My recent articles about child's play certainly hit a nerve, I have had a lot of feed back. Thanks for that, it's nice to know people are reading and taking notice. One comment was that you have to be over 50 years old to really appreciate the things we did in our spare time all those years ago because so much has changed. I think this is probably right. The modern obsession with 'safety' tends to make parents over-protective and in the process they deprive the children of much valuable street experience that serves them well in later life. We found out very quickly that actions have consequences, unlike video games where you can get away (literally) with murder and extreme violence.
One evidence of this is the modern concept of 'the school run' where many children are delivered to the school gate often in large urban assault vehicles! When I was a lad we always walked to school, even when I was only just over four years old and had a mile to walk to Hope Memorial on Huntsman's Brow, crossing a main road on the way with no crossing warden to help me. Later I had even further to go but I can't remember ever being ferried in the car.
Thinking about this another thing struck me. I was born in 1936 and in my early years at school we were all carrying gas masks, doing Air Raid Drills and being lectured about not picking up brightly coloured objects because they were explosive devices dropped by the Jerries to kill children. I'm not sure if that was true but we collected shrapnel that fell from the sky like rain from the Ack Ack shells that were fired at the bombers. No great danger to us going to school as it fell mostly at night but I do remember staggering into school one morning with a particularly interesting find, a full clip of 20mm explosive cannon shells from a damaged German plane. That got the teacher's attention! The local Bomb Disposal people came straight away and I got a severe ticking off! Add to this the bombing we had to put up with, everything from incendiaries to land mines that had over a ton of explosive in them and you can see why the 'dangers' of walking alone to school didn't carry a lot of weight with our parents!
I'm glad our modern children aren't exposed to things like this but the result seems to have been too much concentration on safety by over-protective parents. Unwittingly they are depriving children of valuable experience that will serve them well in later life. I don't see walking to school as hazardous in Barlick! Perhaps we were too busy surviving to worry over-much about safety. Perhaps I was just lucky but I can assure you it wasn't an unhappy childhood and I am sure we all came out stronger at the end of the war. Let the kids have their adventures and they'll spend less time in their bedrooms in front of a screen!
This is what a land mine looked like! This one failed to explode in Liverpool in 1940.
