On the naughty step

labels on the tins on the stairs’, so

I got away with it.” Lucky you, Toni, but I can’t help feeling sorry for the poor, innocent cat!

Back in the Fifties, Margaret Anderson and her friend Mary used to play a game known to them as Knock Out Ginger: “We rang people’s doorbells then ran away. One day the local shopkeeper must have been watching and opened his door so quickly we didn’t

‘“I smeared ‘Deep Heat’ liniment on the toilet seat!”

have time to run away so we stood our ground and defiantly said it wasn’t us. We were so scared we never played that game again.”

Mari Wallace was only nine when she sneaked off to smoke with her two playmates: “A woman who was walking her dog came across us and threatened to tell our mothers. My mother had always said that if

I did anything bad, she wanted to hear it straight from me, not from anyone else. I was so frightened that when I got home, I confessed I had been smoking.

“Of course, the woman had been bluffing – she didn’t know my mother at all – but I never touched a cigarette after that.”

Carolyn Chisholm (pictured above) carelessly left her tricycle on the pavement outside her home: “When the greengrocer’s horse-drawn van pulled up, it rolled in front of the horse which panicked and took off down the road, mangling my bike in the process. Thankfully, the horse wasn’t hurt, but my trike never recovered.”

The prize for the naughtiest deed goes to Margaret Rymer: “One of the worst tricks I did was smearing ‘Deep Heat’ liniment all over the toilet seat for a joke. It was intended for my cousin who was staying with us at the time but, as I watched through a crack in my bedroom door, it was my poor dad who could be seen dashing across the landing with his long johns around his ankles, squealing, ‘What the hell!’.”

■ More of your naughty deeds in the next issue out on August 11…

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