Randomly odd things you believed as a child and possibly beyond...

I was convinced that periods were something only American girls had. I was a very enthusiastic reader and I read Judy Blume books quite early. I figured someone would have told me if this was likely to happen to me...

thought the London underground would be soil tunnels.
DS used to love maps as a toddler, and thought the underground rails would be the same colour as their lines on the map. He was disappointed the first time we went on the Tube. Bethnal Green I think it was - he thought the rails would be red.

That the moon was self illuminating, it's something I never questioned until a few years ago when It crept up in a conversation with DP..... he won't let me live it down.

Eating crusts makes your hair go curly.
I still leave the crusty corners to this day which my DH finds hilarious!

That heaven was under a plum tree. (Guess where we buried our pets)!

I thought the London underground would be soil tunnels. I expected there not to be any lights, that we'd need to take torches, and that there would be worms and moles kind of burrowing through as we waited for the tube. Very disappointed to find lighting, escalators, billboards and reinforced tunnels.

I also thought my dad was Jimmy Somerville. He had a bald head, like my dad, and we had a tape of his hits in the car. I assumed it was my dad when he was a bit younger. (They actually looked nothing alike...)

I also had a great fear of quicksand and human combustion. Was also told by my oldest brother that if I kept burping and belching, I'd have to have my legs amputated. That horrified me.

@Elmo230885 I had in my head something like a mini llama. I have no idea why.

I thought there was an animal called a "Mo" and that's where Mohair came from.

I was also convinced that if you ever did anything the teeniest bit bad, God would physically punish you in horrible ways. My best friend used a swear word at school when we were 7 and I told her that he would come down and set her house on fire. We were both terrified for weeks waiting for it to happen.

@LadyCatStark Perhaps the Harry Potter books have caused lots of children to think this about bank vaults, with roller coasters to get to them.

I thought everyone had a big vault in their bank where there bankers put your money until you wanted it. DS recently reminded me of this by thinking the same thing.

I thought Jesus was born at Christmas, grew really fast and died 3 months later at Easter.

DS thought that people used the sewer network as a fast way to travel around ‘the city’ (we don’t live in a city) ninja turtle style. One day he scoffed that he didn’t know why they’d bothered putting all the manholes in as he’d never seen anyone use them 😂.

@StillWeRise oooh sounds creepy! Thanks I'll take a look!

@Cattenberg You'd have loved something I saw in a primary school early this year. When the vicar visited to discuss the story of the ten lepers, he first showed the class an animated video of the story, where the people said in squeaky voices "Jesus is coming! Jesus is coming!" I expect it might have been parroted in the playground that day.

no, about organ 'donation'

My brother thought that the reason women wore bras was to keep their breasts from falling off. Until he was 12.

No. Is it about sex with vertical rigid penises?

@Cavagirl
have you read Never Let me Go ?

I struggled to make sense of Christianity as a small child.

I had a children’s book of Bible stories, with several pictures on the cover. One was a large picture of a young child, wearing a white tunic. Because the child appeared far bigger than the people in the other pictures, I thought the child was God. I pictured God as a giant child for many years.

I thought that Jesus was a giant man in the sky, hiding in a big grey cloud (well, where else could he have been?) I decided that when it rained, Jesus would come down. I unwittingly whipped up hysteria in the infant school playground, by running around in the drizzle shouting, “Jesus is coming down!”

Oh, and I thought that Heaven was a department store with whitewashed windows. I’m guessing that the nearest word I could picture was Debenhams. We weren’t allowed in Heaven and we couldn’t see inside, but at least we knew where it was. I was so disappointed when I realised that Heaven wasn’t a tangible place on Earth. Even though I wouldn’t choose to spend eternity in Debenhams.

@HUCKMUCK bones don't always hurt when you break them. I snapped both of mine in my arm and didn't feel a thing. Could've been shock tbf but my scraped knee hurt more

One arm forever

At playgroup a girl broke her arm and had it in a cast. I thought that her arm had actually snapped off, and that she would have to have the cast on forever to keep her arm in place. I was OK with that, but was really concerned when they said she was going in to have the cast removed. I thought that was it and she would only have one a forever.

Not me but my kids...years ago I wanted to sit between my brother and my niece in the sofa, and for some reason the words I used to ask them to make room for me were "Can I be the jam in the glue?" So the whole family now use "the jam in the glue" to mean sitting between two other people on the sofa. My son and my daughter were both amazed to find out that "the jam in the glue" is not a universal expression for this and if nobody outside our family has any idea what it means.

I loved science books as a child, but there were some things I read in them which I thought were too fanciful to be true; such as if you're blindfolded and holding your nose, you can't tell the difference between apple and raw potato. I never tried it though - perhaps I didn't want to prove myself wrong!