Life wasn't all nicking Horlicks...

I would just like to say that I used to be sporty, and I have evidence to prove it. Here:

                                            See the ‘moi’↑?

That’s me trying to point myself out in a sophisticated, unassuming way. Like, not boasting or anything, but guys, I’m in the team, see me?

Hockey was my game and I loved tearing down the right hand side of the pitch with a well-controlled ball, to whack a clever and perfectly pitched cross to the three forwards who had broken out from the central mass and were rushing towards the goal. Then one of them would stop my pass and in turn whack it into the goal mouth. We never lost a match! Go Maidstone Girls’ Grammar School third years!

This healthy, exercisey little snippet is added to illustrate the fact that I didn’t spend all my time nicking Horlicks [see previous post ‘Where were our hoodies?’].

Before sport, I sang. And I have proof of the singing activity too:

I know, a Church choir wasn’t X-Factor or anything, but still. We got paid.

Moo is on the extreme right, and Saggy is in the front with the sombre moon face and hairband. This was taken when I was in the last year of Loose Primary School. Life was pretty serious, I was about to sit the 11+…….

But look! Me and Sis were only following in our father's footsteps. The photo below of Him and His Identical Twin, were taken when they were teenagers, just as solemn as me, and I can't even tell which is which...

What is it with my family about dressing up in robes? But anyway, going back to the hockey era, if my Dad reads this he will;

1  Remind me that he used to drive me to matches, and

2  Remind me that I was a bit rough on the pitch, and

3  That a parent commented on it while watching the match, and

4  That the parent was a police officer

In my defence I don’t think that I come from a normal family. 

Hands up who has a Dad that paints lawnmowers purple with a white flower for decoration? Well? And pointing to a lawnmower to prove what exactly? Why?

And, although the quality of the photo below is rubbish, it shows incontrovertibly, that my father thought it was a good idea to try to kick a brick.

                                                   ↑ The brick that was kicked

And, yes, he looks like a mad scientist here. 

And, talking of mad….

Why?

TBH, he didn’t come from a totally normal family himself. Here is Grandad with plaits pigtails:

Don’t tell me that it’s because they used to live in Hong Kong.  Plaits pigtails weren’t mandatory…

Goodness knows what it is he is smoking.

But, dear reader, lest you are worried that I came from a dysfunctional family. I finish my post this week with a lovely family portrait taken by Daddykins, proving, quite frankly, that I was once taller than Jim:

Pale Saggy on the left of Mum, bronzed Moo on the right.

Saggy

Where were our hoodies?

So. This is Saggy, sitting on Moo’s lap. Don’t laugh at the bows.

In the 1950s it was ‘de rigueur’ for girls to wear pretty dresses, ankle socks, shiny shoes and big bows in their hair. Even playing in the garden, going shopping or strolling down the road for our mother to show off how neat and tidy we were. No elasticated waist jeans, my friend. No easy-wash tee shirts.

Saggy, a couple of years later. Still in pretty dress, ankle socks and shiny shoes. Playing in the garden. Honest to goodness.

We grew into neat and tidy Grammar School girls, who even wore their school blazers over their ordinary dresses when on a day out with their family! What craziness is this? Honest to goodness again. Where are our comfy trainers? Our hoodies? Even our poor little squidge of a brother is in his primary school blazer. If we had known any better we would have rebelled, but it hadn’t been invented yet.

Saggy stayed tidy while at the beginning of her teenage years. Still rocking the short pretty dress style here. Not a look that would suit Saggy now. 

This apparition of neat-and-tidiness didn’t last through to the end of the teenage years. Obvs. 

Here is a scruffy Saggy sitting on Moo’s settee instead of her lap. In a tee shirt at last!

Saggy is by now bigger than Moo so it’s just as well. Moo is at this point married with a kid, and her new domesticity is a draw for an A-level student who doesn’t know what to do with her spare time. Apart from nick Horlick’s from her sister’s kitchen cupboards.

Moo being gracious about the Horlicks because she is distracted....

