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PASTIMES
 When my young grandsons say this to me, I think, we
were never bored as kids. There was always something of interest to do.
All our pastimes seemed to have a ‘season.’. There were whips and tops,
hopscotch, fly the lion, conkers, cigarette cards, birds nesting,
catching tiddlers (minnows) in the stream, hoops and skimmers, and
yo-yos.
No! we were never bored and we had no TV, computer games or all the
electronic gadgets available to children today.
Whips & Tops came in around Easter time, You could get a ‘mushroom’ or
‘flower-pot’ top and with the whip the idea was to keep it spinning as
long as possible, Hoops were in fashion in the Autumn when the evenings
were drawing in. They were made of iron, about three feet in diameter
and fashioned by the local blacksmith, and the skimmer, an iron hook
with which you ‘trolled’the hoop along the road. It was great fun
running down the road and seeing sparks fly where the hoop bounced along
the hard surface. Fly the lion was a team game, where four or five boys
would bend down nose to tail against a wall to form a bridge and the
others would run and jump on to their backs and see how many could land
before the ’bridge’ collapsed beneath them.
We seemed to spend so much time out of doors, climbing trees, roaming
the water meadows and the fields and searching the hedgerows for birds
nests. I had quite a large collection of eggs all labelled and stored in
shoe boxes on a bed of sawdust. Sledging and skating in the winter,
paddling and bathing
In the river in the summer, no there never seemed enough hours in the
day for our boy-hood pastimes. |
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