When I was boy there were exciting places to explore and play and there was lots of time to do so because parents were not nearly so paranoid about children wandering off to enjoy themselves as they are today. In those days it wasn’t uncommon to go out in the morning and only return home when you were hungry and there certainly weren’t search parties out looking all over the place. It’s a shame that these days children are confined to their back gardens or have to be taken back and forth to school by car because there was so much more fun when young lives were not subject to so many safety restrictions.
It wasn’t that our parents were irresponsible or didn’t care about us it’s just that they were somewhat oblivious to risk. I suppose when you have been brought up in London during the blitz when Hitler’s bombs were dropping every night and there was always imminent danger of sudden death then life in the 1960s almost certainly would have seemed a whole lot more sedate and certainly less dangerous. This didn’t mean that there weren’t hazards of course and as boys we used to like to hang around the dangerous places.
First of all there was the railway line and you don’t get much more dangerous than that. It was relatively easy to get up on the tracks and put half pennies on the line for the trains to squash and expand to the size of a penny in the optimistic hope that this would double the value of the coin and shopkeepers wouldn’t notice. (This never worked by the way). A couple of miles from home we used to dare each other to walk into the inky blackness of the Kilsby Tunnel but I seem to recall that none of ever got more than a few feet before beating a hasty retreat for daylight and safety. The Kilsby Tunnel is near the village of Kilsby in Northamptonshire on the West Coast Main Line and was designed and engineered by the engineer Robert Stephenson. The tunnel is two thousand two hundred and twenty four metres long yards long and took one thousand two hundred and fifty men nearly two years to build. It was opened in 1838 as a part of the London and Birmingham Railway and is today the eigteenth longest tunnel on the British railway system. We used to think it was cool to play there but I realise now that it was totally stupid.
Sometime in the early 60s the line was electrified and this made it even more dangerous. I remember a man from British Rail came to school and addressed morning assembly to warn us about playing on the railway. He looked a lot like Norman Wisdom in both appearance and stature and was a bit like the railway equivilent of the Green Cross Code Man, without the muscles. His name was Driver Watson and he proudly wore his navy blue uniform with red piping and told us that the electricity was so powerful that we would need to wear wellington boots forty-two feet thick if we were to be safe from electrocution if we were to touch the overhead wires. That sounded convincing enough to keep me away from the tracks in future and anyway British Rail started putting up fences so it was difficult to get there anymore.
It wasn’t that our parents were irresponsible or didn’t care about us it’s just that they were somewhat oblivious to risk. I suppose when you have been brought up in London during the blitz when Hitler’s bombs were dropping every night and there was always imminent danger of sudden death then life in the 1960s almost certainly would have seemed a whole lot more sedate and certainly less dangerous. This didn’t mean that there weren’t hazards of course and as boys we used to like to hang around the dangerous places.
First of all there was the railway line and you don’t get much more dangerous than that. It was relatively easy to get up on the tracks and put half pennies on the line for the trains to squash and expand to the size of a penny in the optimistic hope that this would double the value of the coin and shopkeepers wouldn’t notice. (This never worked by the way). A couple of miles from home we used to dare each other to walk into the inky blackness of the Kilsby Tunnel but I seem to recall that none of ever got more than a few feet before beating a hasty retreat for daylight and safety. The Kilsby Tunnel is near the village of Kilsby in Northamptonshire on the West Coast Main Line and was designed and engineered by the engineer Robert Stephenson. The tunnel is two thousand two hundred and twenty four metres long yards long and took one thousand two hundred and fifty men nearly two years to build. It was opened in 1838 as a part of the London and Birmingham Railway and is today the eigteenth longest tunnel on the British railway system. We used to think it was cool to play there but I realise now that it was totally stupid.
Sometime in the early 60s the line was electrified and this made it even more dangerous. I remember a man from British Rail came to school and addressed morning assembly to warn us about playing on the railway. He looked a lot like Norman Wisdom in both appearance and stature and was a bit like the railway equivilent of the Green Cross Code Man, without the muscles. His name was Driver Watson and he proudly wore his navy blue uniform with red piping and told us that the electricity was so powerful that we would need to wear wellington boots forty-two feet thick if we were to be safe from electrocution if we were to touch the overhead wires. That sounded convincing enough to keep me away from the tracks in future and anyway British Rail started putting up fences so it was difficult to get there anymore.
Running parallel to the railway line was the Oxford Canal that had been commissioned in 1769 and built by the canal builder James Brindley. The canal was an incredibly dangerous place really but of course we didn’t realise that at the time. During the summer we used to wait at top lock and offer to open and close the gates for passing canal craft in the hope that we would receive a few pennies for our labours. If the canal was dangerous then the locks were doubly so but this didn’t stop us from daring each other to jump from the elevated tow path down about three metres and two and a half metres across to the central section of the double locks. I shudder to think about it now. We used to swim in the canal too and that was a stupid thing to do as well. Not only was the murky water about two metres deep and lurking with danger but it was also full of bacteria and germs especially in the black cloying mud on the bottom that would ooze through your toes so it’s a miracle that we didn’t catch typhoid or something else really, really awful.
Talking of catching things, we used to go fishing down the canal and this wasn’t quite so dangerous except when my friend Colin Barratt (who was forbidden to go to the canal on account of not being able to swim) fell in while struggling to land a four-ounce Perch with a home made rod and line. We fished him out and took him home and didn’t see him again for about three months after that but to make him feel better we told him that it was a monster Pike that had pulled him in.
Water always had a special attraction and when we weren’t messing about on the canal there was always Sprick Brook where we used to fish for minnows and red-breasted Sticklebacks and take them home in jam-jars in the days before goldfish. Sprick brook ran under the railway bridge on Hillmorton Lane and was just the sort of place where you could have an accident and no one would find you for days.
One place that wasn’t nearly so dangerous as it is today were the roads and we used to play on our bikes without any real sense of danger and certainly without those silly cycle helmets that kids wear today. Cycling however did get me into trouble once when I was about ten and persuaded some friends to tackle a cycle ride one afternoon to Leicester to see my grandparents without checking with anyone first. I have to confess that this was both ambitious and thoughtless especially on a Raleigh Junior bike with 18” wheels and no lights and not in any way suitable for a fifty mile round trip. Getting there was reasonably straightforward but the return journey was a bit more difficult on account of it being dark and us being completely knackered. There was a search party that night for sure and I can remember being astonished about how much fuss was made over such a trivial incident when Dad intercepted me at Abbots Farm and sent me home immediately for a good telling off from Mum which turned out instead to be an emotional and tearful reunion and I can remember being thoroughly confused by that.
Apart from the dangers presented by the transport system there were other equally hazardous places to play as well. Building sites for example. There was a building boom in the 1960s and this presented all sorts of opportunities. Especially good fun was climbing ladders and playing on the scaffolding and hiding in part constructed rooms. There were piles of bricks to build camps (much better than Lego), sewer pipes to crawl through, sand and cement to kick around and oil drums and bits of timber to take away and use to build rafts to sail on the canal but this never worked either. Once a passing police patrol car stopped to watch us building a waterways craft. They teased us by asking to see our boat license and then told us to hurry up and get on because they wanted to see us fall off before getting on with their duties. We clambered aboard and didn’t disappoint them. I can still hear them laughing as I write this.
Most of these dangerous places are closed off to children these days, the railway line is fenced, building sites are fenced, the canal locks have wooden guardrails and you would have to be just plain daft to take a bike out on a main road. Given the modern restrictions it’s hardly any wonder I suppose that today children have to stop at home and watch the television or play computer games and are denied the pleasure of real dangerous activity and that is a real shame.
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