Childish Things...............

Can you remember being young? How such very small things brought wonder and pleasure. Take a piece of grass between the fingers and blow on it and make screeching bird sounds. Lay in the grass chewing on a piece of grass or hay just watching the clouds, listen to the drone of bee's and watch an airplane off to some foreign land and dream about where it might be going. The larks hovering above you, singing their hearts out. Seeing shapes in the clouds above. Being excited about a new collectable card in a packet of tea and hoping it was one you didn't have. I can smell them when I think of it, the loose tea smell. A surprise in the cereal box and even though it was a piece of valueless plastic it was free and exciting. I remember the little submarines and not being able to wait to play in the bath. I also remember a cut out bird off the back of the box that my dad helped me put together. Its wings flapped when you pulled its string and it hung from the ceiling. We don't get anything but calories these days. We would gather conkers and play the game, we made a lot of our games in those days. Most of them didn't cost a thing. Maybe a few pennies for some marbles but not the expensive toys of today. Simple things like Daisy chains or as someone else said "holding a Buttercup under a friends chin" to see if they liked butter. Dandelion clocks told us the time. Girls loved to skip rope and play leapfrog. What about "Mother May I?". We made our own fun by interacting with friends and oh those summer evenings when it began to get dusk and the street lights came on. Time to go home but what fun playing Hide and seek. Then there was the hula hoop craze. No wonder we were never fat kids back then, first off who ever bothered to go home for lunch? Breakfast and outside for the day. Walk everywhere and go where ever we felt like that day. We climbed trees and for us kids we climbed the walls of the chalk pits, we looked for fossils and learned all about the wild flowers, birds and animals. Childhood was a simple time, who needed toys. Most of us didn't have shop bought toys. Even if we did those were not what we treasured. We treasured our birds egg collections and pressed flowers. We would pop the heads off plantains, make a loop of the stalk and try to hit your friend with the head. We knew if we got stung by stinging nettles to look for a Dock leaf, there would always be one near by. We knew our world and loved it. The few games we all seemed to have to play on those wet days in the summer.............Snakes and Ladders. Tiddlywinks, Mr Potato head, Blow football. Or we might save all the boxes and cans from the kitchen and play at stores....or schools. Imagination...........I never owned a bike growing up, never felt the need either. We made chassies out of old pram wheels and boxes. Back before traffic was an issue we could ride our soap box cars down Bidwell Hill and hope to arrive safe at the bottom. My dad told me he and his friend would have to babysit their sisters. Naughty boys that they were they would race the prams down the hill. He had two babies sitting in his pram, one each end. He and his friend were racing down the hill when the wheels locked and they all went in the ditch. His two sisters went home with eggs on their heads where they had banged foreheads when coming to an abrupt stop. They were always in trouble. I will have to tell some of his stories.