Memories............

[Captain Kong]

I remember as a kid at school, we had no writing books, due to a paper shortage in WW2,
We had a slate each and a piece of chalk.
When we did Sums, the lad, next to me, Trevor Smethurst, used to copy what I did then spit on my board and rub it all out. Then he would get top marks and me nothing.
I couldnt batter him cos his mother ran a skating rink and always let us in for nothing.
.

Brian.

[Rocky]

i remember when we used to get all the kids in the area down to the river picking up stones from the river bed and piling them up to make a dam even with all of us there it was still a full days work so we could have a swimming pool and you could drink the water from the streams on the hills , Anywhere there was water there was kids skimming stones until that got boring then trying to skim other kids, having a place in the woods and building a fort out of any old bits of junk we could find

Fighting with your best friend on Saturday afternoon over who was going to be butch or sundance or you picked up a stick and were Zorro robin hood or king Arthur playing footy with an old tin can cos none of you had a ball (now this last one i admitted to a few years ago so even if lil sis reads it im safe she already knows ) stealing just 1 rollerskate off your lil sis splitting it so you had 2 wheels on each part then nailing them to a plank for a skateboard because you had seen one on TV (what they forgot to show you was the fact that if you hits something as huge as an ant turd it locked the wheels stopped dead and threw you like a bucking bronco )

No traffic on the roads so we could play on our street without getting run over (and even with no traffic we still had to do the cycling proficiency test ) even a quiet car could be heard from one end to the other and talking of noisy engines my friends dad had an old triumph Bonneville that caused my friend to do the worlds best superman impression when it backfired as he tried to start it although his leg was a bit of a mess with bruising it was his arm that broke on the landing ( so when you think about it the impression was not really that good but he did fly ) that was us in trouble again and the excuse ""a big boy did it and ran away "" was not going to work this time

We were never bored we had something to do all the time in any weather and kids today are bored as soon as they get far enough away from the TV so the games controller stops working

[Rocky]

Wow a few hours sleep and a coffee and i have worked it out why kids cant behave like kids like we did its the do gooders and elf and safety lot making them so bored

Take a look round the area where you live how many no ball games signs can you find put up by the council and if they cant use a ball they certainly cant use a rusty old tin can that makes much more noise and has sharp edges the lil angels might cut themselves on that is providing they can get more than 3 together before some curtain twitcher calls the police cos a gang of 3 kids are up to no good on the corner

What about the poor lil sod 4 years old and caught chasing girls on the playground at school and kissing the ones he caught will he get done for sexual harassment with his first asbo banning him from going anywhere near girls his own age and now has to go through life labelled a perv and sign in at the police station as a registered sex offender

And thats just the summer stuff they wont go out in winter when its cold they cant even wrap up warm without getting accused of something fine if you are a ****** girl hiding behind a burkha but let a poor freezing white kid wear a balaclava and some sexist racist hulk in a uniform will have him pinned to the floor and his arm up his back asking where the rest of the gang is and what bank they were going to rob

Is it any wonder that teenagers today never leave the darkness of their own bedrooms finding ways to get round the parental controls so they can find porn on the computer and even when caught its a case of noooooooo mum i was not looking at porn i clicked a link and it just popped up or no dad you don't search like that here let me show you how to do this so mum wont find out

[leratty]

