Utterly insane things your parents did when you were growing up

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My gran thought that liquid paraffin applied to my skin as achild would stop me from burning (in the tropics). God knows why she thought that. I stank! And was wary of lit cigarettes. Needless to say it didn't work and I fried.

She bought a 6 foot long chest freezer from a shop which was going bust, and put it in the hallway. Our house looked like Iceland (Kerry Katona, not volcano) when you walked in. She bought half a cow from a local farmer to put in the deep freeze. We could have had fillet steak, but no, she kept that for best (?) and we ate the offal. Never did eat that fillet steak, it was probably still in the freezer when she died.

Would refuse to pay the council to remove old ovens or whatever, so would wait until the dead of night, we would dress up like burglars and would fly tip the oven (by hoiking it over a 6 foot wall into allotments, or shioving it down a rough path and pushing it into the sea over the harbour wall). Ilfracombe residents of the 80s - that oven on the beach in August was mine.

Same happened with hanging baskets - she would refuse to buy Busy Lizzies or lobelias or whatever to make her hanging baskets, so we would sneak into municipal parks at dead of night and nick 'em.

What eccentric or frankly insane things did your parents or guardians do?

My Mum wanted to save money on clothes and so used to make me wear the ones that my sister had grown out of. That wouldn't normally be a problem - I make my DSs do the same, but there's 8 years between my sister and I. I'm sure I was the only kid wearing flares in the 80's.

Oh, and did anyone else have to endure Clothkits clothes? Very loud patterns and, again, they were very 70's patterns in the 80's.

We'd go for days out in the Peak District, and the minute my dad saw a sign saying 'Unsuitable For Motor Vehicles' he would turn down it.

We would end up, hours later, pushing the car out of deep mire, or pushing it back up a precipitous track because reversing up the slope had burned out the clutch, or chased by a bull, or digging it out of deep shingle, or trying to get out mid forded stream where the car had spluttered to a halt...

LeQueen I probably saw you at Skeggy - I was the flat chested child in the dress with the large empty bosom space that had belonged to a much bonnier cousin.

My parents pretended to us mere girls that we actually had two older brothers who lived with a millionaire in the country. I believed it until well into my teens.

My dad was physicist and did consultancy work so had a lab in our garden.
He always talked to us as if we were just as clever as him but a bit smaller, So we would often have chats about the Middle East situation, or the uses of scientific forensic evidence when I was about 6

At my birthday parties, he used to fill a paper bag with dry ice and then open the top of the bag and fill the room with white 'smoke' to everyone's delight.
He made me 'bull roarer' a flat piece of wood on the end of a long string, - you whirl it round your head and it makes a roaring noise - brilliant.

He drove one of those old canvas backed landrovers, and in summer he'd fill a giant (3 foot high) thermos (he used in his work) with little wrapped blocks of cornish icecream, bundle us all in (including any passing friends ) and take us all to the beach.

He used to sing me the Red Flag as a lullaby, and he used to do cossack dancing with accompanying shouting, - on special occasions he and my Polish Uncle would do a dance duet

My mum used to put Nivea on us as a sub screen.

My dad had a job in Yates' Wine Lodge in the 70s and would come back with bottles of red biddy that he nicked and give it to us in mugs for a bedtime treat.

Dad also worked as a builder on the new council estate near ours and he had a master key to get into all the properties so he would take us on days out looking round all the new homes and playing families.

Then on the way home he would dig up the trees the council had planted and take them with us to plant in our garden.

My dad would dip my dummy in Guinness froth and give it to me to suck. Apparently I'd suck it clean then spit it out and cry for more

Mum would cut a 'finger' of butter and roll it in sugar for me, because it would grease my insides. I

I got a spoonful of Syrup of Figs every week. Mum called it 'opening medicine'. I was 12 before I knew what it was supposed to 'open'.

Whisky on the gums for teething.

When I was a toddler mum had a bowl of sugar and a bowl of condensed milk by the teapot. She would hold me up so I could dip my finger in the milk, then the sugar, and lick it all off. I had to have 11 baby teeth pulled out when I was 7 because they were all rotten.

Dad's surefire cure for a cough was half a teacup of hot vinegar with three sugars in it. And the standard treatment for a cold was to be sent to bed with a big mug of hot milk with two sugars and a huge slug of whisky in it.

I had a 'bad chest' as a baby so mum would hold me over the huge vat of boiling tar when there were workmen doing the road. The vapours would 'open up the tubes'. When I was 8 they discovered I actually had asthma.

:o some of these are brilliant!!

my dad used to play guitar (badly) and i had a cool friend from school who i really wanted to impress. her name was laura. and when she came round to play, my dad would serenade her with bad guitar playing of "tell laura i love her"

he would also make up long winded stories about how he was in the Navy (he never was), he even invented names of his "colleagues" (but would refer to them with their "surnames" ie smithy, and the like) and remember them for when he would next launch into one of his tall tales. always in front of my friends.

he was a builder and had a flatbed pick up truck, sometimes he would pick me up from school and let and my friends sit in the (open) back it was only the 90's as well!

and when my friends came for sleepovers mum and dad would take us all to the pub :o

my friends LOVED him :o

Guiness one has reminded me of something my granny done.

