Just for fun...discipline through the ages

[Shewie]

I love the way this thread's turned out in the end, I thought it was heading for a lock down when I last checked this morning.

Some nostalgic memories from my childhood ...

Raliegh Choppers
Revels
My dads Moog sythesizer
Phil Spectres christmas album
Pogo sticks
Caravan holidays
Not having be home until it gets dark on school holidays
Making dens in the woods
White dog poo
Labelling up your own VHS tape and the naff fake book cover it went in.
Grange Hill
Stig of the Dump
Jackanory
Superman
Famous Five
Buck Rogers
Loading the push bikes up with DIY panniers and camping gear then setting off into the sticks for three days

Happy days

[Laurentius]

I went to school in the late sixties early seventies and was bullied.

My dad had the old school attitude that you should stand up to them and learn to fight with your fists. I am not sure this was the school attitude even then, the point about bullying being that it went on under the threshold of any supervision, whoever was caught right or wrong, provoked or not was the one who would get punished for it.

One day I did simply have enough of a particular bully, swaggering tough guy, you get the picture. I didn't use my fist's I gave him a roundhouse kick square in the teeth on the top deck of the school bus once, no mean achievement, but I had been pushed beyond tolerance.

The thing is his reaction to that was not resentment or wanting revenge, it was respect that I could give as good as I got, either that or I genuinely scared the bejasus out of him when he was least expecting it.

If that had been reported to the school well I guess those who are familiar with the times would know what the consequences would have been, a sore backside for me.

[Barn Owl]

Nice Rich,

In the pub earlier we were on about kids progs' and cartoons when young 'uns.

Remember it was the 'chipper','tomahawk' then 'chopper' bikes.(iirc).

[Laurentius]

Really? Funny, I'm old enough to remember corporal punishment at school, and it certainly didn't work out like that... The real troublemakers got the belt at least once a week on average, and bragged about it afterwards. Never made a damn bit of difference to their behaviour.

I'm old enough to remember it too, however whilst it might not have made a difference to the few, for the rest of us it was not something we would willingly provoke and to be avoided at all costs.

[Toddy]

I was a digger,tried valiantly to reach Oz first with a dinner spoon then a wee plastic spade.

By the time I could hold the real garden spade I couldn't be bothered..

My brother playing sodjers.......dug an escape tunnel that went under next door's fence When the bottom of auld Harry's fence stob poked through the roof he just sawed it off.
Harry's 10 year old youngest was leaning over our fence a couple of days later and the whole fence section collapsed and toppled him headfirst into the six inches of gloopy clay that was the bottom of our garden pond. He climbed out and walked like a chocolate man up our back garden, through the close, out the gate and round to his Mum dripping mud the whole way; she screamed like a Banshee at him, and turned the hose on.
I'm still laughing at it now A mud man with big blue eyes

M

[Opal]

In the fifties we used to make our own high wooden stilts and walk on tin cans with the string in them, stearing carts too out of bits of wood, never seen any youngsters doing that these days.

Never see anyone playing ollies/marbles either and making firewood bundles selling them to our neighbours for 2d a pack, that's how we made a few coppers to buy four Walkers and three Uncle Joe's mint balls.

[Barn Owl]

Can mind one Sunday afternoon there was 'visitors' in.

My wee sister came in from the field out back covered in coo dung having fell in same

[Toddy]

Visitors, and being "good" Lady's in hats and posh voices for the phone Everybody wore hats, I mind not recognising a neighbour without her hat on, one summer.

Mind those white crepe rubber soled Clark's sandals? Every summer we got new ones, felt like we walked like ducks 'til we broke them in

Day trips on coach tours, and if there was water I was in it.

Public drinking fountains, they'd be declared totally unhygienic disease vectors nowadays, yet every child in the school drank from the same one.

Catching bees in jam jars full of clover heads. My brother found a plant of genuine fourleaved clovers one summer. He made a fortune selling them for 3d a piece to neighbours

Guy Fawkes bonfires, the biggest redd out of houses and gardens ever. Built like wigwams they were often over 20 feet high. Burnt right through the night and still on fire when we went to school the next day.

Standing in Assembly in school. Frozen solid and just starting to thaw out and the stinging nip of fingers and toes as they burned as the blood flushed back through them.

