Misunderstandings you had as a child

[NoEffingWay]

When I was little, there was a florist near my house. It had beautiful displays of flowers, and I used to spend ages looking in the window. What I really wanted to do was save my 20p a week pocket money and buy my Mum some flowers. Not just any flowers but the ones that said ‘Mum’ on them. I was in my teens before I realised these were for funeral cars . Luckily for my mum, there was a sweet shop next door where I spent my 20p on sweets every week so I never even asked!

I somehow, in Yr7 chemistry, got mixed up and thought that the gas we used in bunsen burners (and gas cookers) was hydrogen. Luckily it never came up in a test, and I went on to get a B at A level Chemistry narrowing missing an A

I thought there was a bank inside St. Paul’s Cathedral for many years! The misunderstanding came from watching the film Mary Poppins.

I used to think that if you had a bigger tv you’d be able to see more of the programme. Like you missed out on a lot of the scene if your tv was small, and those with big TVs were treated to more 🤣

I thought there were 2 types of sky, blue one and white one. I didn't realise that a solid white sky was just very cloudy.

When I was 3 we had central heating fitted, by a friend of my Dad's, with pipes being installed under our wooden floors. I was walking past our dining room and saw the plumber putting something with wires coming out of it, under the floorboards. He glanced over his shoulder at me and didn't smile.

It was obviously a bomb! I couldn't work out how to explain to my parents . . . so I did the next best thing and persuaded them that I really wanted to change bedrooms with them, so that I wasn't sleeping in the room above the bomb! I did feel very guilty - I remember lying on bed v. anxious about it. I eventually explained about 5 years later, much to their amusement.

I’m embarrassed even typing this but here we go.. I used to think every To Let sign on buildings we drove past as a child was advertising there was a toilet there (to use) I can remember thinking why are there so many toilets around when we drove through the city to my nans (until I learned to read properly)

I was 12 before I realised that when a character in a film/TV has a baby, it's just acting! I genuinely thought they had to get pregnant in real life and gave away the babies!

When I was younger I thought 'Sleeping Policemen' (speed bumps) were the graves of dead coppers! I felt so weirded out when we drove over them.

I used to think if you got ran over, it'd be scary but your knees would just give way and you'd just fall backwards and lay flat on the road and the car would drive over and you'd bounce right back up

Every Sunday my mum would make a roast chicken for dinner, except on the rare occasions she made roast beef, then my brother and I would complain because we didn’t like roast beef. One Sunday she presented us with rolled chicken’. It was delicious and every few weeks we would ask for it.

I was 16 before I realised that rolled chicken was actually roast beef 😂

I used to think that when people talked about ‘cutting their head open’ they meant like two halves of an orange falling apart. I used to be right miffed when it turned out to be just a graze and nothing so dramatic!

I was convinced the telephone box outside the post office was a time machine

I used to think all breakfast cereal was made of wood - like Weetabix was compressed wood shavings, and Cheerios were lovingly carved little wooden rings.

It made sense, trees were plants and you could eat plants....

I watched a news report once where it said something like "they found a new kind of ...." I asked who 'they' were and was told it was scientists.

So whenever anyone said 'they' in any context I assumed it was those scientists at it again.

I often wondered as a child in the 1950s what I would do in "my war"

not terribly unreasonable given that my grandparents had lived through WW1 and my parents through WW2.

I just thought all generations had to live through a war.

As it turns out, at 74, I'm now living through the most frightening danger, even though I recall the bay of pigs.

My partner thought that everyone shared a birthday with their aunty (because he did).

I used to think that it was trees that produced wind, when they moved about it made the air all windy.

My mum also taught us that when the ice cream van played a song, they’d ran out of ice cream.

I used to think that when you grew up you got to choose your house. For free though. I was going to have one of those old converted railway stations.

Also I didn't realise till a fairly advanced age that not everyone got the summers off and that in a real paid job you had to work all year round. That was a real bummer.

A neighbour died on our road. My mum closed all the curtains at the front of the house as people did then out of respect. This wasn’t explained to me so I thought they must be holding the funeral on the street and buried neighbour in the front garden of their house.

@user1471453601 Mine is war-related also. We used to watch the news at teatime and occasionally, the newsreader would mention guerrila warfare, accompanied by clips of soldiers in a variety of jungle settings. Well it was obvious, wasn't it? The gorillas in the jungle were at war with one another, and the human soldiers had to be sent in to stop them fighting. It was years before the penny finally dropped.

"mummy am I a Catholic or a Prostitute?"

"You're lapsed Church in Wales"

My understanding of both The Troubles and Christianity was somewhat lacking age 9

I thought that test tube babies were literally grown in a laboratory in a test tube.

@haveyouopenedyourbowelstoday

Me too! And they moved the baby in to progressively bigger test tubes as it grew.

My son had a new slide cabin bed and mattress when he was around 8 in his newly decorated room. I went in the following morning and asked how he’d slept on his new bed ‘well, it was okay’ he said ‘but not that comfortable for all night’ I asked him what he meant and he explained that laying in one position all night didn’t feel right …he’d seen the label on the memory foam mattress that said ‘no need to turn’ and he thought it meant him. Needless to say, I was on the floor laughing and we still laugh about it now 16 years later.

Not me, but I remember one of my history teachers at school telling me that she couldn’t understand it when the Second World War ended. She was too young to remember the years before 1939 and assumed that war was the natural state.

When I was about 6, and my reading was pretty good, but not perfect, I thought under the shop sign for Boots, it said disappearing chemist, and was most confused that it was always still there. My mum eventually explained it was dispensing, when she'd finished laughing.

I thought that battery chickens were literally battery operated and the eggs from them weren’t real but were edible. I’m ashamed to admit I was 19 when disabused of the notion!