Me and my brother used to sleep every weekend. Being t total she doesnt know about alcohol. Her friends had gave her some snowballs and she gave them to me and my brother. She thought they were like britvic as they were in a glass bottle and ket getting her friend to get her some when they went to the shop.

Because we liked them she used to buy them for us every weekend. A few months later we had drunk 4 bottles each and mam picked us up. We must have been tipsy and she noticed.

Grandma insisted it was only pop.

Lovely thread... brings back memories of the chickenpox parties. Which did not work btw as I did not get them until I was 42! I know my MIL is a bit nutty, as she was a guide leader when my DH was little and used to be able to put the tents up in her kitchen to dry (her kitchen was massive apparently) and she used to take him out with the guides when he was 6.

As there was no such thing as sun screen my mum used to make me wear a sun hat, and make a poncho out of a roller towel to stop me getting burnt. Our beach pictures usually show a not very happy me in this horrible towel

My dads idea of getting me to learn to swim was to literally throw me in the swimming pool (I had a dread of water for many years)

My dad was a continental lorry driver, and used to come home with all sorts of stuff. It was not uncommon to home home to a sink full of crabs/lobsters (they were still alive btw) trying to climb out of the kitchen sink.

Home haircuts were common, but thankfully I had long hair. The home perm was a disaster.

Mum used to let us do target practice in the garden with an air rifle!

I grew up in the 70s and mum used to make all our clothes, but unfortunately her idea of fashion was stuck in the 1950s and she wanted me to wear circular skirts!

Oh yes snowballs! My uncle would give me one every time I went to his house. From the age of about 2.

My grandad had a job branding a security number into tail-lights from lorries, he would get a big box of these red plastic light covers delivered, all wrapped in tissue, with a big metal branding iron with a wooden handle. He'd line all the lights up on his kitchen table, heat the branding iron on his gas stove until it was red, then go along the lights melting the security number into each one. I used to help him unpack and re-pack the lights, but when I was 8 he decided I was old enough to do the whole job. So there I was, 8 years old, waving a red-hot branding iron around the kitchen. The whole house smelled of melted plastic too.

Fernier Wed 06-Jul-11 06:16:25

all baths were filled using fairy liquid and shampoo was also fairy liquid - and baths were only ever on sunday evenings.

when cooking sunday dinner at my grans house all the men would be given a useful job but NEVER in the kitchen so you would have men sat around in the living room cutting beans and peeling potatoes in a saucepan on their laps.

YES, YES, YES! Thankfully my mum didn't do the TCP thing on my hair, but it was used very frequently. And every time it was used I was reminded my great grandfather knew the man who invented TCP.

Collecting horse shit in the woods to put on Dad's roses.
Mum making raisin and split almond sarnies with a mountain of butter for lunch.
Dad pretending to be an African prince ringing up to rent a flat to expose rascism.
Dad's Ministry of Silly Walks performances.
Dad bringing home old lost people for tea until we found their families - actually not insane - very kind but was confusing at times.

Mum put on masks and leaped out from behind doors to terrify us.
Always locked out - either Mum out when we got home from school or had left her keys in the house.
Nan skipping in the bedroom.
My auntie hanging cellophane bags filled with water in the doorway in summer to 'make the flies eyes go wiggly' and stop them coming in the house.
Hair rinsed with vinegar to make it shine. Being made to drink cold cabbage water 'for my skin'. Being given iced coffee for my bedtime drink (aged 5) and 'weak' shandy by my alchy auntie.

dripping lemon juice into eyes (direct from the lemon) because it "brightens the eyes and keeps them healthy" (coz nothing else would effing live in the acid, no doubt)...this was my grandmother

your posts are making me laugh so hard I have tears in my eyes :)

Stealing gates and Christmas trees from surrounding fields in the dead of night with Dad.

Dad letting us, age 9, climb onto the (2 storey) roof with him when he was doing something to the chimney. Mum came home from shopping and discovered me and my sister sitting on the ridgepole of the roof, one leg down either side, playing pat-a-cake.

Granddad used to let us hold one of his hands each and walk him into lampposts. He would pretend not to notice what we were doing, then fake crashing into it, with much flailing of arms and legs and groaning, in the middle of the town square.

I remember gagging down spoonfuls of extract of malt which was supposed to improve health, and then horror of horrors, after we rebelled against the malt, Sloan's Liniment, until one of us discovered it was meant for external use only.

Just remembered getting a small glass pill bottle stuck on my finger. My dad poked slivers of blotting paper down between the bottle neck and my finger and then heated the glass with a blow torch until it broke off, my mum shoved fruit gums into my mouth to distract me

My mum was a fan of neat hydrogen peroxide on any wounds. And for splinters, or anything with pus in it, she favoured the kaolin poultice. Sticky clay stuff heated to boiling in a tin, then put between two bits of rag and applied to the wound.

haha some of these take me right back to my childhood, being told to wear a full circular skirt in the seventies(it must of bin found in the attic from the 50's), collecting horse shit when i was bored in summer holidays and being told i would get my reward by eating the gooseberries it was put on (urgh) and always being locked out(i dont think i was trusted with a key, or my mum was never home) and sittin on a metal bucket in the garden having a pee cos i was locked out for hours.