To ask what stuff you did as a kid that now seems weird and/or wildly inappropriate

[CheeseyToast]

For whatever reason, today I was reminded of being three years old and lunching with the street cleaner. He drove a little cart/sweeper thing and would take his break sitting on the grass outside our house. I called him The Jigger Man.

When I spotted him, I'd run inside and say, Mim! The jigger man is here! Can I take my lunch outside?

She'd give me little sandwiches wrapped up in paper and I'd rush out to sit beside him on the grass.

Oh I loved my jigger man picnics.

Was I a complete weirdo or did other kids do stuff like this?

1. Being given an axe to take to the woods to chop down trees for the bonfire. Age 10 or thereabouts
2. Dragging trees from woods to bonfire site across a main road
3. Being out all day every day. Mum used to give us a couple of sarnies (luncheon meat) and a milk bottle rinsed and refilled with water. Stoppered with tinfoil or wodge of newspaper.
4. Coming home from school for lunch and after school twice a day from the age of about 7 onwards. Alone.

Setting up a pretend shop in my bedroom and my sisters would come in to play 'shoplifting'
Roaming the streets in the evening to find tv to watch through random garden fences
Them were indeed the days

I can't really believe it looking back either Gallico's Cat... but we lived in Spain and were quite wild as children. Just really hope my daughter stays on the straight and narrow as the thought of her taking risks like we did scares me to death!

Not me, but someone I know played a game called "light a shite", which involved putting a dog turd on someone's doorstep with some flammable materials and lighting it. This would have been late 70s / early 80s.

I grew up in the 90s into early 2000s. When I was a kid we would be out all day often wandering the nearby fields. Later some of these became building sites, they were not secured at all and we would go out and jump the foundations of houses under construction. Sometimes we would also steal building supplies to make 'huts'. Into the 2000s my parents were much stricter with my younger sisters and where they went outside, meanwhile I was on the internet totally unchecked talking to all sorts of randomers on chat rooms. Parents never enquired or had a clue what I was doing.

ALongHardWinter My school was secondary but it did begin with an H!

• Walking along the railway.
• Riding my bike for miles. A lot of the time I went up to the hill near my home where there was an abandoned quarry. The road skirted the lip of the quarry and a wire fence separated me from death as I leant over peering at the rats looking like little black specks way below. I didn't even like rats, but I suppose these ones were far away enough not to be creeped out by them.
• Going to the beach alone, skipping stones. Sometimes exploring a cliff path instead of skipping stones.
• On holidays, climbing a cliff most days. It was about four stories high.
• Playing in a wild area on our street, a site abandoned by the builder and neglected by the council, full of heaps of concrete blocks, patches of broken glass, mounds of mud, nettles, thistles, abandoned washing machines, etc. There was a network of tracks established through it all, and we used to ride our bikes in circuits for hours.
• When I was about 3 I used to climb through the back fence of our garden and escape into the building site that was to become the rest of the estate where we lived. I couldn't be stopped apparently, so my mother made me a little red dress that I wore every day, the better to see me from the upstairs back window. I found patches of nettles and thistles and heaps of concrete blocks irresistible from a very early age.
• Chopping logs with the axe - dad had taught me to do it so I could be useful.
• Brought myself and my sisters home from school on the bus from about age 8. Sometimes other parents would ask mum if I could make sure their children got onto the bus and off at the right stop, so I did that too.
• Went to the shops for mum - picked up meat, veg, potatoes, Woman's Weekly - crossing the main road from Dublin to Wexford both ways. I was supposed to only cross at the lights but what mum didn't know didn't hurt her.
• Spent hours in the top of the tall tree in our front garden and that is how I found out that two of my neighbours were having an affair. The tree was across the road from the front bedroom window of the woman involved...
• I played hockey in secondary school. The team used to meet up on Saturday mornings at certain bus stops depending on where our away games were, and travel together on the top, smoking, singing, and annoying other passengers. We played some teams that were pretty far afield so we often spent most of Saturdays on buses, doing maybe a four hour round trip with a match in the middle and only slices of orange at half time to sustain us. Parents never came to watch any of our matches iirc, and we were always astonished to see parents on the few occasions we encountered them cheering on opposing teams.

Seems tame compared to the rest but my childhood home backed on to a river and me and my friends used to swim / paddle (varying depths depending on where in the river you were) - we'd go a good half hour from the house in either direction completely on our own. I feel nervous at the thought of letting my DS swim in a river when he's older - let alone unsupervised and far from home!

I was born in the late 80s and so growing up as a 90s kid we even had a lot of freedom too, we would always be out playing with the other kids from the estate, we'd even play on the construction site of the estate which was unfinished and just get told to be careful of rusty nails!
Would also be allowed to cycle down to the sweet shop and buy a bag of sweets and cycle back,
We used to play in an abandoned factory when I was in my early teens, near a jetty where we would jump off
Sooo many more stories haha was so fun

When I was probably 8, my brother, step-brother and I had a den in the woods about 2 miles from home. There was also a rope swing which swung out over a stream probably about 20 feet at the highest point. We weren't really meant to play here because it was on private property and had been chased off by the farmer/landowner before.
One day my step-brother fell from the swing and knocked himself out cold. Thinking he was dead (!!!) but not wanting to get into trouble, we went home and told no one. He turned up later with a headache. Apparently though he has no memory of that days events.

aliheat that's hilarious!! Just the sort of reasoning kids apply.

