As children, we would ride in putter bomb cars with no seat belts or air bags.SOMETIMES when summer feels so far away and I need a feel-good factor to combat cabin fever, I reflect on what we of another generation may call the "good old days".
A walk down memory lane
to appreciate our childhood free range days - and a wake up call for the "caged kids" of today.
As kids we ate anything and everything and then burned it off by playing outside - not PlayStationing inside.
All of our family ate processed products, loads of kai from a can and diseases were what poor people got from famine.
Obesity was another name for sumo wrestling and stress was what Dad made at Robert's Concrete down on Hewletts Rd.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.
As children, we would ride in putter bomb cars with no seat belts or air bags.
Takeaway food was limited to fish and chips from the Del Monte and Golden Horizon, no pizza from hell, no Mickey Dees from the Mount main road or big buckets from the Gate Pa colonel.
Even though all the shops closed at 6pm and didn't open on the weekends, somehow we didn't starve to death.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy licorice straps, gobstoppers, blackballs and some double happy crackers to blow up frogs with.
We ate huge doorstops of unsliced Parnwells white bread.
Wicked white bread with real butter and not a polyunsaturated anywhere.
We drank tap water and would have laughed if you told us water would cost more than petrol at a gas station. We drank Fanta and ate fried bread with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day. There were no texts to tell us it was kai time, we just knew by the sun disappearing over the Kaimais.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were okay.
We would spend hours building huts over the railway lines at Central Parade and stash them full of pine cones to flog them off for five bob a bag when we were broke.
We made trolleys out of old prams and pakaru push bikes and then big kids would make all the little kids push them around the block. Brakes? Hell no, they were for sissies - that was half the fun to freewheel all the way down Blake Park hill.
We did not have Bebo or Facebook, iPads, laptops or pieces of plastic to hold in the palms of our hands and send monosyllable messages to mates we had never met ... WE HAD mates and we went outside and found them, spoke and joked with them kanohe te kanohe (face to face).
We were given spud guns and shanghais for our 10th birthdays and fishing under the Mount Wharf was our library of learning on how to forage for a feed. We rode bikes or walked to school and we knew every peach tree to flog fruit from on the way home.
Rugby boots had square toes and they came in one colour, boot polish black.
You ran as fast as the wind to practice and you dawdled back home afterward and after the game you stayed in your gear for the rest of the weekend. Mums had a no-go zone on game day.
Footy was for fathers and back then we all had one - and scoring a try was a ticket to the 2 o'clock pictures that afternoon.
Friday nights in town were a big deal and any act of violence was rarer than a Cob 'n' Co steak - the first fancy feed I can ever remember having.
Our teachers used to cane our backsides if we got out of line and respect was a prerequisite to getting a half decent school report and look out if you didn't get one of those. The idea of PD or a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
But that was back in the day when we had the good fortune to grow up as free range kids, before the government and the joy police got hold of us.
We had it good back then before Bebo, when we played outside all day and not on a PlayStation inside.
broblack@xtra.co.nz
As children, we would ride in putter bomb cars with no seat belts or air bags.SOMETIMES when summer feels so far away and I need a feel-good factor to combat cabin fever, I reflect on what we of another generation may call the "good old days".
A walk down memory lane
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