Alf it started in the US where public sports grounds, playgrounds etc often had to be stopped from having monkey bars, slides etc or games unsupervised due to the off the graph insurance premiums. We only used to get back to Aus in the Christmas holidays, we used to sail our dinghy's on the harbour main & Middle harbour cutting seriously close to the ferries, running across their bows, you were a hero if you could do it to a Manly ferry when he was going out & then again coming back. Man did the skippers let rip with their whistles though never ever reported you. Reckon they enjoyed both the fun & skill of the sailors. No one ever got run down passengers used to craining their necks to see us pop out the other side. Few times too close & got knocked over though. Got reported to my parents once about 12 I think I was by the local preacher, rectal passage. Father used to tow our boats up to Pittwater two of us per boat & we would spend up to a week sailing & camping out in the bays, coves either on the beaches or in the bush at night. Drift wood fuelled BBQíng at night, buying burgers + scrumptious milkshakes from the old shop (only) in the mornings, no showers just the sea or a waterfall to wash in, asleep by 8pm 9 at latest I reckon exhausted. Call parents every couple of days from the shop. No concerns about paedophiles or being kidnapped etc. We would ring dad who would come & get us, superb time had by all.
Going shooting goats in the country, again camping out, no worries for parents. School holidays with school friends whose parents were farmers in Yorkshire & Scotland, oh yes superb, adventurous childhood. Must not forget home made billy carts streaking down the hills with no brakes (: dog always with you.

[Lou Barron]

Do remember that song
When we were kids and went fishing
with a bent pin for a hook
we fished all day and fished all night
but the godarn fish refused to bite
There is more to it
can any of you guys know of it

[Captain Kong]

Hi Lou, here are the words, I used to do the Soft Shoe Shuffle to this. many years ago
.
.Hey, barefoot days when we were just a couple of kid,
hey, barefoot days, oh boy, and the things we did
We`d go down to Shady Nook
with a bent pin for a hook
And we`d fish all day and fish all night,
the jolly old fish refused to bite
And then I`d slide down someone`s cellar door,
and I`d slide and slide until my pants got torn
And then I`d have to go home and have to go to bed
while mama got busy with the needle and thread
Oh boy, what joy, I had in barefoot days,
oh boy, oh what joy, we had in barefoot day-ays...

Cheers
Brian.

[happy daze john in oz]

We had a knocker- up called Liza who used a long pole to rattle the upstairs bedroom windows to wake us all up. No alarm clocks then. I often wondered who knocked Liza up to start work. Bonfire night brought out the worst in us. Not a gate or wooden fence was safe as we erected our fire. November 6th usually revealed a crater the size of the grand canyon which was swiftly filled in and resufaced by the 'Corpy'. Nobody hurt, nobody burnt, nobody arrested, some of the houses adjacent to our 'Bommy' did get a bit blackened, but along with the missing fencing etc all was made good in the fullness of time by our friends ' The Corpy.'
gilly

You want to think your self lucky that Liza had not been 'knocked up', cos you would have had no one to do the early call then.

[happy daze john in oz]

Brian, I just do not understand you. You get your own personal Moslem to live next door, ****, he brings in all his mates to devalue the property around, now you will be able to buy a much cheaper house than the one you live in. LOL

[Ivan Cloherty]

Just catching up and reading the memories. pity health and safety were not around in 1939, they could have told the Germans it was unsafe to drop bombs!. How the hell did we survive as kids, getting bombed out, travelling as evacuees, playing on bomb sites with all the broken glass and steel,playing amongst farm machinery as an evacuee, that could have crushed you in an instant and not hesitated in its movement, climbing tall trees with thin branches to get that reddest apple (wasn't going to mention the word red, but couldn't help myself), thank you Hitler for making us the tough little barstewards that we were and instilling in us a sense of adventure that led us to a life we loved and gave us so many memories good and bad that we recall with a wry smile, knowing that when we relay them to the young they think we are fantasising. The poor buggers don't know what they have missed............. a real life!

[cappy]

remember near the clifftops insouth shields we put up a tent in the summerhols and dug up some turf to put round the bottom to stop the draft and lo and behold found a bomb somebody got a stick and gave it a whack then in turn to show we wernt scared of a german bomb we all had a whackat it along came abloke and we told him wot wed found he told all to go away quick in anglo saxon down came the local copper and said it was an incendiary that hadn't gone off he came back with a bucket of water and put it in he got upset when we followed behind shouting bang and boom don't know wot elf and safety would have done about that regards cappy