Black Or White.........

[Shaglene]

My mum used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread butter on bread on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.

Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e. coli

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake or at the beach instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

We all took PE ..... and risked permanent injury with a pair of Dunlop sandshoes instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors that cost as much as a small car. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

We got the cane for doing something wrong at school, they used to call it discipline yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honour & respect those older than us.

We had 30+ kids in our class and we all learned to read and write, do maths and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter......., FUNNY THAT!!

We all said prayers in school and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. We weren't!!

Oh yeah .... and where was the antibiotics and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played “King of the Hill” on piles of gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, mum pulled out the 2/6 bottle of iodine and then we got our backside spanked.

Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day dose of antibiotics and then mum calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family.

How could we possibly have known that?

We never needed to get into group therapy and/or anger management classes.

We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!

How did we ever survive?

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA.
AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.
I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING!

[DaisyNonna]

I had a great inner city childhood, playing on the bomb sites (strictly forbidden) and in the parks (some gravel covered) with tall slides, witches' hats etc. No soft landings. Never short of mischief.
Frozen school milk bottles on the radiators to thaw. Playing field? No.
We ran, climbed, fell, bled, picked ourselves up and kept going.
Survived!

[zebo]

Could anyone injured on the play park aka a bomb site sue the Luftwaffe for the mess they left behind? My little brother damaged a wedding cake Mum had ready for collection, he went missing for the rest of the day, no-one was too concerned, he'd be back when he was hungry!

[Peter Pedant]

This is typical recall bias ( you are biassed towards something coz you remember it - like summers being full of sunny days when in fact it rained alot )

we didnt have Prozac and the psychiatric hospitals ( or lunatic asylums ) were chock-abloc until chlorpromazine came along ( and emptied them) in the early sixties

and yes we did have child molesters
and yes barnardos homes have a long history of the masters abusing the children in various ways from around 1900

and yes London was evacuated for fear of bombing and the hospitals were emptied to await the hundreds of thousands of 'war psychosis' cases which would occur in civilians once the bombing started.
When my school was bombed ( clearly I was not in it nor even born -) the reports at the time said that the support the kids were getting meant that outside (psychological) help would NOT be needed to heal the trauma

and yes Pepys records children playing King of the Castle using dung heaps in London streets - in 1658 the stock of parliament was so low before the restoration that those very children used to shot 'kiss my parliament' instead of kiss my *** ....
oops and yes lots of people died in the plague eight years later

and yup there were 30 in my class
and no not every child came out of skool able to read and write

and a few kids were forced to leave at 14 and labour on the farms or building sites. and they were looked on as exploitable cheap labour with no future

Funny how things change and thank god !

other than that I remember it like you do

[Peter Pedant]

Oh God sorrry shaglene

it is under JOKES
and not ' here be the unvarnished troof'

sozza. dont read headings very well

[ubasses]

We survived because we learnt to make a risk assessment as part of everyday life, not to have to fill in endless forms to prevent us being stupid.