I don’t know about you but I think Horlicks tastes nicer straight off the spoon out of the jar. Dry. Especially if it’s sneaked out of your sister’s cupboards without her knowing.

Oh, wait. She did. She took the photo….

Saggy

Well, we thought it was a good idea…

Water babies

We were not unusually naughty children. No. It’s just that the stories of the ‘bad’ things we did got repeated over and over until they were the stuff of family legend. And yet….

 nobody recalls the times we ate up our vegetables, were obedient, polite, tidy and all the other things our parents wanted us to be.

One of our bright ideas which has stuck in our parents’ memory is when we flooded the bathroom. Which was not as bad as it sounds. They have insisted on laughing about it for over fifty years, now they can see the funny side of it.

It wasn't funny at the time, that's for sure. Not for our parents that is.

We, however, had a brilliant time……. up to a point.

It was early morning. Dad had left the house at the crack of a very cold dawn to go to work and Mum was still asleep. We, meanwhile, were awake and ready to start the day, as young children so often are. Opinion is divided about who came up with the idea of creating an indoor swimming pool. Moo was just tall enough to reach the taps on the bathroom washbasin. Saggy’s innocent little head barely reached the basin at all. Mum and Dad assumed it was Saggy’s idea, as she was regarded as the family mischief maker.

Anyhow, it was Moo who filled the beakers with water and generously shared the fun of emptying them onto the floor. Over and over again.

Obviously we hadn't considered the possibility of the water leaking out from under the closed door, and we never enjoyed the swim of our dreams. We just sat in about an inch of water and tried to imagine the rest. By the time Mum had been roused from sleep by the sound of chattering teeth coming from the bathroom, the water was cascading through the kitchen ceiling.

Meanwhile upstairs, there were Saggy and Moo, sitting in a pool of icy water on the bathroom floor and turning blue. To her credit, Mum’s first thought was for her poor wet shivering daughters. Once she had us wrapped in towels, dried and warm, she had to deal with the mess we had caused. I don't remember what happened about the water damage. It wasn't our problem. But I'm pretty sure we had some serious music to face.

Our pony phase

Some of our bright ideas weren’t naughty. Just unrealistic and probably annoying for the rest of the family. You see, we grew into that phase that so many little girls go through.

We wanted a horse.

A pony would do. We didn’t want to be unreasonable. We had it all worked out. Completely unfazed by the fact that we lived in a three bed semi on a residential road, we just couldn’t see a problem with it.

Ponies need stabling? We had a garage, didn’t we? There wasn’t a car in it, was there? Well, you could easily get a pony in it.

Ponies need food? They eat grass. We have a lawn, don’t we? Problem solved.

Life is so simple when you are a child.

We obviously didn’t have much idea what owning a horse (or pony) involved. Mum said they ate a lot more than just grass. It cost a lot to feed them.

We’ll give up our pocket money then, we offered. Two shillings a week wouldn’t be nearly enough, said Mum.  Plus, they need fields or paddocks to run around in. We still thought the lawn would be plenty big enough for our pony. We’d settle for a small one.

 And you have to groom them and clean out the garage stable, Mum pointed out.

‘We’ll do it!’, we cried eagerly, safe in the knowledge that Mum would do it if we didn’t, like she did with the guinea pigs. Ponies are in a different league to guinea pigs though, and no matter how we begged and pleaded, the horse in the garage remained just another bright idea.

 

These days we're still coming up with bright ideas, most of them a lot less wacky than the childhood ones. We long ago abandoned any hope of having a horse, and although Moo did once have a paddock, she settled for a dog. Saggy has gone for chickens. We never did get an indoor swimming pool. But you never know. One of these days, just maybe……

Moo

Our 1960s bedtimes and the Bong Song....

You hear a lot among parents of young children about bedtimes. Should they have set bedtimes at all? And if they do, how do you get them to stay there if they don't want to?

When we were children our mum expected us to be in bed quite early. So keen was she on this that she sometimes went to great lengths to get us there and make sure we stayed there. In my opinion she was a pioneer in this field. You had to admire her ingenuity and persistence.

