things you did when a child that your parents would have gone spare at. had they known

[hatwoman]

that thread about the things our parents did got me thinking about the things I did.

I used to play on a building site. we used to make dens in these huge mounds of soil and rubble. we'd find bits of ply or wood and make tunnels and roofs .

Play in the totally derelict eaves above the virtually derelict milking shed in the farm next door, daylight seeping through every crack and hole in the floor. rats and mice all over the place

clamber over and play on the rusty abandoned tractors in same farm. not so bad but not great either

harass our neighbours by "spying" on them. sneaking into their overgrown garden and prying through their windows before running away giggling and screaming

Oh another - i took the condoms from uder dads pillow and stuck pins in them.. i wanted another brother or sister..

Awen, did it work?

We used to play tennis over the house, One of us would go in the garden and the others in the road (cul de sac)and hit the ball over, it was a 3 story house.

Go on adventures in a dried up large resovoir playing stuck in the mud !!

Play with a real bow and arrows

Oh the good old days being 8yrs old

I was fairly good, but some of my friends were horrors.

A friend who grew up in the country used to play a game with his brothers whereby one of them stood at the washing line with a loaded air rifle, counted to ten while the others scattered, then opened fire on them.

The same brothers used to have competitions to see who could hold onto the electric fence the longest.

Another friend told her parents she and a mate were going on a Thomas Cook tour of the Mediterranean. They hitchiked overland to India.

sneak out of afternoon naps for a trip at the river and get spanking when i return home.

We used to start fires in the empty land between our neighbours houses, bring mice into the house, and for a time me and my friends played to have funerals burying animals we found by the road (!).

We used to go into bulding areas to play with the sand and go into the very deep foundations holes to pretend it was a maze.

Used to sleep on trees (yes... with a pillow and no platform, in branches higher than a house). I also used to climb to the roof using the alley between my house and the neighbour's by placing my hands and feet at the opposite walls.

Bunked off to the fair with the babysitter who was meant to be looking after me at home! Makes me go cold thinking about naughty babysitter now I am a parent ha ha!

I used to get dog shit on the end of a stick and either wipe it onto car door handles or throw through open sunroofs. I used to leave notes in peoples empty milk bottles on their doorsteps telling the milk man to cancel their milk. The note thing later progressed into darker territory in that myself and another friend used to write notes to women about their husbands having an affair. We would give details etc and then we posted it through their letter boxes . That is really awful when I think back, I hope we didn't wreck any marriages.

We used to pinch our neighbours' grapes from their vineyard, and were caught once, also their figs (but I don't think they cared about them).

Stopped off on the cycle ride home from school once for about 1.5 hour unscheduled stop at a friend's house, which time we spent jumping from her father's barn mezzanine into a huge pile of freshly harvested wheat- which her father had forbidden. All got into massive trouble for various reasons.

Made a den on a flat roof inside a barn with straw and things, and brought a real petrol lamp, and matches up there to make it more homely. Good grief were we in trouble (I know these are supposed to be things our parents didn't know about, but they were everywhere and we always got caught)

Nearly set fire to the house once by making a "candle" out of an upturned flowerpot and a piece of cord, and leaving it smouldering during supper next to one of the wooden roof supports of the terrace. Remembered after I'm gone to bed, and crept past open door where scary father was watching football to find flames licking up timber. (it was quite wormy and dry and just good to go up like a pile of sticks...) Never been so scared in my life- it was our only house...

I was perfect

HOWEVER, my bf (and she still is after 35 years..) and another girl threatened a little boy with a badminton racket unless he ate some dog shit. He did. Oh God. He had to have tetanus injections and all sorts...

We lived in the Yemen for a while with my dad and we would run wild a bit as he was working a lot.

My brother (aged 10), his bf and me (aged 8) would run after little trucks on a main road, jump on the end and hang there like monkeys for a little way and then drop off when it came to a traffic light. Yemeni roads aren't the best so we did get lots of road rash. What a stupid idea.

at living in Yemen as a child. I went there in 98 and fell in love with the place. In my other life I'm a mad eccentric English woman living in al-Muqullah.