The good old days were not always that good!

DURING an interview with Toowoomba woman Leila Conway on her 101st birthday earlier this month, I asked her what had changed the most during her past 100 years.

Mrs Conway had no hesitation in saying that the biggest difference in life today as to her early days was the way children were brought up.

“If the children lived like we did, they couldn’t do it,” she said, adding that kids today have too much technology at their hands and not enough of the “simple life”.

It got me thinking about my own childhood and how my parents, particularly my father, lumbered me with tasks that, today, might have seen him receive a visit from the authorities.

Of course, we didn’t think of that at the time, we just did as we were told.

But I got talking with my mates about it and we all had stories that we laugh about now, but, looking back, were quite scary.

Like the time not long after our family transferred from North Queensland to Haden, north of Toowoomba.

My dad called me under the house one day to show me some tracks in the dirt.

He had met my mother in Croydon in the Gulf Country so he had seen similar tracks.

“See that,” he said, pointing to the disturbed dirt, “that looks like death adder tracks”.

This of course sent a shiver down my spine as it probably would any 11year-old as I was at the time.

He followed the tracks into a garden of shrubbery against the house and told me to stay there and keep watch while he got the mower.

There I stood under the house while Dad ploughed through the shrubbery with a large mower.

I spotted an obvious scaled reptilian creature slithering among the shrubs and I took off.

Fortunately, it was a blue tongue lizard.

I’m not sure who was more relieved, me or my mother who after all had to wash my shorts in those days.

Not long after that episode I recall the family returning to Haden from Toowoomba one Sunday night.

It had been raining and the creek between Kingsthorpe and Goombungee had flooded with water across the bridge.

My dad turned to me: “Peter, get out and walk in front of the car and see how deep that water is”.

It was dark, cold and creepy, but hey, you did as you were told and I started wading through the current.

Suddenly, I noticed the car almost on me and I had to take a dive to the side to avoid being run over.

After he pulled up on the other side of the creek, my father simply told me: “Sorry about that, but I was worried the car might stall in the water”.

I think my father’s thinking was, “Well, I’ve got five sons, what difference would losing one or two make?”

However, regardless of the trials I was put through as a kid, nothing came close to my mate Nobby who is probably still in therapy looking back at his childhood.

His family had a pub in Yarraman which in the 1960s had yet to have inside toilets installed forcing hotel guests to take a “bed pan” to their room when they retired for the night.

At the age of seven or eight, it was Nobby’s job to collect and empty the bed pans in the morning.

“I had a big bucket which I struggled to carry down the stairs,” he told me.

“The bucket would splash the contents out, some of which would land on me.”

One morning, the young Nobby had had enough and simply took the bucket over to the upstairs verandah rail and tipped it over the side.

The contents splashed on the ground below and our Nobby felt relieved that he hadn’t had to carry that bucket down the stairs.

That was until a guest who had been under the verandah having a morning smoke at the time suddenly appeared looking upward at a sevenyear-old holding an empty bucket.

I don’t think even Leila would have accepted that job.