Reminded me of when my little sister and I took our baby brother out in his pram, we must have been about 7 & 5, and we argued about whose turn it was to push. Neither of us would acquiesce so we just left the baby in the pram and went home! It wasn't till much later when mum asked where the baby was that he was brought home,

My children were brought up in the Caribbean. They were allowed to roam with instructions to return with the parrots (they roosted about 5ish) or the bats (about 6ish). My grandchildren never go out unsupervised.

Esspee that must be the island equivalent of coming home when the streetlights come on!

Toadinthehole Haha, funny you should mention that. My teenage gs has just suggested I do this to our horrendous snob neighbours in the nearby courtyard. Some things never change.

I grew up with 7 cousins who we used to go on holidays with.
Our dads would tie our dune board behind my uncle’s beach buggy. Two kids on the board, two on the roof off the dune buggy (!!!!) and then they’d drive up and down the beach, pulling the dune board behind with us screaming with laughter and holding on for dear life...

Just wondered if anyone else remembers it being almost excepted if a family member was a bit of a sex pest/paedophile. In the 80's I remember at least two friends where at family parties you had to be on guard for groping hands. One was known as "flash Gordon"! Also a PE teacher who made absolutely outrageous comments and double entendre's to the girls.

Yes! We were told not to let a great uncle make us sit on his knee. He was funny and charming (ugh!), and once persuaded me to put my hand in the pocket of his raincoat (it was cold and wet and I wasn’t wearing gloves). I now know what it was I felt, but didn’t at the time. I spoke to my mum about it a few years ago, and apparently he’d done the same to her as a kid... in between abusing his own daughter. Why weren’t people jailed then? He died in a motorcycle accident, and good riddance, say I.

We used to go on day trips to the beach with my friends uncle, he was a bit odd (possible sn’s) my parents had never even met him other than to say hello when he picked me and my friend up in his car. He used to let us lie in the back of his estate car in our swimming costumes on the way home, I don’t think he was a sex pest but we were allowed to parade around in our swimming costumes around him, no one thought anything of it.

Bit late to the thread here but reading some of your stories brings back great childhood memories!
Early 80s child. Riding on the milk float with "Saucy" the milkman helping him do his round. Riding our bikes everywhere until dark. Visiting neighbours we didn't know for a chat & biscuit. Playing on building sites. Riding our bikes on self-made tracks with ramps/hills. Climbing trees. We had a teacher at school who took girls into a cupboard lots of rumours about that one. Breaking into a disused buidling & storing/drinking our alcohol there. Knock knock ginger. Camping on a common & running across the dual carriageway for supplies from the petrol station (parents never knew about this) - dodgy place for young girls to be camping. Aged 8 being allowed to go into town, trying on lipsticks & clothes & going to the cafe for a toasted teacake - we felt so grown up! Before mobiles ringing the phone box in the town centre to get hold of friends or to see who was out. Riding motorbikes & driving an old car around my grandparents land from age 9. So so many more memories. I wish my children could have that freedom but I'm too scared to allow it!

Oh and my first time clubbing in our local city I was 15 & my parents had no idea where I was

This thread is gold!

Did so many of these - I barely remember seeing my parents throughout the 80s, we were completely free range.

All of our parents thoughts nothing about the local kids spending the entire day miles from home in the woods known as "the flasher woods", for obvious reasons. Only saw one flasher in about 5 years so can't have been that infested. Do you still get flashers?

A friend and I had a penchant for getting inside the window display in Littlewoods and pretending to be mannequins. We must have been 100% unconvincing.

Dads friend used to pick us up from scjool occasionally. He would let us sit in the boot with the boot door open for the last leg of the journey. We used to love clinging on to the seats so not to fall out.

What the hell!

We used the phone box at our local shops as our own personal phone too! My boyfriend used to ring it to see whether I’d arrived before he set off from his house a few doors down .

Watching 18+ horror films from the age of 9 onwards. Some of those films were awful.. Halloween, chucky etc. I hate horrors now and can't believe we were allowed to watch such films so young!

(1970's) If someone had a baby you would knock on their door (with one of your friends) and volunteer to take the baby out for a walk in its pram and many mums would let us! - no phones, no idea where we had gone.We were at primary school. I had younger siblings I often looked after so didn't particularly like this game but my best friend was obsessed with it for awhile.

My mum and dad would go out for the afternoon and leave me with baby brother to look after soon after birth - I was 8! We all walked to school on our own from infants - mum took us the first day of reception and that was it. I used to get chased by roving dogs when walking home for lunch and was badly bitten. Can't imagine seeing 4 and 5 year olds walking around on their own now.