What do you remember from your youth that would never happen today?

Cars with no seatbelts and unheated wing mirrors on the wings.

My dad’s Morris Traveller with the sticky indicator which needed a thump on the inside of the door pillar to get it to pop out.

Great thread—amazing all the things we survived and, IMO, sad that kids today will never experience

Playing cowboys & Indians with homemade bow & arrows with the arrows as sharp as you can get them.

Getting a backhander from local plod for giving him lip

Getting the slipper at school or cane

Eating toast toppers

Yes and white dogshit never see that now?

Sat on the village green guarding a big pile of empties the bigger lads collected from the houses and the took back to the pub for the deposit. I got paid in threepenny bits.
Finding a cache of ww2 ammunition and rifles we were told by the police were put aside in case of invasion. Obviously we didn’t give it ALL back
We used to drill holes in fence posts stick in a live round and hit it with a hammer. Golden days.

Playing tiggy airgun and trying to hide the resulting purple bruises from mum and dad at bath time.

Going to The Anvil outdoor to buy cigs and cider for “my mum”.

Aged 14. Drinking Boddinton’s bitter in a school minibus on the way to The Lakes with a fully opened OS map to conceal us from the teacher in the driving seat.

Metal climbing frames on tarmac playgrounds at school

Soft. Ours were covered in concrete and broken glass. There was always some kid with his arm in a plaster at school.

Iodine on your knees after you fell over.

Making shrapnel ‘grenades’ from 3 bangers, a Ben Shaws pop bottle and a good handful of drawing pins.
Three bangers with the fuses wrapped together packed in the bottle with the drawing pins and the fuses sticking out of a hole in the screwtop lid.
The idea was to see how late you could leave off throwing the bottle into the air once you’d lit the fuse 😀

Kids today are quite good at making stuff up too. 😉

As a scout leader , i’m pleased to report that the rope with a knot/ball game is still going strong. Scouts are still allowed to build massive fires and carry knives (penknives only till you get to 13 then bowies it is!)as well as climbing trees and playing various fairly energetic wide games in the pitch black before coming back to poke sticks in the fire etc

We can’t travel up the M6 in a removal van though……

Standing on the transmission tunnel between the front seats of my dads car whilst he drove.
Similarly sleeping in the boot of a large estate whilst my dad drove 7 hours to Devon.

We went on a 6th form trip to a club, we were 16, the 3 teachers drove the minibus. thems were the days.

The grenades were a bit of a disappointment if i recall, more of a ‘pop’ than a bang. Anyone remember those whistling bangers you could buy? Made great missiles, you lit them & stuck them lit end first down a bit of pipe with a sealed off end. We used to shoot them at each other in the local park – how we never ended up with our faces blown off I’ll never know!

Aged about 10 I used to be sent to the paper shop to purchace 20 Senior Service for my Dad when his gout was bad and he couldn’t walk properly. The lady in the shop used to put them in a paper bag and fold over the top and selotape it down and write down the amount on the front.

Travelling the length of the street in the backies without toucing the ground, going from one air raid shelter roof to the next. Technical terms involved “half spammies” where distance < body length so hands in front and below face level so falling forward should span the gap, “full spammies” where distance = body length so hands at face level or above and the awesome “jumping spammies” where distance > body length so a jump was involved, as well as some tears and someone’s mum as often as not

Going shopping with my mum at the village CoOp. The counter girl would ringbir up and put the receipt and cash into a metal puck that was latched on to a network of cables on the ceiling and it it would be fired off to the cash office at the back of the store. Moments later the change and receipt came firing back. Every months or so wed go to the big CoOp in Chester or Birkenhead to cash in the divvy.

Sugar and weedkiller pipebombs. We set fire to Jamie Fogg’s dad’s shed that way.

Blagging the empty Barr’s pop bottles to return them for 20p to get toffee off the Penny Tray.

Playing in the local works throwing small metal discs at each other.

