Do you remember.................

When we first moved into the house on Bidwell Hill we had an outside toilet. At least it was a flush one, not like my friend Margaret who lived on a farm. They had a hole in the ground, well it did have a wooden seat and was in an outhouse but still.......no chemicals back then either. Was a rather creepy experience. Although I must say ours was not much better in that respect. It did have a small window, unlike this one. It also had a lot of cobwebs and spiders.

We used newspaper out there too, it was awhile before the nice toilet rolls came into existence and newspaper was preferable to Izol.
We played simple games, always outside. We made our own fun. No TV, no Ipad or smart phones, in fact no phone at all. We played with each other.

We built "forts" from things we found. My friend Mick and I dug out an underground one and had corrugated iron on its roof. The building of it was the fun. Sometimes we built them in the bushes like this one.

All the kids did that. We also built our own transportation (smile) from odds and ends we found. The gypsies were a great source of supplies. When they left we could go to their camps and often found old pram wheels, ideal for making our chassis.

Being a girl I only got to help build them, I didn't get to race them down Bidwell Hill like the boys did.

We practically lived outside. Went out first thing in the morning and came home when the street lights went on. No one knew where we were at any given time during the day. Neighbours watched everyone's kids, kept tabs on them. The village police man would tell our dads if any trouble and we would get in trouble at home as well as receiving a clip on the ear from the copper. My Dad said in his day the village copper wore a cape, he said he was very proficient at whipping that around to smack their legs real good. I must get out my Dad's journal and tell some of his stories here. Today kids would be locked up for some of the things kids did back then. However none were dangerous or malicious just naughty. In those days, letting the farmers cows out would not cause accidents as it would today.
If we had a penny we could go into the local sweet shop, Miss Dickens and she would tell us what a penny would buy us. Quite a lot we thought. She had tiny paper bags that would hold the sweets that she had weighted out precisely and sometimes there might only be 2 in the bag, but we got what we wanted.

Later on when we were older we could also buy a cigarette one at a time. That was probably not a good thing but at the time we thought it was.