Childhood Revisited

rosequartz my dad cut the toes off my sandals too !

I used to have to get the bus too and from school by myself at 7 as mum worked. I would call next-door when I got home and the neighbour would use her key to let me in.

Sherbert is powder and comes in a tube withna liquorice dipper.

I think Kali is just sugar crystals with some very sour lemon flavouring, comes by the ounce (!) in a paper bag, you tip it into the palm of your hand and lick it from there. The colouring (oh dear, it gets worse) leaves your hand and tongue bright yellow.

Sounds like what we used to call rainbow crystals, but it came in different colours (though I think sort of layered in the big jar in the shop). We used to dip our forefinger in it and lick it - yes, the flavours were very acidic!

Ours was just bright yellow. I probably lived in a deprived area, we didn't have a car either so couldn't sit in the back without a seatbelt.

Playing marbles in the gutter. Building a bonfire from any spare wood we could find in the middle of a side road for 5th November, baking potatoes in it and having a box of fireworks which we set off ourselves

Watching Mum make toffee apples and being impatient for the toffee to cool enough to eat them.

Group of us going off for a walk across the fields and not getting back home until we got hungry and nobody worried, we knew not to talk to strangers and we all looked out for each other.

An enterprising sweet shop owner near us when we were kids used to add water to kali and sell it as a drink for a penny. It was awful but we still used to buy it after the Saturday morning matinee at the pictures!

All these memories! We used to build bonfires too and make a Guy and take him out in an old pushchair to get pennies. Oooo and toffee apples.

What a joy to read all about my childhood Norvic Kiltie Glamma rings a bell and no flip flops. There was a farm next to my house and I was out from dawn till dusk and we played in the fields, the hay loft up rickity ladders and as others have said if you fell out of a tree you just picked yourself up and carried on - oh happy days.

Also my Daddy used to cut the toes out of my sandels to make them last all summer and I was never allowed to go into my summer clothes until "May was out" which in our house meant June

My friend had a pair of skates with ball bearings in the wheels. She would let me wear the right one as she could manage on her left. Then we started watching the tap dancing lessons in a room at our church hall and acquired a pair of tap shoes. I wore the right tap shoe, her the left. To this day, I can perform tap movements with only my right foot!

We had whips and tops and would decorate the tops with coloured chalks. We played marbles into a well, scraped in the ground, hopscotch with shoe polish tins, stilts with National Dried milk tins and string and skipping with mum's old washing line.

For Whit Week, we had new white sandals which my mum would whiten and leave on top of the dustbin lid in the sunshine to dry, then it was off out in my dad's bike and sidecar to visit grandmother, four children squeezed into the sidecar and mum on the pillion. For a week in Blackpool, suitcases went in the middle!

Whips and tops??? I thought those went out in the early 1900s!

(Seriously...I never heard of anyone having those in my childhood, and I'm not that much younger than you, when)

I had whips and tops - I was born in 1946. There are two tiles of tops, but the most difficult one was a mushroom shape and I never mastered it. My mother thought it was all a bit common. (If you have read anything I have said about my mother, you will know that "common" was her watchword.) and I could never make those pretty patterns on my tops.

BTW, weren't whips and tops seasonal? Can'T remember when the came out each year, though.

Oh yes, Clarks' sandals in the summer, and brown bar shoes in the winter. But not knee sacks because they were.....???

Ariadne you've just reminded me that at my school we were allowed to wear short white socks in the summer, but not knee length ones because girls 'who frequented coffee bars' wore them!!!

I didn't know flip-flops existed until I went to work in Africa in 1965, after which I wore them much of the time. Clark's sandals were bought during the Easter holidays and eventually we were allowed to wear them without socks and got white T-bars on our feet! We played out on the beach and on the street, tennis without a net and French cricket. We could go anywhere on our bikes. 4 pennorth of chips on the way back from Guides. Pressed button B in the phone box to see if any money came out - very occasionally it did! Every few years yo-yos came into fashion. If we didn't have one, we could raid our mums' button boxes for big buttons to make our own. They worked.

Ariadne yes! my mum had a list in her head of what was 'common' such as eating in the street, milk bottle on the table and the worst offence of all - having a fringe! Where she drummed that one up from, I don't know. Needless to say, I do have a fringe.......

I was born in 1943 and we had whips and tops and chalked coloured patterns on them It was a seasonal thing and alternated with hopscotch with the grid being chalked onto the pavement and a bit of shiny tile used as the puck.

We also did skipping with lots of rhymes and bouncing balls against walls in rhymes too. There were both one and two ball games.

One of my favourites was "Releivio" which was a chasing game. When you were caught you were in prison unless someone not "it" could run and touch you and shout "Releivio".

My Mum was keen on "common" too and she classed red shoes and sandals as common so I was never allowed them. They were boring brown (and how I yearned for red ones) but I did love going to the shoe shop and putting my feet in the x-ray machine so I could see all the bones in my feet. I think they realised there was a danger from the radiation eventually and stopped them being used.

We didn't have a car but my dad rode a big Norton motorbike (no crash helmet). He made a 'sidecar' for my brother and I to sit in from our old pram - a big black old deep bellied thing. He took the hood off, hammered in a plank for a seat, and somehow attached it to the side of the bike, my brother used to hunch up behind me. We travelled miles, with mum riding pillion (in her flowery cotton dress and white sandals). Apart from the excruciating back ache, we had lovely days out - and all survived to tell the tale!

Fantastic, bohemian. I remember my dad taking us all for a picnic in Lyme Park (edge of Peak District) when I was 8. So there were 4 children in the sidecar, 8, 7, 4 and 18 months, plus collie dog, mum on pillion in summery frock and dad driving!

Yes Ariadne, there was a whip and top season, a skipping season, and a marbles season. I used to take the leather thong off new whips and replace them with string, it worked better!

Jacks - remember those? I got very good at the game the one summer the craze lasted - school playgrounds are pretty hard on the knees and knuckles though!

They still sell them, Ana. I have a set in the children's toy drawer.

www.smartstart-toys.co.uk/puzzling-fun/indoor-games/metal-jacks.html

Oh, I think I'll definitely have to get some for my GDs...thanks, when!

Another facebook " chestnut" I see. Ah well .

Not all of us are on facebook, thank goodness!

Anyway, it bears repeating...

I wore Flip Flops as a child & I was born in '51. Made by Bata shoes. probably because I lived in E Africa.

I think there were many good things about 'risk' taking when we were kids and we do not allow enough now..parents hover over kids far more!

I would like to know the statistics of serious injury/death in kids playgrounds with those high slides, witches hat roundabouts, wooden seat swings and un-sprung seesaws all on hard tarmac. Did kids learn more about safety or did high numbers suffer injury?? I don't know.

Also death and permanent damage from polio, scarlet fever, measles etc etc! It was not all rosy!

I couldn't get the hang of jacks, we played 'dabs' or fivestones in London 50's. I have a photo of me wearing flip-flops in about 1960…they were red rubber and yes, gave painful blisters between my toes