MADAM - My mum used to cut fowl, rabbits, chop eggs and spread butter on bread on the same cutting board with the same knife, (no bleach) but we didn’t get food poisoning.
My favourite snack?
Apples sliced/rolled in sugar and my very own home made lemonade - sugared water in a corona bottle.
Corona bottles were recycled and foil from cigarette packets.
(Later foil tops from milk bottles).
Every kid collected these things and sent them off for gifts etc.
(Much later to the Blue Peter appeal for them to buy guide dogs for the blind).
Local authorities seem unable to recycle foil now, so it goes into land fill.
Come to think of it these days, the PC brigade would never allow a programme to be called “The Black and White Minstrel Show” or a kids programme called “Blue Peter.”

Sandwiches were wrapped in waxed 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, the canal or at the beach, instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

We all did PE at school, we ‘risked’ permanent injury in a pair of Dunlop black plimsolls instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors that now cost as much as a small car.
I can’t recall any injuries but they must have happened because we’re told how much safer we are now.

We got the cane for doing something wrong at school, it was called discipline yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honour and respect those older than us.
We took penknives to school and Scouts had sheath knives – but no one ever stabbed anyone.

There were 52 kids in my class at the time and we all learned to read and write, do maths and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter.
A miracle too - we could all do and recite correctly multiplication tables up to 12 times, many up to 20 times - from memory.
Computers and calculation machines were unheard of, (we did have a Chinese Abacus and learned to use it).
We all said prayers in school irrespective of our religion, we sang hymns and took part in nativity plays and carol concerts, sang the national anthem paraded around with the Union Flag on St. George’s Day and no one was offended.
There were three black boys in my class – no one ever or even noticed much less bothered.
We played freely in the fields and the woods.
Once I was cheeky and ‘rude’ to a policeman, he gave me a clip over the right ear.
When I got home I complained – all I got was another one over the left ear.

Staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention we wish we hadn’t got.
For a while I was bullied at school by a much older youth.
I was told to ‘stand up for myself’, I did – it stopped completely when I clouted him in the face holding half a house brick.

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 stations - we weren’t.
My Dad’s wage then was £1.15 shillings per week less 2/6, (175pence less 12½ pence).

Oh yes ... and where were the antibiotics and sterilisation kits when I got that wasp sting?
I could have been killed.
We all had the diphtheria/polio/smallpox jabs too at school.
No one ever thought to ask married Mummy and Daddy for permission.
The school dentist though we met with trepidation.
He was known as ‘The Torturer’.
We played ‘King of the Hill’ on piles of gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, mum would pull out the 2/6d (12½p) bottle of iodine, applied it and then we got our backsides spanked.
Now it’s a trip to A & E followed by a 10 day dose of antibiotics and then mummy calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
We played hide and seek and had camps out in the woods.
We hung around in gangs which had no names or their own ‘turf’.
Anyone could join ‘our gang’ and we did not threaten or intimidate anyone but we had to be home before it got dark.

Not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family.
How could we possibly have known that?
All that mattered was that we were happy kids and every day was another adventure.
We learned quickly from our mistakes.
We never needed to get into unheard of group therapy and/or anger management classes.
We were obviously so ‘duped’ by so many of society’s ills, that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac. ®.
How did we ever survive?
Lee Prescott
Stonehouse