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Give them a puddle and a few odds and ends and they will build a world of imagination - wonderful! [photo: Shirley Baker]:

 

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I remember buying my youngest daughter a small dolls house for Christmas when she was about five. The house was ignored, and she played with the box that it came in for weeks afterwards.

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That's odd, Fly......The late ma-in-law used to do the same. We gave her a lovely Caithness Glass bowl for her 95th and she commented that the box was lovely.  She played with that box all day!  Must be a beginning and end of life thing.

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It's obviously the times when their imagination knows no bounds. 

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#4

 

My parents bought me a dolls' treasure cot when I was a child. It had rose decorated fabric, trimmed with lace and a princess-style canopy. Never played with it. Wasn't a dolly person. Had endless fun playing with the box!  Having no maternal instinct means that toys of that kind didn't appeal. Preferred books and still do.

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I had a 'pet' conker. Made a bed in a shoe box,  tied some string to the box and pulled it behind me.  Kept me entertained for ages. 2 clothes props up against the back garden hedge and an old sheet thrown over, and I'd got a tent.

 

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Tonight I saw a newish kid's scooter dumped in the street nearby. Most probably belongs to a child in a local house where neither parent has never worked, always claimed & lived on benefits. Easy come, easy go, never had to work for anything culture. Perhaps if these parents worked for their money they would think twice about wasting money.

21st century benefit Britain at it's best.

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13 hours ago, annswabey said:

Those second class citizens, then?

To use a gambling term,"In the human race they would be 500/1 rank outsiders" but then again it wouldn't do for us all to be the same would it

 

Rog  slywink

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Love that... this was a good childhood. We grew up playing in mud, making our own toys from sticks and whatever else we could find in the forest, creating games, climbing trees and jumping in the lake. We had nothing but never really knew it, we were rich in things that mattered and above all else I just remember being happy and not feeling like I was missing out or needing for anything. 

I don't remember watching much for tv, I never wanted to be inside anyway! I have become one of those "back in the day..." people and I'm grateful & happy for it.

 

 

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  • 8 months later...

I still play with my grandchildren but somehow computerised battleships and Nintendo Wii isn't the same as a den in the woods, a piece of scrap paper for 'hangman' and a bucket & spade on a beach.  By the 1970s things such as dens were passing into history; I tried to interest my son and daughter in building a good den but with little success.  However, to my surprise, one day I was talking to my son and he told me that he remembered the den building lesson and had given his own son the same lesson whilst on holiday at his mother-in-law's in a wooded area of Poland.  Maybe all is not yet lost and the humble bucket & spade may make a comeback yet  :)

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Continuing on from my post about play: During the 1950s and early 60s my brother and I had four friends who lived across the road. They were three brothers and a sister. If the weather was not fit to play outside their mother would invite us in to play board games. She would make us a soft drink out of whatever she had and if we were lucky there might be a biscuit too. Her husband was a model railway fan and had a good layout on a large board. Again, if lucky he would let us "Have a go". We looked forward to these gaming sessions and always wondered why the other kids on the street never made frriends with them.....In later years I discovered what the problem was. The man had been in Germany at the end of WWII and brought back a German bride. The good lady was in fact a German and as such shunned by the majority of the residents in the street. I consider myself very fortunate to have had parents who had also been in the war, (my father was wounded), but had no such prejudice. My life would have been much more dull without the kindness of that good lady. Sadly, she died a couple of years ago.

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Being a left-footer, many of my schoolfriends were Polish, Czech or Ukrainian.  Their parents had fought for Britain in the war and stayed on afterwards.  I went to school with their children. My biggest regret is that I never learned their languages because their parents all wanted to speak English when we were around, so that we wouldn't feel sidelined, I suppose?

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When I first started going out with her indoors she said "Whatever you do, don't tell my mother you are a left-footer". I wouldn't have minded but I hadn't had any religion at all since I was fifteenn years old!  Seems her parents would not have approved of me had they known about my past religion - even though I was 39yrs old and she 37yrs old, at the time!  Nowt so queer as folk, eh?!

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