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