And carry on!
Miranda Ward recalls the good old days when making the most of what was to be had was the norm – and great fun, too!
s a child I lived in a second-hand world. Most of my clothes were hand-me-downs from my big sister Fran; my cousin, blabbermouth Betty, told everyone “that used to be my Brownie uniform”.
And it wasn’t just clothes: even our toilet paper was second-hand – neat rectangles cut from old newspapers and pinioned onto a spike (the snippets gave me a very skew-whiff view of the world). When we had visitors, out went the spike and in came the bar of transparent soap and the green pack of medicated toilet tissues. Woe betide any child who dared to use the toilet before our visitors left and the spike was brought out of hiding. I once sneaked a piece of the forbidden tissue and was hugely disappointed, it was far less absorbent than newspaper, and certainly less absorbing… nothing to read!
It might have been a second-hand world, but it was an exciting one. We had a readymade adventure playground that we called “the bomb-building”, at the top of the
AIzal – not much use as loo roll! road, where pink spikes of rosebay willowherb flourished happily among precarious piles of rubble. We had no idea that the fragments of brick, tile and broken glass had once been a house, and the crater we skated down was a legacy of war. To us, the place was a child’s paradise. Knowing we were forbidden to play there added to the excitement. Our playground came complete with buried treasure: a typical day’s rummage yielded a silvery shoe buckle attached to a sliver of black leather, a shard of stained glass, a dog-eared photograph in a twisted frame and a thruppenny bit (enough for ten aniseed balls and a stick of barley sugar). Once, I found a fingerless glove and threw it back without a thought for the wearer.
When the builders came, we were furious. We watched, stone-faced, as they poured weedkiller on the willowherb. A digger scooped up the
‘We had no idea the fragments of brick, tile and broken glass had once been a house’
rubble and turned it into cement. They filled our crater, surrounded it all with barbed wire and installed a house in place of our wonderful playground. How could they!
We were forced to play in the park with its weeded flower beds and a park-keeper who locked the gates at teatime. It just wasn’t the same; swings and a see-saw were no substitute for our boundless playground.
Back then, our second-hand world was, for us children, a first-hand source of adventure and discovery. And oh, the fun we had!