Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
The way we were
Shamelessly plagiarised from another forum
Meldrew rides again !
" My mum used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread butter on bread on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.
Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e. Coli Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake or at the beach instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.
We all took PE ..... And risked... permanent injury with a pair of Dunlop sandshoes instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors that cost as much as a small car. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.
We got the cane for doing something wrong at school, they used to call it discipline yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honour & respect those older than us. We had 50 kids in our class and we all learned to read and write, do maths and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter......., FUNNY THAT!!
We all said prayers in school irrespective of our religion, sang the national anthem and no one got upset.
Staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention we wish we hadn’t got.
I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. We weren't!!
Oh yeah ... And where were the antibiotics and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting? Could I have been killed!
We played “King of the Hill” on piles of gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, mum pulled out the 2/6p bottle of iodine and then we got our backside spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day dose of antibiotics and then mum calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?
We never needed to get into group therapy and/or anger management classes. We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!
How did we ever survive???????????????:) "
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Betty Careless on
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Without wanting to trample on anyone's halcyon memories, a quick look at the National Statistics around mortality rates in the twentieth century suggests that the 'we' who lived a rose tinted existence untouched by the dread hand of health and safety were just lucky. If you look on the ONS website you will see - to take a random year from our bucolic past - that in 1951 40% of the people who died in this country were under 40, many of those deaths would now be preventable . You might also notice that there were a lot more suicides in 1950 then now - suggesting that , unfettered as they were by political correctness, at least some of the population weren't deliriously happy.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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Betty, I wasn't alive in 1950 but my husband was. His memories of that year are of relentless post war grimness and continued rationing and of course all of those young men still traumatised by 6 years of war. Despair and suicide would have been sadly inevitable I would imagine.
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Permalink Reply by Geraldine on
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You don't have to be deliriously happy. Who is deliriously happy in today's society, where people barricade themselves in their houses and fear walking the streets at night?
I was a child of the 50s, a latch-key kid who grew up largely unsupervised. Statistically, you may be right that there was much sadness, and it was survival of the fittest for some, but each of us who lived with deprivation received every good thing that happened as a wonderful and unexpected bonus. Nothing was taken for granted. It would do no harm if a small measure of that existed today.
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There were no 'rights', only responsibilities, and we were the better for it.
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Playing out in the street unsupervised until the sun went down (and after that if you could get away with it). No, not in some country hamlet, but in the centre of a busy industrial northern town. Every kid I knew did it and I miss seeing it on my own street now.
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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Jumping off stacked up bales of hay onto thick piles of straw that could have concealed farm implements.
What Playstation can give you that sense of adventure ?
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In my case, jumping into bomb sites that could have concealed unexploded bombs.
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Permalink Reply by Norah Borough on
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Oh for the good old days of legal physical abuse in schools and no vaccinations! My parents were children of the 50's and would also play out all day long, their parents so impoverished that they were working all hours with little time to keep an eye on all of their post war babies who were smoking fags and from the ages of eight, running wild and hungry and getting into all sorts of situations from which they should've been protected.
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Norah, I agree that of course it wasn't all good and it's very easy to be rose tinted about the past. My parents were both born in the late 1920’s. My father from a family of 16 kids and my mam 21 kids. 10 of my Dad's family made it to adulthood and 4 of those died as soldiers and 2 in air raids. On my Mam's side only 5 lived beyond five years old. Childhood was a period of huge danger because of disease if you were poor, as they were. But what they had, and what I had growing up in the 60s was a freedom I don't think many children experience now. We learned to understand and negotiate danger, risks and boundaries because most of our waking hours were out on the street, interacting with other kids and adults.
As far as health and financial security, a lot (though of course not all) children now have a much better life. But I feel that something is missing and that is simply being free to be a child with other children and live and invent your life without the relentless intervention of adults.
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Permalink Reply by maggie on
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Chicken, eggs and butter !!! LUXURY!
It was strictly Mariane margerine and the only chicken we saw was Rosie and Florry, who gave up their lives for Christmas and Easter for the only taste of chicken for the entire year.
Wax paper? The only paper in our house were recycled brown bags that is apart form cut up squares of newspaper on a string until the grand days when Jeyes hard paper adorned the loo.
Dunlop sand shoes? An embarassment of riches! Strictly bare foot for games and PE at our school, with vest and pants even with a windchill of minus 10, followed by satisfying hours of scratching chilblains, not to mention getting your tongue stuck to the ice on the inside of the bedroom window after wondering if the frost patterns tasted good and the days spent on sick kids beds trying to catch measles, mumps, german measles etc while still young...
"We got the cane for doing something wrong at school", our headmaster would pick at random from those queing to get into schol and then line up ten kids at a time, hands out, and taking a run would cane the lot with the rest of the school looking on as a lesson for us all (?!?). And an education where girls were not allowed to study anything higher than simple maths, languages were for toffs, where physics and technical drawing were deemed lessons for boys only, needlework and cookery were mandatory as was working half day a week in the local clothing factory, and being told that the only reason girls were taught English was that they would at least be able to teach their kids to speak properly.
And as for 'dysfuntiontional families' the secret lives of women revealed stories and coping mechanisms in families before divorce was possible and domestic violence was common, after all the women had learnt to cope and grown strong with their men away and now had to buckle under. There were a lot of people living secret lives for all sorts of reasons and a lot simmering away, and sometimes exploding, behind closed doors.
I'm surprised you don't mention paedophiles; there were two 'Peeping Toms' on our street plus a 'kiddy fiddler', the advice from grown ups was "never get changed in your bedroom without the curtains being pulled" and "don't go near the bushes in the play park".
Ah the good old days...
Having said that I do think that kids now live more sedantry lives and should be out running across playing fields. That is once they have done the piles and piles of homework and we buy back their playing fileds that were sold off...
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I think there's a bit of a myth that all kids are barricaded up all day long. My kids are now 21, 16 and 13. They all played out, we live on an estate where that is possible, where we all look out for each others kids and where there are safe areas to play. I also brought them up to not be afraid of where they live and encouraged them to venture out and be independent. The youngest two are confident enough to pop on the tube and go shopping up west or pop on a bus to brick lane, The South bank, their cousins who live by Epping forest etc etc . The furthest I got at that age, in the 70's in a northern working class mining town was the local park at the other end of the village. True, in the Summers me and my friends would be out all day cycling through neighbourhood villages to get to nearby fields and beauty spots but london has its own landscape, ripe for different adventures.
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