The glorious days of fun before health and safety
At its worst Twitter can be a snarling bear pit of mutual incomprehension. Every so often, though, it throws up something utterly delightful that unites us. And so it was over the weekend when barrister Joanna Hardy posted a simple question: “What’s your childhood memory of something that would cause a health and safety overload nowadays?”
Hardy went first: “On a day out,” she recalled, “my parents let my brother and I hire a motorboat on our OWN. We were about 4 or 5 at the time. I think they thought it would be gentle. Off we went into the middle of the lake. My brother panicked and jammed the steering stick thing. We just did violent doughnuts in the water screaming our heads off for about 15 minutes until they found a rescue boat. Absolutely traumatised. Imagine the paperwork now.”
Joanna’s hair-raising story prompted a huge memory rush. Scores of respondents cheerfully offered up examples of neardeath escapades in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies.
Seaside disasters were commonplace. “Windsurfing in the sea off Donegal at summer camp aged 14. Offshore wind developed,” recalled Sonia, “I got blown out to sea. Rescue boat man had gone for lunch.
Was rescued hours later suffering from hypothermia. Told to take a shower & put an extra jumper on to warm up.”
Don’t you love the rescue man who had gone to lunch?
Scores of people recalled being balanced on their father’s knee and steering the car home while dad operated the pedals. Many recalled travelling in the boot or clinging to pallets or furniture or hay bales. Richard Armstrong’s recollection took some beating: “Youth club leader took us on a trip – 15 of us in his Triumph Toledo, including 4 in the boot. The last kids in the back had to be slotted in through an open window.”
Playground equipment was reliably lethal. One person recalled a witch’s hat roundabout with 20 kids piled on it as it rotated violently and “small kids ran underneath until knocked senseless”.
Adults not only turned a blind eye to danger, they aided and abetted it. “When I was nine, my best mate and I were learning about Ancient Egypt and wanted to try to make papyrus by slicing up pampas grass from my garden,” recalled Phil, “My teacher agreed and supplied us with a bunch of double-sided razor blades and a packet of plasters.” A thoughtful touch!
There were building sites and bonfires and bangers and the bumps where you bounced friends on concrete on their birthday. All quite sane compared to “lighting the spray from various aerosol cans to use as blowtorches” or “sledging on scrap car bonnets down the M6 embankment”. As you do.
Reading these stories, Himself and I were reduced to helpless tears of laughter. How on earth had our generation lived to tell the tale? It was a miracle. Yet, somehow, we did and those brushes with disaster, denied to our own sheltered, seat-belted offspring, are never to be forgotten. To live dangerously is to live vividly.
It made me think of that time I was squashed (aged about eight) in the footwell of a Mini tearing through Welsh country lanes. The car was so rusty it had a hole the size of a plate in the floor through which I could observe the road whizzing a few inches beneath. Happy days!
Please send me your memories of childhood before health and safety. Liam Halligan and I will read the best one out on our Planet Normal podcast this week and share some more of our own.