My mums reaction to Chernobyl (lighthearted)

[Okeycokey1]

Named changed on the very slim chance that dm is a mumsnetter

On the phone to my mother having a typical catch up about what films, radio shows, tv we are watching etc and mentioned am I watching Chernobyl..

Mum says “oh I remember it at the time - I switched to buying bottled water, and also you’d only drink certain things (I was around 4 then) and I wasn’t keen on giving you your normal squash or milk. As cows may have been infected

You’d always liked coke and lilt so gave you that instead”

aibu to think this is quite sweet, and would love to hear your versions of 1980s parenting

@isabellerossignol sorry to derail the thread. I understand the danger of car bombs and unoccupied cars but if you couldn't have an unoccupied car in the street how did anyone ever go anywhere/visit anyone/park outside their own house?

Still laughing hard at TheBrilloPad and her jammy eyes!!

I've just realised my parents didn't own a car with 4 seats in the back till I was 6! I'm one of 4 so that's 6 years of driving around with more kids than seats. They also took us in the car to the local pub that didn't let children inside, only in the garden. There was a massive pond in the garden but my sister (6 years older) was in charge of all of us and I must have only been 3/4 when we lived there.

@isabellerossignol sorry to derail the thread. I understand the danger of car bombs and unoccupied cars but if you couldn't have an unoccupied car in the street how did anyone ever go anywhere/visit anyone/park outside their own house?

It was just in town centres that you couldn't leave a car unoccupied. There were controlled zones, and there were gates around the town centres of the main towns, although they were generally open during the daytime. Back in the early 70s you needed a permit to even take a car into a town centre, but by the 80s anyone could take a car into a town, past the security barriers, but you couldn't leave it unoccupied. The controlled zones didn't apply to residential areas.

I used to be sent to the shop with a note to get cigarettes for my mum, I was too young to be in school so 5 at the oldest.

Went on holiday, north of England to Dover then Calais to Spain in the tailgate with the luggage.

My cousins and I would be dropped off at my grans in the summer holidays whilst our mums worked part-time. Gran was more of a smoker than an eater and never had anything in. I remember being given money to get lunch and being told not spend it on junk food from the corner shop (crisps and sweets) but to go to the chippy for a proper lunch.

I watched Jaws when I was about 6 and am still scared of open water.

Chernobyl happened when DM was pregnant with me and she was quite worried. We were in Italy so a bit closer.

My friend (from E Europe but not the Ukraine) has one hand because of Chernobyl.

I remember driving from Italy to England and DM making me all cosy in a sleeping bag lying down at the back. I think she did buy us booster seats when we moved to England though.

I remember being 13 and my cousin 11 and being allowed to take our one year old cousin for walks in the pram. One of us would have the baby and the other would have the dog. We felt so grown up.

My parents had a 2 seater sports car with a sort of shelf... yep that's where I travelled!
I could roll a cigarette by the age of 7, and remember being sent to the shop across the road to buy cigarettes aged about 6.
I could play out all day 'come home when you are hungry' and swam in the canal , and worked the locks for holiday makers for pennies.

Played in the farmers fields and accidentally set fire to the crop stubble while cooking bacon on an open fire surrounded by a couple of hay bales we had pinched.

A brilliant childhood in the 70s and 80s. I think today's kids are over protected , not given enough freedom to be kids and are treated as brainless when many are capable little people!

i remember being in a room with 4 chain smokers and heavy smoking in the car,people didn't know no different

it did put me off smoking though as i hate it

i also remember traveling 7+ in a car, 3 adults in the back with children/babies on their lap or sat in the foot well

i remember we went to skegness butlins for 4 weeks i was about 8/9 and tall,adult sized really so no longer sat on a lap as my mother and nan are only 5ft.it was a good 6-7 hour drive but we took longer as we got lost

as thre was no room for me i made a bed in the boot as we got a new car with a large boot and i had pillows, a quilt and lots of books and snacks and the luggage was in a trailer.no one though anything of seat belts in those days

i remember getting glass bottles of pop off the pop man and getting milk,butter and orange juice from the milk man and paying at the end of the month

also going to the corner shop for sweets and getting them out of glass jars and having a tab,same with groceries and then your mother would pay it when she got her dole

When I was about 2/3 I got blind drunk because my dad had a pint of something and put it down on the floor, I was sneaking around the back or his chair and drinking it. I was found rolling around on the carpet behind his chair laughing like a loon. Being taught how to roll a cigarette at about 6, dad always smoked inside and in the car. Baby sitting at 10, my parents set the jobs up for me.....I was 10!! Being put in the boot of our estate car .....no seat just me rolling around in the back and being shouted at to lay down when my mum spotted a police car. Going out to play for hours and only going home when the street lights came on, we use to go into the woods and play and we loved it. I do remember the acid rain thing, not being allowed out and being screeched at to run if it started raining and get home.
Watching our next door neighbor taking her washing in off the line, with her baby on one side of the washing basket, she would then very carefully and throughly spray each item with fly spray. Creating a cloud of spray that stank, and went all over her child!