Going to scout camp and eating meat mush from the river. We had put four days worth of burgers and sausages in a plastic bag then put it in the river too stay cool. The bag had a hole so the meat turned into a pink blob which we ate for the next few days. Can’t imagine what river life had had a nibble previous! Wide games were fun, breaking into the rugby club, stealing whiskey, drinking it at the firing range/jump spot and riding through fire! Scouts was great.

Spud guns!
Remember the ones that had a little cartridge that flipped out to load with spud and a paper ‘cap’ off a roll. If you peeled the backing off the cap, you could fold two together and hurt people more!

getting dragged to the head penguins office by the hair/ear for 6 thwacks with a wooden meter ruler,last one turned on its edge if you were deemed possessed.All in the w**k bank btw 😯

Strippers at our local rugby club – who then did additional performances for cash. So I am told

Collecting cows eyes from the slaughter house for a biology lesson

13 year old Army cadets being sent on a fag break.
We used to travel to camp in an open 4 ton truck. No adult supervision, kids would be hanging off the back going down the motorway.
Occasionally we would take the mini bus. It had two sliddy wooden benches to sit on. The driver would slam the brakes on as hard as possible in an attempt to hurl the cadets across the van. They had a scoring system. They would get the smallest kid to sit immediately behind the driver. If they hit the brakes at the right moment the kid would end up wedged under the driver’s seat.
This was worth loads of points.

Jamming shotgun cartridges into the centre of round bales, then shooting at the percussion cap with an air rifle. From about 20 feet away.

Interestingly, and I wouldn’t want it to descend this fantastic thread into a health and safety debate, I read tthis the other day.

Lived next to Salisbury Plain. Once a year a big exercise had the squaddies camped in Pear Tree hill woods near Earlstoke. We’d buy a case of beer from the pub (George and Dragon). The walk up the hill and sell it for massive profit to thirsty troops.

Buying a .22 air rifle, Bowie knife, and WristRocket at the same time.

Somehow managed not to die or kill any of my mates.

Watching England win a World cup football match.

Running up to a copper and knocking his helmet off, running away, and if caught just getting a clip round the ear.

Playing split the kipper

Airgun fights

Going to France without a passport on a school trip and buying flick knives.

Being able to use whatever language to insult whoever you like in whatever way you like without fear of arrest.

‘Sticks and stone may break your bones but names will never hurt you’ being a very reliable mantra.

Weedkiller and sugar bombs. Obtaining boiling tubes from school and then filling them with petrol. Shooting them over a flame with a Webley Meteor .22, the weapon of choice, all the discerning lads had them.
And as so many others have said- just vanishing for hours and miles during amazing summer days that seemingly now lasted for ever. Oh if I could go back to those times…

In retrospect meeting ‘down the arcade’ on Saturdays and leering at the girls was grim but to be expected I suppose.

Outside toilets at school.

Dustmen who walked into the back garden to collect the bin, and except for Christmas, usually half empty.

Same Milkman my entire childhood.

More worried that my Mum would find out, than actually getting the cane/slipper.

Buying fags in ones from the sweet shop.

Driving a van in my first job, with only the Boss asking ‘can you drive?’

Never, ever carrying any form of ID.

Going out without a watch or mobile phone
Being safe on a bike on a dual carriageway tt
Getting wacked with a ruler in German lessons
Drinking thunderbird (kids these days semust be more discerning surely)

I too used to love the long, languid summer days when we used to cycle bloody miles and hang around in leafy places talking about girls, Commodore 64s and BMXs. I’d be out of the house by ten and would only pop back for meals, I’d roll in home long past dark.

In my teens it was all about drinking cider in the park and smoking your way through a packet of ten JPS…bought for the princely sum of 79p.

Playing “stinky finger” in the park with Jane Kelly.

tying the ‘fur’ from the collar of your parka round a pin and firing it across the classroom using a bic biro as a blowpipe.

