The other day I bought a watering can. I went with the intention of buying a large plastic one that would water all the pots in one go. Instead I ended up with a little galvanised can, painted green, which was half the size and twice the price of the one I had intended buying. Why? Well it reminded me of the illustrations in the vintage Ladybird books that were given to my son when he was a little boy.
The books are long gone but looking online I found hundreds of examples of illustrations from Ladybird books including one of a little girl following her mum round the garden with a watering can just like mine!
There were other illustrations of children, free from adult supervision, roaming through woods and camping out. One little boy is attempting to kindle a fire using a magnifying glass so that his sister can fry a pan of sausages. Another boy is using a knife to whittle a toy plane out of a piece of wood.
It seems unimaginable today that we would allow our children such freedom or exposure to danger.
When we, myself, my brother and our friends, were children we spent the long summer holidays outdoors from morning till dusk. There never seemed to be any adults around and we were never bored.
The estate we grew up on was newly built, surrounded by fields, farms and little country lanes that always led to somewhere interesting. At the top end was a field that had been used by the builders to dump excavated stones and excess building sand. This dump was, to us, a magical place. We called it The Desert and spent sunny evenings playing in the sand dunes. One summer there was a rumour that a “pervert” had been seen hiding in the dunes watching children as they played. No one stopped us from going there. My friend’s mum just said “Make sure you take next-door’s dog with you!” We never did see the pervert.
Another summer we had a craze for building bogie-carts out of old pram wheels and bits of wood. The steering mechanism was made from a piece of washing line and the braking system was your foot. Our road was on a fairly steep hill leading directly onto a busier through-road. No one intervened when we raced the carts from the top of the street not even when we tied the carts together and went down the hill as a train with very little chance of stopping at the bottom!
At least once every summer one of our friends would wander off leaving the rest of us to search and shout after him and then have to return home and inform his mum he was missing. No one ever suggested calling the police. Instead the whole street would set off as a search party, find our friend fishing for sticklebacks and end the evening picking blackberries.
These were indeed Ladybird days. I remember the first summer I passed without grazing my knees and I think I must have known these days were numbered.
The other thing I noticed whilst looking through the Ladybird book illustrations was that there were lots of examples of people eating delicious food. So today we had high tea in the summerhouse and had our own Ladybird day. Lots of sandwiches, cakes and lemonade.
