Water under the bridge (From Gazette & Herald)

Water under the bridge

A LITTLE while ago, a youngster in the village asked me in all innocence what we used to do for fun when I was young and how we managed to spend our time before the days of TV and computer games.

This certainly stirred my memory buds, but thinking back has made me realise just how little young people seem to know about our lifestyle 60 years ago.

Reading and religion and the farm were the things which dominated my early life.

My earliest memories outside the farm and family are concerned with church and chapel, with Sunday school at both places every Sunday morning being regarded by mum as an essential part of life.

Because my parents owed allegiance to both church and chapel, we went to both almost every Sunday and this meant we walked there and back, whatever the weather.

There were no excuses - this was part of our daily life until I became a teenager, by which time I had moved on to be a choir boy in the church and still had to attend every week.

But in addition to all the other things, I was an avid reader. We had a good collection of books in a cupboard at school and I read them all.

The village library was based in school and one of my jobs on Monday nights after school ended was to get out the books for the villagers who called to collect next week's reading.

This gave me first choice of all the latest editions and I developed a love of books and a thirst for knowledge which is probably similar to today's youngster's devotion to TV and the internet. It all offers new horizons and broadens the mind. Knowledge is the key to learning.

Our lives were perhaps blighted to a certain extent during the 1940s by the war, which overshadowed our daily lives, but young people are always very resilient and war games were very much to the fore amongst village children.

At Hovingham, we had a big army camp in the park all through the war and, so, were immersed in soldiers, tanks and guns. Bombers and fighter planes flew overhead every day.

In and around the village, there was always plenty to do and plenty of mischief for young folk to get into. It had not to be too serious because retribution in the form of the local policeman, as well as the cane at school, was always on hand if we got caught, and these are still vivid memories for me because I was always classed as one of the ringleaders and given extra punishment, for arguing or talking out of turn. This made you careful and we learnt craft and guile, but now and again we all made a mistake.

Even then, we had gangs, but during the early part of the war, village life was complicated by the influx of the evacuees who were billeted in the country and whose numbers doubled the pupils in the village schools.

This new intake of children from a very different background and culture caused a certain amount of tension and fights, but eventually a pecking order was established and a truce was declared, but it never paid to be caught on your own during the early days and because very few of us had bikes you learnt to run and hide if you were out-numbered.

Soon, however, most of the evacuees went home and peace reigned amongst the village youth and we got on with our normal pastimes. Cricket and football were our main sports and rounders and skipping were a normal part of PE, which in a village school always took place out of doors, whatever the weather.

Hide and seek and fox off were favourites during the summer months, but during the dark winter nights, I used to read library books and comics - even that was difficult without the help of electric lights.

Sledging on the Temple hill was the best fun of the lot, especially when a good snowfall coincided with the holidays or weekends in winter. Most of the country children had jobs to do and helping to milk and feed the cows or gather the eggs and muck out the hen huts at weekends was normal on most farms and regarded as a duty. Pocket money was a luxury for the families of the rich and, anyway, we only had a very small ration of sweets.

Out of school, the countryside was our playground with freedom to roam at will being guaranteed for all the country children and we took full advantage of things like the fields and the woods as well as the streams and becks. We built tree houses and dens where we ate apples and things like gooseberries in season - not all of which were acquired legally - as well as smoking the occasional cigarette, but that was part of the fun of growing up.

Many of us had dogs and ferrets and rabbiting and ratting was a normal occupation for a farmer's sons and their pals during the winter weekends, with the extra incentive being, we could sell the rabbits and acquire some spending money, most of which went on cigarettes or the Pictures in Malton.

Catapults, whilst supposedly illegal even in those days, were the stock in trade weapon of most country lads, but it was not wise to be caught with one of these at school and, of course, there were always the girls to tease and, as we all got older, relationships developed and blossomed, just as happens today.

This, of course, was before the days of sex education, but being country kids, we knew all about reproduction and perhaps, even more importantly, most of us were afraid of our parents and the good hiding which would follow if we were caught doing anything wrong.

Contraception was a word most of us had never heard of, but as we got older and we matured, sometimes relationships became more serious and if things went wrong, there could be a rushed wedding or some of the girls went off to stay with family or friends until the bump went down and the babies were either adopted or went into an orphanage.

The best contraceptive was always: "If you want to do things like that, you will have to marry me." Most brides of my generation were proud to be married in white.

Even then there were plenty of people with short memories who would moralise about the wicked ways of young people, carefully forgetting their own failings. The old country saying "Mothers and Maidens should never gossip" was as true then as it is today.

Updated: 15:41 Wednesday, June 15, 2005