Riding on the top of a trailer stacked high with straw bales

Collecting cows eyes from the slaughter house for a biology lesson

Our kids (4.5 yrs old) have just helped dissect a pig’s head in school! Pictures if them holding prized-out eyes, holding slices of brain etc…. 😀

pretty much all of it. most of all pyrotechnics, ‘genies’ rockets up and off the slide, out of the end of handlebars, with bike on its side we werent mad, rocket in 2 forked sticks just above river level, went like a torpedo with a smoky baang at the end, shooting at each other with those exolpoding fireworks. Acorn catapult attacks, acorns just about eye sized
incendiaries with paraffin were crap.how far can you get with julie T…. competition, mostly quite a way 😀 😀 was a team event and good spectator sport at 13-14. how the hell did we get through it all?

Oddly enough last summer I mentioned to a friend of mine that as kids a group of us went away on a weeks’ holiday without parents at 13, a few were parents themselves at 15, and most of us had left home at 16. Alcohol and fags were a given by secondary school. By the age of 20 at least one mate would have died as a result of a motorbike accident. It seemed normal back then – early 1980’s for me. He looked at me as if I was an alien and patiently explained that it was not normal for people to have done such things.

Being able to 180 a BMX.

But I may have made it up.

Playing cowboys and Indians with air guns around the local housing estate.
The Indians had to use those little steel darts with the yellow or red ‘feathers’.

Going to a primary school (from the ages 5 until 8 ) with about 12 pupils and one teacher. having a rota to take turns to make the teacher her morning coffee, boiling milk in a little saucepan on the open fire.

The sadistic bastard Mr Kissack at Albert Road school, who would beat you with the sole of a slipper if you so much as looked the wrong way, were one second late doing something or did something incorrectly.
He’d always make you wait until the end of the lesson too -“you know what’s coming, don’t you lad?” Bastard, I can still recall the smell of his fags (he smoked like a chimney).

Having a “Hobbies Exhibition” at school and one of my mates bringing in his collection of swords, bayonets and revolvers (with ammunition) and test firing the guns in the long-jump pit. He was just told that he’d “better take them home”…

Me shooting someone with a Gat gun while waiting for the school bus in Ramsey and then, while he ran whinging back into school to “tell Sir”, jumping on the first bus that arrived (to make my getaway!), being chucked off later by the conductor ‘cos I didn’t have the right bus pass and having to walk home.
I never heard any more about the shooting though.

Riding a 197cc Sun motorcycle down a school corridor at the end of term (when I was 15) and crashing through a set of swing doors into the school kitchen. I was chased out by irate dinner ladies.
The bike had been provided by our Biology teacher to give us something to do for the last week of term.

Driving tractors everywhere, as soon as I was tall enough to operate the clutch. Doing pretty much all my father’s tractor work in the school holidays, at weekends and whenever I got the opportunity.

Getting 4d bounty for each “longtail”( we’re not allowed to use the “R” word) tail that we brought to the local Police station. When we were threshing we’d collect hundreds of them. I bet the copper at Andreas loved having to count those…..

Riding bikes without a helmet 😛

Having real fur on your parka hood

Standing close to a ‘senior’ school girl on the packed bus to school, they had massive boobs back then

Typing ‘BOOBLESS, SHELLOIL AND ESSOOIL’ into a calculator and thinking it was ace.
Treehouses with a cider stash.
VHS video nasties
Your mates Atari
My Raliegh Bomber(I miss you)
Smelling your finger on the way home 😯

When I was very young, mods and rockers at Belle Vue..
Nicking empty bottles from the AA pop factory to get a few p from the shop
Making man traps in the woods filled with dog shit and sharp sticks and covered over with sticks and leaves
Getting battered by teachers
Battering teachers
Perry boys
1/2 p’s
Vimto like treacle
Mars bars that were as hard as a brick
Tickle finger with Caz..
M’old… 🙁

Making chinese arrows.
Being slapped(hard) across the face by teachers.
Teachers smoking pipes in class(I loved the smell).
School trips where the teachers provided the booze.