What crazy things did you believe as a child?

[SinkGirl]

Just been discussing this with DH after realising that DT1 thinks that putting on his coat in the morning magically makes the school bus appear.

We were remembering things we believed as children, some courtesy of adult fibs but others... who knows?

Here’s some of ours:

• That the kidneys in steak and kidney pie are not actually kidneys, they just have the same name
• That the moon is only a few metres above our heads (blame the grandparent who said the moon was the same size as the dining table, plus child logic)
• That all cats are female and all dogs are male, or (much weirder) that poos are gentlemen and wees are ladies (this was me, and I have literally no idea where this came from - I even remember imagining a cartoon poo in a top hat, so I’m wondering if it was something I saw in a book?)

Obviously aside from Santa, Easter bunny etc, what obviously bonkers things did you believe as a child?

We watched When The Wind Blows at school and I spent ages after that genuinely terrified of a nuclear bomb dropping on us. I mentioned it to my gran thinking she'd allay my fears, and her response was 'well if it drops it drops, nowt either of us can do about it..' that somehow didn't help at all

I asked a friend how people got their ears pierced and she told me they made a little mark on your ear and the earring went in with a gun. So I thought they stood on the other side of the room and 'fired' the gun. Took me until late teenage years to work up the courage to get them pierced and felt like a right plonker when I realised.

There was an expression 'so and so has swallowed their tongue' meaning quiet/shy but I took it literally and thought it was a medical condition and meant you couldn't speak anymore. Again, many years worrying about accidentally swallowing my tongue

I thought that when people moved house, they swapped with someone. Actually the while moving house thing confused me.
I lived all my childhood in one house. Left at 18 (my parents still live there). In the following 16 years I have had 12 addresses. I now understand moving house! One more move then I'm done... Until the kids are older anyway.

Why the fuck would you show When the Wind Blows in schools?

I get the feeling a teacher just though 'oh this is a animation type thing I'll stick this on'

I believed that girls got pregnant by boys peeing inside them I guess some part of the birds and the bees talk got lost in translation!

As a small child I used to sing chick, chick, chick, chick, chicken, lay a little egg for me to my elderly neighbour. He would make clucking noises and then lift the cushion on the chair he was sat on and hand me an egg.

3 year old me honestly thought he could lay an egg

(Never occurred to me that when I was sent out the room to go use the loo before the singing started, was when his wife would go get an egg from the kitchen and hide it ready...)

@user1471565182

Why the fuck would you show When the Wind Blows in schools?

I'd never heard of this film and when I've just gone to look it up apparently it's by the same guy who did the Snowman and the characters are based on his parents.

Its up there with Threads for scaring 80s kids, LadyEv. Very good to be fair but dont show it to kids in the 80s.

My mum let me watch deliverance when i was about 8 or something

Yeah that animation messed me up for a while! Not a clue why it was shown at my school. Probably to scare the shit out of us

Just remembered that I thought the Wombles sang, "the Wombles of Wimbledon come when you wee."
I used to sit for ages on my potty waiting for them to arrive.

@Aroundtheworldin80moves I also used to think that when you moved house you just swapped with someone. I had forgotten that till now!

Given that I found it unlikely that two sets of people would like each others' houses enough to want to swap, it seems odd that I was very surprised when I found out how it really works.

I thought if you left the switch of an electrical socket on without a plug in, all the electricity would run out onto the floor

My sister told me that Adidas was a rude word. I believed it for years and was shocked when I saw people wearing clothes with it on.
She also told me that when burglars broke in, they would 'get me' first as I slept on the bottom bunk.

The tv would blow up if you did not switch it off at night. Then again might be a good one to perpetrate under green shit.

When I was quite small (relevant) and sitting upstairs at the front of the bus, I was convinced that when the cars coming towards us disappeared, they were going under the bus! Being small, I couldn't see them going by on the other side of the road.

Many of these I believed in. Funnily enough, this one is very relevant at the moment. I always thought that no one was allowed to be born on Christmas Day as it was Jesus's birthday and it was against the law. I have no idea why, we weren't a religious family at all, I doubt the teachers told me that so who knows where it came from?

I thought my aunt was John Lennon.

She had long hair and glasses. For years i insisted 'My aunt is john lennon'.

My dad when he was young told the same aunt (bis younegr sister) that you were born with a finite number of words you could speak in your lifetime and she should not waste hers.

It took several sessions with my grandaprents taking her to speech therapists and psychs because she suddenly went completely mute before dad owned up.

I knew Tipperary was in Ireland but I thought Timbuktu was just down the road from Tipperary.

That Josephine Bettany was alive and living in England. I used to go through the new phonebook every year looking for her. Crackers!

That if the toilet seat was left up, it went down by itself at midnight. (I was scared of seeing them with the seat up - it looked like an open-mouthed monster.)

I also believed that I had an innate sense of direction, and would always know which direction "home" was. An older kid burst my bubble by blindfolding me, spinning me round, and telling me to turn and face the direction I thought was home - it was a huge let down to discover I was totally wrong!

@NoMeatIsHumane

That the world was black and white!

@NoMeatIsHumane

Mine was that Germany was black & white - growing up in the 1950s there were lots of b&w newsreels at the cinema & they often featured Germany

(Obv British ones were b&w too but I knew we lived in colour!)

Had to NC for this as this is fairly outing for any of my friends who I know are on MN. As a child, I believed that to move house you had to find someone to swap with you (this is what happened with the Neighbours and I thought that was just how it was done).

Love this thread!

Mine was that I believed that my parents had found me in my grandparent's cabbage patch. We lived next door to them and it made perfect sense to me that if my grandparents had found a baby, they would give it to my parents to raise

@ladyjaye - I clearly remember realising that people existed and things changed when I wasn't around - it absolutely blew my mind