Open Writing

Oh, sweet nostalgia! I’ve reached the age where I keep saying “in my day….” But bear with me, and I’ll tell you about the joys of being a free-range kid.

Back in the Sixties, kids, or at least working class kids like me, were not swaddled in cotton wool. At weekends, in the light evenings and in the school holidays, we “played out” – which meant we disappeared together, in a pack and played in wonderful freedom. As long as we got back by nightfall, nobody worried. So off we’d go, with a packet of jam sandwiches and a bottle of pop apiece. All of us had “don’t get separated, and don’t talk to any strange men” drummed into us – and we lived to tell the tale.

The street we lived in was called Baker Street, and nowadays I think of my little gang as the Baker Street Irregulars. No Sherlock Holmes to reward us however, in between puffs of his pipe and other more harmful habits. Just a clip round the ear if we were late home. Our town was a paradise for adventurous, energetic kids, and we roamed over a wide area. The countryside was on our doorstep (scrumping apples was a favourite activity – scrambling back over the fence with jumpers bulging with purloined fruit). A much safer pastime than some we indulged in, as you will see.

The place is ringed with old forts, built during the era of the Napoleonic wars. They were a defence from an invasion that never came. At one time they were linked by tunnels. Five minutes’ walk away from Baker Street was Fort Mycroft – a grim and ghostly-looking example. In my day (yeah, yeah, OK) it was derelict; nowadays in has been turned into posh flats. The owners don’t seem to mind the ghosts, which we knew about even then. Opposite the fort was a park called Mycroft Gardens. This is where the risky bit of my tale starts.

The top bit of the Gardens was fairly tame – lawns, rose bushes and stone seats. But after this it sloped steeply down to the bottom bit, where anything could happen, most of it highly dangerous. It was wild and jungly, covered in trees and bushes and was the haunt of unsavoury men of various kinds. “Don’t get separated”, we were warned – and we didn’t, so they were no threat to us. Rather, we baited them. Free-range kids get streetwise pretty young, and we certainly were. On one occasion, we had shinned up some trees and were happily indulging in a dirty joke telling competition, roosting in the branches like a flock of rather potty-mouthed birds. From below came an indignant voice: “You’re a bunch of dirty-minded little bleeders!” A lone man in standard issue perv’s gear – you know, dirty mac, flat hat, the lot. No dog with him – obviously up to no good. “We know what YOU are!” we jeered, and he departed in short order.

Two other features of the Gardens presented real physical danger. A moat, part of the defence works, sloped down from the top of the Gardens and ended abruptly in a sheer drop of about thirty feet. Spanning it was a wooden bridge with a stanchion in its centre. We delighted in scrambling up the stanchion, over the balustrade and back down the moat – over and over again. The bridge was twenty feet high if it was an inch. Makes my blood run cold to think about it. At the bottom of the Gardens, set in the sheer drop was a rusty iron door, behind which was the delicious adventure of – THE TUNNEL! This led under the road and ended at the perimeter wall of Fort Mycroft. It was our delight to explore the tunnel, lighting our way with stubs of candle and one day, even a lighted bit of tarry rope. None of us had a torch – or maybe we thought torches were sissy?

More cold blood – it was infested with rats and strewn with all kinds of debris, probably inflammable. Even worse, in the lobby before you got to the tunnel was the remains of a staircase down to an underground room. All that was left of the stairs were the treads – so we climbed down those! Once I got stuck half-way out of sheer terror and had to be hauled out by Peepsie, the oldest and strongest of our gang. God knows how much of a drop the stairwell was. Easily enough to kill or maim anyone falling down it, though.

Mum went ballistic when she found I’d been going there – but it didn’t matter how many cloutings I got, I still kept going back because of the frisson of terror and because I wanted to be with the others and join in what they did. These days, I’m with Mum on this one. But I lived.

Other adventures were equally blood-curdling, such as messing about on a floating pontoon-style pier, jumping from segment to segment. It was moored on a river that’s notorious for vicious, whirlpool currents. One slip and – you’d drown before anyone even knew you’d fallen in. Years later, the lifeguard at our local outdoor pool (now there’s another happy memory – the pool, that is), dived off the town bridge for a bet. He emerged dripping but unscathed – until the police found out. He got the telling-off of a lifetime.

A safer kind of messing about on the river was a trip on a paddle-steamer. For sixpence, you got to cruise from Star Pier to an outlying village upriver, and back again. Adults could have a drink at the bar, but we contented ourselves with the pop we’d brought with us. Or there was always Navy Day, which came round once a year. A sailor (don’t know if his eyes were navy-blue, but he had a beard so looked the part) would take parties out to the destroyers and corvettes moored in the estuary then give a guided tour. One of us addressed him as “Beardie” but he didn’t seem to mind.

Saturday morning pictures were great fun – not that we were film buffs. We got more fun out of peanut fights with a rival gang from the White Road Estate, ice-cream bombing from the balcony and making vulgar noises and signs at any hint of a love scene in the film being shown. Not to mention opening the fire door and letting our pals in for free in the time-honoured fashion. Little treasures, weren’t we? The manager lacked a sense of humour and was always threatening to stop the film and turn us out. We were undaunted, of course, and he never did. I do remember being scared silly by ancient Flash Gordon films, until I worked out that Ming the Merciless would never win – or there’d be no film next week!

So we played out, got into mischief and ran all kinds of risks. But I don’t regret any of it, because it made us hardy, self-reliant and it rubbed our corners off. Not to mention burning off all our surplus energy. Fat kids were a rarity in those days – also because for us, fast food meant fish and chips as an occasional treat, Chinese restaurants and the like being too pricey. Good old-fashioned dinners like neck of lamb stew, mince and dumpling and liver and bacon, served up with home grown vegetables from the allotment were our usual fare. I still cook these dishes today because I still enjoy them.

Today’s kids? I pity them. Ferried here, ferried there to an endless stream of suitable activities like Brownies, music lesson, chess club and so on. When do they get to just hang out? Or they are peering mole-like at an X-box screen, pretending to have the kinds of adventures we actually had. No wonder there’s so many roly poly kids nowadays, and kids not streetwise enough to look after themselves. OK, am off my soapbox now. Better stop before I get started on soapbox carts.

Hours of fun, and what’s a few missing teeth between friends?