Bedtimes in our house could be fun. The first stage would involve Mum encouraging us up the stairs by terrifying the life out of us, chasing us and going ‘Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!’ behind us, making pecking gestures with her hands. If she caught you, you would get a pinch on the bottom, but you never got caught because you got up those stairs in double quick time. Which, of course, was the whole idea.

The Bong Song

The next stage, getting undressed and ready for bed, was considerably enlivened by what we thought of as the Bong Song. Not a song really, but part of a poem Mum had learnt as a child and now scared us into bed with. It was about the curfew introduced by King William I to keep the peasants from revolt, and it went like this –

At bong number one they all started to run

Like a warren of rabbits upset by a gun.

At bong number two they were all in a stew

Flinging cap after tunic and hose after shoe.

At bong number three they were bare to the knee

Undoing the doings as quick as could be.

At bong number four they were stripped to the core

Pulling on nightshirts the wrong side before.

At bong number five they were looking alive

Bizzing and buzzing like bees in a hive

At bong number six they gave themselves kicks

Tripping over rushes to snuff out the wicks

At bong number seven from Durham to Devon

They slipped up a prayer to our Father in heaven

At bong number eight they were all in a state

And with hearts beating all at a terrible rate

They jumped BONG into bed like a bull at a gate.

The pace and volume at which Mum delivered this verse started quite slow and quiet, and gradually picked up as it went along, finishing in a crescendo of terror with the final BONG, by which time you had better be in your bed or goodness knows what might happen to you.

If we were lucky, Mum might decide to have a bath when she had settled us into bed. On these occasions she would sing us lullabies and other soothing songs while she relaxed, hoping we'd drift contentedly off to sleep. It usually worked. You can't beat the sound of ‘Scarlet Ribbons’ drifting steamily out of the bathroom to get you in the mood for sleep.

In summer we still had to go to bed at our bedtime, however light it might be outside. Mum would try to fool us into sleep by pegging a blanket over the curtains to make it dark, but it just made it stuffy. Anyhow, we could still hear the enticing sounds of the summer evening going on outside – perhaps a neighbour mowing his lawn with a push- mower. A relaxing sound but not relaxing enough when you can also hear the sounds of other children playing. Lucky them, allowed to stay up and enjoy the balmy weather outside. Neighbours chatting and laughing, everyone happy and still enjoying the day while we had to be cooped up in a darkened room.

So, did we drift off to sleep?

Of course not. We invented all sorts of ways to amuse ourselves. It was just not possible to resist the urge to peek behind the blanket and look at the world outside the window. Sometimes we would see the next door neighbour pottering about in his garden. On one occasion we thought we would shout things out of the window at him. It was so funny to imagine him glancing round nervously, wondering where on earth the voices were coming from. It hadn't dawned on us that he would know immediately. Anyhow, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Oi!” bawled Saggy;

 “YOU!”

“ YOU DOWN THERE! YOU WITH THE BEARD!”

And we both disappeared double quick behind the blanket, pleased with ourselves and giggling uncontrollably. However, we had forgotten that he wasn't the only one who could hear us. All the neighbours who happened to be enjoying the evening sun also heard.

Unfortunately for us that included our parents. We didn't try that one again.

Trying to get around the room without touching the floor was a favourite, but tended to get noisier than we meant it to. We might try sneaking across the landing to our little brother’s room. That was dangerous, as you might get caught the wrong side of the top of the stairs. Usually Mum would come up the stairs and tell us to be quiet. So we would subside for a few minutes before starting to chatter and giggle, getting louder without realising it. Mum would come toiling up the stairs again, getting a bit fed up now. And this would be repeated a few times, Mum starting to get really cheesed off. Then at last would come the ultimate chilling threat, the last resort of a mother whose patience was exhausted….

‘If you don't stop it Dad will be coming up…….’

We couldn't seem to help ourselves though, and would be in the middle of larking about and giggling when we would become aware that Dad had materialised in the doorway. How long he had been there and how much he had heard we had no idea.

Anyway, that was the end of the naughtiness.

You didn't mess with Dad.

Moo