My parents used to tell us about the time they were on holiday in the Scilly Isles when DB was a toddler. They had hired a small sailing boat when they were there. One day they sailed to another island to get some stores and a huge storm blew up on their way back, so they lashed DB’s pushchair with him in it to the mast. Just as well the boat didn’t capsize

In the 70s we were always playing on building sites as they weren't fenced in or as secure as they are now.
God knows how we escaped injury or death.

No seatbelt rules.
Mum and Dad has a mini van with a kids chair tied with rope to the passenger seat. It also had a play mat. Drive from Manchester to Cornwall was fun

isabellerossignol thank you. I've lived in England all my life and never been taught Irish history and I think it's awful I'm so ignorant of what was happening just across the water.

Apparently the GP prescribed sedatives for me as a baby because I didn’t sleep more than 2 hours at a time until 9 months. Merrily told DM to increase the dose as she saw fit. Mid 1980s 😂🤦🏽‍♀️

I remember travelling in the boot, fitting eight kids in the car and standing up through the sunroof on sunny days. I was given phenergan to go to sleep every night for at least two years and they used to dip my dummy in liquid malt. I remember having to get the washing in immediately as it started raining due to Chernobyl as the rain might have come from There and carry radiation!!!

I remember in the late 60s or early 70s driving back from Northamptonshire to Aberdeenshire sitting on a small box between the front seats of the car. I can't remember if we had DB and my three cousins in the back, but I suspect we did. My uncle, aunt and grandmother travelled beautifully undisturbed in another car.

XH used to tell the 'hilarious' story of how when he lived in Malta, his then not quite 3 year old son drank several pints, deliberately given to him, and was pissed out of his skull. I do sometimes wonder if this is partly why the son grew into such a fucking twat.

Hello @Okeycokey1 just wondering are you Irish? My mum is Irish and yours sounds really similar to my own .

80s parenting-
.The wooden spoon
.Standing up in the back seat of the car between the seats
.Lots of parent (and child) swearing
.Smoking around the kids/ in the home
.Chocolate cigarettes
.Toy guns, swords, bombs on planes
.Lack of safety equipment on amusement park/ fairground equipment
.Tea and fizzy drinks in bottles
.riding your bike to school
.playing out on your own even when it's dark

. Don't forget dipping the dummy into 7up/beer
. Baby having a sip of Guinness

Building sites were great places to play. We moved to a new build just before I was 7.

We took fresh putty off the windows (is putty still used) and play a game going through a house with no floor down, you were not allowed to touch the ground.

Loads of sand to play with, and the day we found the builder's hut wasn't locked - we were a bit disappointed, there only seemed to be mustard to eat.

Both my parents were heavy smokers, as was the cleaner, who always seemed to finish her fag in my bedroom and toss the butt in my bin.I started keeping my own room clean / vacuumed so she had no reason to go in.

Shops around schools where you could buy 2 cigarettes and a box of matches.

sashh we used to play in building sites too but even better than a building site was the dump! We used to play in the dump and god knows how we didn’t slice our legs open or catch some kind of disgusting illness or disease. Literally an open pile of junk mixed with rotting waste.

The best thing though, was when the dump got cleared, and THEN became a building site! So we’d then also scrape off the putty, and walk across beams where there was no floor, and there was a rope and pulley hanging down from the roof down to the ground floor and we would swing across the gaping hole like Tarzan. Terrifying now, I just googled it and the flats were built (finished), when I was 10, so I guess I was playing on the building site at 9, and playing in the dump from 9 and below. We had some level of self regulation though, because once fittings/finishing started happening in the flats, we stopped going. It then felt like breaking into homes, despite still not being functional or anyone living there.

It's funny reading some of these because I'm a similar age (born in 1987) but my mum was much more in line with modern/MN current lines - she went mental if anyone smoked near us (she grew up in a smoky house with bad asthma herself), we had car seats (admittedly only up to late toddler age), we weren't allowed anything other than milk, water or fruit juice (which at the time they thought was a super healthy option!). No memories of being left alone. I don't know if mum was ahead of her time or just v neurotic!

I was pregnant with my son and still living in Germany at the time of Chenobyle. I wanted my DH to put his sheet in to be posted to the UK ( I was on maternity leave from my post in the forces at the time ) but he wouldn't hear of it.
I spent the remainder of my pregnancy panicking that my son would be born with 2 heads or something.

Both my parents smoked as did my 2 older siblings. The house was like a fog, particularly if my grandparents visited, who also smoked. I never smoked, i had smoked enough 2nd hand smoke to last me a lifetime.
My Parents had a caravan which they used to hook up to the car a few times a year for holidays. They used to lock us 4 kids in the caravan with a stern warning to behave before driving off down the autobahn to wherever we were going to be having our holiday.
All the way to bloody Tuscany one time when i was around 5 years old!
My mum told me that from us being around 6 weeks old, she used to soft boil an egg and dip our dummies in the yolk 'for goodness' and mix a spoon of honey into our milk from around the same age.
How on earth we survived i have no idea

Phenergan still available over the counter FYI 😉