Vocal Voices

Osc's thread about the dolls house brought this back to me.

Kim (who is my oldest friend and like a sister) and I used to play for hours and hours with paper children we cut out of catalogues. Freemans catalogue being our favourite, but Mothercare was good too. We made a big house out of cardboard boxes and it was our orphanage for these children. They all had names and we knew them all, all 50 odd of them

We cut out furniture that we stuck on the walls and beds out the curtain and bedding pages, with a slit for them to put their heads through so it looked like they were in bed. We cut out toys for them, pets, books.

We played orphanages for hours and hours. It is the one shared memory we have that no one else can share

We did have a disaster one day, we took them on a trip out the garden and the wind blew a few away

What a great memory Shell..hours of fun when you were young.

My favourite toys were my roller skates..my oh my did I love my roller skates.

We lived right at the top of a long hill and I spent hours every day zooming down that hill and walking back up again.
Funny how I've ended up living in a really hilly place again.

And my bike...I still remember the sheer joy at finding a brand new blue Raleigh bike waiting for me on Christmas morning 1970.

Oh the memories of always, always being outside playing with my friends and only going home when I was hungry or it got dark.

Ooh I had roller skates! Loved them - I didn't get a bike until I passed my 11 plus

My toy cars I loved and my Bettabuilder lego. I have a younger sister and we had playmates a few doors away. Jane was my age, Jackie my sister's age and their brother Andrew tagged along. Our little cousin Richard (Aunty Rose's boy) came over a lot

I was always reading - I read myself to sleep every night

Kaz wrote:Ooh I had roller skates! Loved them - I didn't get a bike until I passed my 11 plus

My toy cars I loved and my Bettabuilder lego. I have a younger sister and we had playmates a few doors away. Jane was my age, Jackie my sister's age and their brother Andrew tagged along. Our little cousin Richard (Aunty Rose's boy) came over a lot

I was always reading - I read myself to sleep every night

I read in bed too.

Can you remember the year there was all the power cuts..well that was the year I read Heidi...by candlelight.

Yes I remember them well

Again Kim and I used to walk down to the Post Office where they also sold books, and buy an Enid Blyton every couple of weeks, on a Saturday, when we had enough pocket money. We would sit one each end of her mums settee and read and read and they swap and spend Sunday doing exactly the same.

We both had roller skates, she had a speedy pair and mine were slower. One day we went to her Grannies in them. Her flying ahead, me slower. When we left her grannies we had to come down five steep steps, hesitant me took mine off, not her. I got to the bottom and heard a thud, there she was in a heap

No roller skates - but I did have a three-wheeler trike with a boot. We had an alcoholic aunt who lived with us, so we kids in the avenue used to fill the boot with her empty beer bottles (and any others we could scavenge around the neighbourhood) and take them down the hill to the off-licence, where you could get 3d back on a bottle ! Paid for the Sunday comics!!

One of the favourite games in the avenue was making up toy farms, complete with animals. We used to have a daily market where we'd swop animals amongst us ....

I practically lived on roller skates God we were good, we'd have loved the really fast ones that came later, we were forever oiling them to gain more speed
We moved just before I was 11, and the road was perfect. About 8 of us similar ages, and a hilly alley, with bends, all paved It was a quiet cul-de-sac too, so no danger apart from ourselves. My goodness, the injuries!
Before moving a friend and I were racing down a hill, got too fast near the bottom and both had to stop by grabbing a lamppost, you know the hexagonal ones, they give you really, really bad bruises and burns on your arms!
Then going down that alley, on down the path and the chicane - a big rusty screw was sticking out of a concrete post, and then stuck into my leg...
I spent most of my childhood on a bike, or roller skates, or in a swimming pool, where we'd be left for the day

We spent most of our time playing in trees, making dens and generally getting filthy.

My friend and I also used to cut the pictures out of catalogues and use them as fairies - we would make little houses for them in the garden and would spend hours playing with them. I remember making an ice rink for them out of a piece of cardboard, tin foil, matches and bits of string.

Another favourite was drowning ants!!!! It must have been during one of the summers when we had a drought as I remember the paddling pool was filled up at the beginning of the summer holidays and just topped up occasionally but the water wasn't actually changed. The bottom of the paddling pool must have been covered with dead ants!

We had a small play shed in our garden which, at the time, seemed huge. We had two armchairs, a coffee table and a desk in there and would spend hours and hours playing in there. My poor sister was never allowed in as she never knew the password (it changed every time we told her it) so to be allowed to come in and play with my friends and I she had to be our slave and fetch us drinks and biscuits all day.

I remember as we got into secondary school we would go off for the whole day either on our bikes or to the swimming baths, taking a packed lunch with us. We had roller skates and skateboards too although they were rarely used as we lived on a hill!

We had a sweet shop at the top of the road and one a couple of streets away and we would be really naughty and sneak into their back yard to get the empty pop bottles, take them round to the counter to get the money back on them and then buy sweets with them. I think most of the neighbourhood kids did it! The shop keepers never seemed to realise.

Another favourite pastime was sitting on the wall outside the house in my full riding regalia, with a blanket over the wall as a saddle and a skipping rope tied to the gate post as reins. I could spend a whole day doing that if there was no one around to play with.

I was quite a solitary child as the nearest of my brothers to me in age was 6 years older and the other was 8 years older, so when I was small they were in school. Mind you, the younger taught me to read before I went to school, and the older one used to put on radio programmes from one of the upstairs rooms, he drilled a hole into the kitchen and fed down a speaker of some kind. Not surprisingly, he ended up working in television!

When I was about 4, our gardener built me a little den in the garden, which I loved, it had two rooms and I had great tea parties there with my dolls. When I was about 10 or 11, myself and two other girls roamed around the local area, up on the moors, along the old tramline having picnics and making dens. We lived within walking distance of a beach, so in the summer many days were spent there even when the weather wasn't great. We would bring gipsy cream biscuits and lemonade. There was a small shop just behind our house that someone set up in a shed in their garden, and when we were a bit older, one or other of the lads would cycle up the cliff path to the shop and buy icecream and then have to really belt it right down to the beach before the ice cream melted. That beach was the scene of many a romance as we got into our teens, there was a great crowd who went there regularly, some even cycled from five or six miles away, and we all listened to Radio Caroline all day long, I seem to have spent my teens with a transistor permanently attached to my shoulder (no wonder I still remember the words to so many songs from the 60s ) I once fell down the stairs at home while listening to the radio, and as I lay in a heap at the bottom my mother came to the top of the stairs and said "I hope you haven't broken that radio!"