h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I Can't Believe We Made It!

If you lived as a child in the 40's, 50's, 60's or 70's, looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have...

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Our cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paint. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cupboards, and when we rode our bikes we had no helmets. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors. We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times we learned to solve the problem. We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. No mobile phones. Unthinkable. We got cut and broke bones and broke teeth, and there were no law suits from these accidents. They were accidents. No one was to blame, but us.

Remember accidents? We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it.

We ate cakes, bread and butter, and drank cordial, but we were never overweight...we were always outside playing. We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle and no one died from this. We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, video games, 65 channels on pay TV, video tape movies, surround sound, personal mobile phones, Personal Computers, Internet chat rooms ... we had friends. We went outside and found them. We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rung the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.

Imagine such a thing. Without asking a parent! By ourselves! Out there in the cold cruel world! Without a guardian - how did we do it?

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls, and ate worms, and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes, nor did the worms live inside us forever.

Footy and netball had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't, had to learn to deal with disappointment.....

Some students weren't as smart as others so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. Tests were not adjusted for any reason.

Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected. No one to hide behind.

No speed humps!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law - imagine that!

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years has been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

And if you're one of them. Congratulations!

I am a 70s kid. But nostalgia ain't what it used to be....

For more of this, read "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha" by Roddy Doyle. It is the best description of growing up in the 60s I've ever seen.

I remember at the age of five heading off on my tricycle with my best friend from next door. We went on a trip around South Dublin, covering about four miles and taking us about two hours. When we got back, my mother was relieved because she had been worried about me. But not worried enough to come looking for me.

Maybe someone (if they haven't already) should write a book about the seventies. Ahhhh.... the strikes, bin bags left to pile up in the streets, the power cuts, the long hot summer of '76, Star Wars (when it was good), flares, milk at school, space hoppers...

I hope that's not implying that I am useless because I was born in an age that didn't have all of those things... It wasn't *all* fun and games back then, was it?

No. The strikes were abysmal. People think its pretty lousy with the firemen on strike, but thats peanuts to the seventies. New Labour have got it easy...

Bornonthe20thaugust, the generation you describe is the generation that *raised* all these game-addicted couch potatoes...

I would like to point out that I feel as if that message(the first post) applies to me...a lot of it rings true. But I was born 4 months before the start of the 80s...I was child during the 80s not the 70s. I don't think things *really* change that quickly...I doubt anyone born before 85 wouldn't be able to relate to at least half of the memories. And if you were born in 85 then you were only starting secondary school in the mid/late 90s.

I do feel sorry for kids today - they're missing out on a lot...freedom to grow up being the main one. But I don't think that that freedom is gone forever...I can see in 10-20 years time things being a lot less paranoid again. I know for a fact that my kids aren't going to get chauffuered to school...if that means they go to a worse school then so be it...attentive parents make the difference between success and failure - not league table positions.

Hhhmm. I remember things like this. There were distrubing abductions of children in those days too, but everyone (almost 100% correctly) assumed it wouldn't happen to them. At least, they didn't allow any neuroses to form about the possibility. I have thought about this and there are a few things that would worry me if my child played in this fashion. First and foremeost, she is only three. So in the interests of relevance, let us imagine that she is between eight and fourteen. That's right, eleven. Although the thought of abduction *does* concern me, my main worry would be traffic. When I was a kid, even A-roads between towns were fairly sedentry places, where you could drive for spells of time without any other car in sight. Especially at night (there were also a lot more moths around, but that's a different matter).
Now, the car is so obligatory that the alarming rate of deaths per month is seen as an acceptably mortality rate in return for the convenience of being able to travel short distances at speed, without getting wet. Deaths due to traffic accidents in the UK are equivalent to one Boeing 757 crashing into the ground *every month*! (We can rest assured that if it was actaully a brand of aircraft responsible for so many deaths, it would be grounded immediately. Concorde only had to do it once).

Oooh. So where were we...Do I miss these days? Sometimes. But let's not view this period with any variety of tinted spectacles, monocles or throw-away lenses. There were almost certainly vast grey slabs of interminable boredom which selective memory has expunged from our minds. Humans only tend to remember the very good times, or the very bad times. The 'nothing much happening' times are skilfully removed and siposed of, like the boudoir biscuit layer of any decent trifle.

There was boredom during those times. Pubs didn't open all day and shut at 10pm, there were only three channels, and programmes only started in the evening at shut down at midnight...

We lived just down the road from 2 main roads (see http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=334336&y=395890&z=0&sv=L20+5BJ&st=2&tl=Postcode+L20+5BJ&pc=L20+5BJ&mapp=newmap.srf&searchp=newsearch.srf if your dont believe me...note Bootle New Strand on the left...where Jamie Bulger was abducted from).

The park was across one of them...I was about 7 before I was allowed to go to the park on my own and it was only after my mum was 100% sure that I understood and used the green cross code...she would test us on the way to the shops, we'd take it in turns to tell her when it was safe.

