops let wee kids pick them up for their parents. Some things have changed for the better!

I remember a child probably being molested by a man on a country lane surrounded by woods near us, nobody said to us what had happened just that something bad had happened to a little boy so we shouldn’t play near this location. I remember how obediently we nodded but as soon as we could we went straight the country lane where it allegedly happened searching for the culprit like Blyton’s Secret Seven. Looking back it makes me draw a sharp breath in.

ViceVersa
Yes, the no safety matting etc.
And if you fell off and broke an arm, you were told off for being stupid or not being careful rather than the rush to sue.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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 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.

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 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!

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.

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.

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"

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

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.

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..

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.

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.