The smell of hallowe'en, the coal fire smoke and cold nights, and Christmas , real trees with jaggy needles and a dozen fairy lights on it The steamed up kitchen smell of dumpling boiling for three and a half hours

M

[Shewie]

Standing in Assembly in school. Frozen solid and just starting to thaw out and the stinging nip of fingers and toes as they burned as the blood flushed back through them.

M

That's just reminded me of the little glass bottles of milk we used to get every morning at school, they would usually have an inch of ice on the top too in winter.

And drying out your woolly gloves that your gran knitted on the big iron radiators in the class room, only to go back out a break time and have another snowball fight.

Proper parker coats with the orange lining and furry hood

Deep snow that shut schools and villages, everybody would just end up sledging and playing together for days until it thawed.

[Chinkapin]

There was a great book written in the U.S. way back in 1957. it was entitled: "Where have you been? Out. What did you do? Nothing." This was the standard mother's interrogation, and the standard response delivered by the child. The interesting thing about this book, is that it was written in 1957, by an adult man about his childhood in the 1920s. It is amazing how what he had to say, dovetails together with the memories posted above. The book is filled with childhood games, activities, etc. Although this book is a bit of Americana, I'll venture that many of the games and such, had a British counterpart.

When I read this book, I was reminded of many games that I had completely forgotten about. It is a real, and warm trip down nostalgia lane. Many of the conclusions that the author reached in 1957, have been expressed here in this forum. Seems nothing much ever changes.

[British Red]

Space hoppers...they were cool

and boxing was still a sport and taught in school

MArkets - good ones, not tatty scruffy ones. With boxes of broken buscuits and the toffee man.

Collecting pop and beer bottles up to get the deposits back


Cresta and the polar bear "its frothy man"

[TeeDee]

"Cresta and the polar bear "its frothy man" "

Right , BR you lost me there , that must be MY age cut off group.

I had to go looking for it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thxAqdxGSPU

[telwebb]

rimsky-korsakov! If it wasn't for the polar bear i'd never have heard of him!

[JohnC]

My Clarks commandos? with a compass in the heel... And you could leave tracks of some animal, possibly a badger...

[British Red]

Stripey chewy mints called "Pacers" anyone?

[Toddy]

My Clarks commandos? with a compass in the heel... And you could leave tracks of some animal, possibly a badger...

My brother got them and I was green with envy. Girls got flower prints in the sole
Half the boys in school had one crushed down heel on their shoe, taking it off and forcing it back on without undoing the laces

Then they changed the milk from those wee bottles to the little triangular cartons, felt like we got less
and there was always someone sick after milk break, and in the hygiene of the day, the jannie came round with a bucket of sawdust and the jeyes fluid

The smell of varnish when we went back to school after the Summer holidays the floors had been re-done and the desks were stuck shut with it

M

[Robbi]

R whites lemonade

flying saucer sweets ( rice paper and sherbert )

claude butler racing bikes ( never had one ! )

when the thames flooded in 1968 ( what fun we had )

[locum76]

I must be getting old because I remember all this stuff and I'm only 34. I'm going to have to join in.

The school playtime milk freezing in the winter when we lived at Drumdelgie. Before the milk was all homogenised - we had to drink it when it was split. (from bottles).
Playing football on stubble in wellies and a boiler suit.
Shooting my dads air gun at everything.
Cycling everywhere from the age of 8 and up.
Lucky Tatties, neverending gobstoppers, pacers (BR).
Falling in the drainage tank for the grain dryer (rescued by brother - parents still don't know)
Playing with the welders and gas torches in the workshop from 6 years old.
helping with the hay bales from age 5.
Working for actual cash from age 12 (£1.50/ hour 40 hours a week - We were minted).
Making bows and arrows and firing them at each other.
Spud guns on the school bus.
Playing on the salmon fish ladder at Luncarty (parents still don't know about that one)
Making an Igloo from actual blocks of ice (Drumdelgie again).
Being bullied but eventually decking the main culprit and being congartulated for it by the head teacher - never looked back.
The bon-accord lorry visiting the farm and us getting a whole crate of fizzy pop.
and all the mud, glorious mud. I reckon that's why I'm a gardener and biologist type now.

[British Red]

They still have pop vans round here....with pop that is "mostly additives"

[British Red]

Oh - what about space dust? That must have been all additives