THOSE WERE THE DAYS (my friend)

I lived deep in a community when I was a child. Everyone knew who did what, when, where and gossiped it behind closed doors or into ears behind a flat hand. The tyrant grandmother had lived there from before the builders left; she knew all and everything. None of that mattered to me – my life skipped rope, threw two balls against any wall and delved into the RSD.

The RSD had been an internment camp during the war and even though it had gates, they’d been pried open long enough for grass to grow and an invitation thrown out. It was heaven. We spent whole days in there, often without lunch, and would come home filthy and starving at tea-time. The choice of adventure might lie with the froggy-pond, the Monkey-puzzle tree, the old house, the burn, the rope swing or little brick houses/kennels that we called the Zig-zags (because of the roofs). When there were no boys with us, we girls brushed them out and played house; we built armchairs with loose bricks and served up a dinner of wild strawberries or brambles on leaves.

My grandchildren and their like will never have this kind of experience. Camping with their father, and days in the big parks might echo remnants but could never leave the same impression.

People only stayed indoors when it rained. In the late 50s early 60s there was no day-time television except for a lunch-time programme and the news. On warm evenings my mother would put a pillow out on the window ledge of the front room, and watch us play a game of Rounders in the street. She spoke to every passer-by. I don’t remember anyone on our small street having a car so we had an empty road to play in and hardly ever had to move…except for the ice-cream van. Oh, the games we played in that street: Kick the Can and Olevio were different versions of Hide and Seek. One version was played in the dark with torches to root us out of the huge back gardens – spooky; they still had bomb-shelters up the middle. Sometimes the younger adults would join us and the oldies hung out of the windows.

Those were the days of long, hot summers when the tar of the roads and pavements melted and spoiled our white ankle socks. I wore Clark’s sandals and home-made cotton dresses that appeared years later in patchwork quilts. All the boys wore short trousers until they went to the big school after the eleven-plus. Dirt loved us and scabby knees were compulsory. Time stood still but it must have been moving because here I am – heading for sixty and wondering where it’s all gone.

All the paddling in burns, catching minnows and firing stones at water-rats, has made me the individual I am. We also caught bees, tadpoles, newts and frogs. I am ashamed to say that we tortured the bees in cans of water and cooked them on fires; we pulled the wings and legs off Daddy-long-legs…and my brother once deep-fried a newt in my mother’s chip pan. Of course I shopped him and he got thumped after Mum threw the whole pan out in the bin!

On Saturdays our street gang would go to the ABC Minors in Shawlands, and the big kids would look after the little ones – this was a twenty-minute bus ride away. During school holidays we’d go swimming, again in the same group, and the big kids taught us to swim. These big kids would maybe be about twelve, and there were only two of them – in charge of six or seven others at varying ages; that wouldn’t be allowed now.

Thinking of this reminds me of that movie Stand by Me where the boys go in search of a boy’s body; it’s from a Stephen King story that completely captures what it was like to be a kid in those (safe) days. Those days are long gone.