When I was a young lad the world was different, in some ways it was a harder place, but to me it seem be a better and happier one too.

After the war it was still a time of shortages, ration books, and low wages, the end of all rationing didn’t come until 1954. I never saw a banana until I was eleven, I remember Ringtons leaf tea, powdered egg, Colman’s mustard powder, Birds custard powder and gravy salt. Bacon bones, lap with barley, a small joint of meat on Sunday and a chicken for Christmas day. A penny worth of broken biscuits, a two-penny worth of chips, socks that were darned using a bodkin, shoes repaired on a last and no long trousers until I started the big school. My mothers used to tell me it was good for my legs.

Things were better, fathers had returned home and everything was on the up. Factories were beginning to produce consumer goods, house building had begun again and though wages were small there was work to be had. We were lucky to get one of the first prefabs – central heating, a bath and a fridge in the kitchen was luxury indeed

People were happier, maybe it was a feeling camaraderie left over from the war but people helped their neighbours, children played outside on their own, women walked home at night without fear and the young respected the old. Doors would either be unlocked or the key would be hung from a string behind the letterbox, so that you could reach in and pull it out to open the door. In those days there were no computers, no videos, mobile phones or electronic games and no one that we knew had a car, a phone or a TV. The first time I saw a TV was when we were invited into a neighbour’s house to watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth on their new Bush TV.

What we didn’t have we didn’t miss and we had more than enough to keep us busy. We played outside after school and at the weekends. At nights or if the weather was bad, we’d listen to the radio or read a tu’penny comic – my favourites were the Beano and the Dandy. If we didn’t feel like reading we’d play games, draughts, ludo, snakes and ladders, tiddlywinks, darts and marbles on the floor, or maybe we would play with our lead soldiers.

We had our treats too, home made toffee cakes and black bullets, or a stick of Spanish, barley sugar, liquorish root, cinnamon and sometimes dried vanilla pods. At Easter we’d go to Saltwell Park to roll our paste eggs and in summertime we’d catch a train from Felling station for a day trips to South Shields. Before Christmas we’d take a trip to Newcastle and visit Santa in Farnons and go to Gateshead Empire for a pantomime sometime in January.

When we grew a little older we got a bob each on a Saturday to go to the children’s matinee at the Corona and that bob went a long way, some sweets, entrance into the pictures and a Dragoni’s ice cream cornet on the way home. We didn’t go short through the week either, we collected bottles and jam jars and got money off each to buy sweets and if we collected newspapers, we could exchange them at the chip shop for a bag of chips. Sundays we would walk to the Tyne Bridge, ride the lift down the to the Quayside and spend an hour watching the man on the trick stall demonstrate his magic tricks. Later after wandering around the market we would hang around one of fruit stalls and at knocking off time the man would give us a big bag of bruised fruit each.

As to the rest of the time I don’t know how we managed to fit it all in. In the winter – we definitely had more snow then – we sledged, had snowball fights, built snow forts and snowmen, in the spring we collected birds eggs – it wasn’t illegal then. We would collect frogspawn and watch as it turned into tadpoles and when the tadpoles became frogs we’d tip them back into the pond. We caught lizards and had lizard races, hunted newts at the pond, fished for sticklebacks in the stream and played shops with boodie money.

Later we’d build a tree house in the fire station grounds and rescue young birds when they fell in the water tank. In the summer we’d build a camp amongst a clump elderberry bushes in St Mary’s church yard and spend many a long hour on Felling tip scratching about for scrap lead to melt down and make more soldiers. In addition we played football, leapfrog, hide and seek, endless games of marbles and chucks, camp out in a tent made with an old blanket and a clotheshorse, swing from the arms of the gas lamps on ropes and occasionally wandered down to the river to throw stones at the rats.

In September and October we’d collect blackberry to make black berry pies, rosehips for rosehip syrup, conkers, to harden in vinegar and thread on a string as the conker season began. In the half term holiday we would pick potatoes at the local farm for pocket money, begin collecting wood for our bonfire and go penny for guy to collect money for fireworks. After Guy Fawkes Night it was back to the comics and games for a few weeks, until we ended the year by carol singing around the doors.

Nowadays when my grandkids say, ‘I’m bored.’

I simply smile and say, ‘Come on then, let’s find you something to do.’

After all you can only say. ‘Once upon a time, when I was a lad…’ so many times before they become bored to tears with that too.

Copyright Fred Watson 2008