Luckily all the kids on my street used to play together most days so we would watch out for each other and I was allowed to get an older friend to cross me across the road after the age of about 4 (usually one of my sisters friends).

I used to get the train home from school on my own at 9 when we moved house away from primary school...before that my mum used to walk us or when she went back to work we would walk up with all the other kids and their mums.

I thikn what I'm saying is that keeping your children away from traffic just makes them even less likely to be able to cope with it...not *one* child from my school got knocked over or hurt by a car(even the ones who used to play chicken)...we were all fairly streetwise and that is what I feel todays kids miss out on

Well, as someone born not so long afte rhte hot summer of 76 I find it strange looking at the way just schools have changed.
We used to have a proper set of metal work equipment in our school. Gone, Health and safety. I only remember burning myself once, i didn't like it, so didn't do it again.
Sports. They are seriously talking of stopping rugby cause people can get injured doing it. Yep, you can, every time I did it just about.
My brothers school don't do Shot put, javalin, or discus anymore, when I was at Taht* school we did all of them. Yes, they were dangerous, yes, I got stabbed by a javalin, but my own fault, we'd been told not to run up to them i didn't do it again, and no one got taken to court over it, I just had a nice plaster put on.
Talking of plasters.
In schools now, they can't put a plaster on a kid who's got a small cut, just in case they are allergic, and the parents take the school to court.
the whole world has gone bonkers.
As a kid I'd disappear some weekends, for the entire weekend, with mates, on bike and with tend on back... No one would have ever dreamed of telling us it was dangerous, or that we should have been supervised by parents, and this was age 11 or so. Heck, I walked a mile or so to school at primary school, on my own from age 7, no one was kiddnapped, abducted or anything, though it was a possibility, it didn't become such a over talked possibility that people took it seriously heck, and thats thinking of it, when I was at school in the 80's, so it is that recent that society gone a bit bonkers stupid.

Don't know why everyone's thinking that this is a description of the 70s... sounds just like the 60s (when I was a kid) to me, and prolly the 50s too.

It also sounds very idyllic... it wasn't entirely like that. Some kids did fall out of trees and get hurt. Some kids did run out in front of cars and get hurt or killed. Some kids were abducted and murdered. There were train crashes and a lot of people died in them. And maybe it gets reported more now, but it got reported then too. Oh - and about the "building go-carts out of scraps"... a friend of mine did that, and just for added effect he thought he'd put a battering ram on the front of it, so he got a three-foot long piece of 2x1, nailed it (one rusty nail, a Corgi lorry for a hammer) to the front of his go-cart, sat on it and got a friend to push him toward a wall. Obviously the nail didn't hold, and you can imagine where the piece of wood went

Maybe there weren't so many overweight children then, but there was always at least one fat kid (in real life and in fiction - Billy Bunter, Fatty from the Bash St Kids, etc), but it was more likely to be for physiological reasons than through lifestyle.

But I did all those things in Bornonthe20thaugust's post, and I'm damn glad I grew up when I did and was able to have that freedom. I got my first road bike when I was 10, and my parents had few qualms about letting me ride it on the road.

However, it sounds a lot like what my dad used to say to me about when he was a kid in the 20s - how he could walk up and down streets without fear of motor cars, how he could leave his bike anywhere without fear of it being stolen, how he and his friends played games where they'd leave coins as a trail for another kid to follow and find them, and a whole bunch of other stuff I can't even recall.

Plus ça change.

I used to live in the countryside, and used to go for really long bike rides, out into the more remote areas of our county for many hours- without a second thought about perverts or murderers, how times change, eh?

I speant a lot of time before my parents divorced playing in fields and parks and the suchlike too. That was only about 10 years ago...I only started staying indoors when I had mountains of homework to do, and was going through the teen thing.

I think it still exists. It's just the dangers are more real...if that makes sense.

It (paedophilia) existed in the 70's, no doubt, but we were all pretty 'sheltered' from that sort of thing then. Is it because of the Internet making this world a smaller and more frightening place?

And who'd think we'd be here drinking Chateau du Chasalay?

I remember eating sweets and jelly and ice cream and lots of brightly coloured foods that are probably banned these days. My mother was X-rayed when she was expecting me and probably smoked through the entire pregnancy. (We're talking mid-50s here) My sister at the age of 18 months was given phenol barbitone to give her (and especially my parents) a night's sleep.

You could buy codeine in bottles of 60, loose, with or without a prescription. A prescription didn't cost anything.

But, as Peet said, for some reason, our kids are our products. Where did we go wrong if we had such a healthy and uninhibited childhood? All we want to do is to give it to our kids. They abuse it, ignore it and deride it.

That last sentence is a bit daft. You can't deride something you're ignoring. But you know what I mean. And of my three, only one is that bad.