I came from a wee place in central Scotland where we made up our own adventures when we were young in the 1960s.
We had little of materialistic value but what we did have was friendship and fun. We were unaware of any politics that would interfere with our love of life and no social media to influence our mental health, and as far as I remember, we were also oblivious to any foul play. We stuck together as friends and no-one was going to come between us.
We had a carefree attitude which lots of kids had back then and still have today. We all came from the local council estate and never went hungry. We always had food in our bellies and clothes on our backs, even if they were hand-me-downs. Some kids had sugar or dripping sandwiches which our mum disapproved of as we always had meat or fish with two veg and always homemade.
We were adventurous with wild imaginations and we always played games in the street together. There were no computer games back then. Even though we never had the technology we have today, we learned and socialised with each other face to face. Our games become our own adventures as children and are still my most cherished adventures to this day.
One of the games that we played was “Kick the can”. A can would be placed on the road/pavement and someone would be it. “It” would close their eyes and count to ten, whilst everyone hid. “It” would then try to find everybody and whilst they weren’t looking, someone would run and kick the can behind “Its” back. As simple as it sounds compared to the complex games available today, it provided us with endless fun.
We also played an adventurous game called “Statues”, where we would all move slowly forward in the street and the person nominated at the front would have their back to us and would suddenly turn around and shout, “STOP!” and we would have to stand perfectly still like statues. The nominated person would then mingle between us to try and make us move or laugh. The person left standing at the end would be the winner.
When it was just us girls playing, we would all form a circle with a nominated friend in the middle. We then sang a song and all had to act it out with body moves. The song went something like this:
“I’ve got legs like Betty Grable, I have a figure like Marylin Munroe, I have hair like Ginger Rogers, And a face like a big yoyo.” In our adventures, we would imagine in our wildest dreams that we could become like our idols, the Hollywood stars.
Another game that we used to play was a game about money – pre-decimal of course – where someone would be nominated in front of a crowd of friends and they would throw a ball with their backs to us and shout out an amount of money. The person who caught the ball got the amount of money. At the end of the game, whoever had the most amount of money would win. Not just fun but educational too, whilst imagining in our wildest adventures that one day, we could become rich and famous.
We played lots of games together including skipping ropes and elastic ropes. We would spend hours joining elastic bands together to make a complete circle of elastic rope. Two friends would stand opposite each other and wind the rope around their ankles and one of you would stand in the middle and jump the ropes in sequence. Two balls against the wall and hopscotch which we called “beds”, where we used to play with a tin of shoe polish as the peever and had hours and hours of fun. Lots of games would have rhymes associated with them, letting our imaginations run wild.
I cannot complete this story without the mention of “scraps”. I’m not so sure how to describe them but they came in sheets and you separated them. They were bright and beautiful in amazing colours. We would collect and assemble them in the pages of a book and we would arrange to swap them with our friends. The scraps came in sets or singular. The idea was to build up sets. There would be angels, gnomes, Santa Clauses, Water Babies and many many more depictions, creating our own adventures with our unique collections of scraps.
Back in the sixties, we lived in an industrial region in central Scotland, also known as the rain belt of Scotland but we were lucky enough to live 5 minutes away from a beautiful glen. Aside from the games, we would make our own wonderful adventures swimming in the river and climbing trees and crossing a tree across a ravine, despite it being so scary with the acrid smells of the local distillery in your nose depending on which direction the wind was blowing.
A special adventure I used to create with my wee friend Jean, was when we were about 8 or 9 years old we would walk up and down the street in front of the boys with two tennis balls up our jumpers pretending we were the real Marylin Munro or Betty Grable, or Ginger Rodgers dancing with her Fred Astaire. Imagining a totally different life to the one we were living at that wee age.
Gosh, those memories and adventures really make me smile. What a wonderful, adventurous childhood I had, and I wouldn’t swap it for all the world.