A Moment In Childhood Times

When I was a child I spake as a child with broad tinges of Mancunian dialect. I would lay in the only nearby grassy field, form pictures from the overhead clouds and create my dreams for future. I always felt safe in that field.
Now, forty years later, once again tucked up in my childhood bed, remembering industrial chimney stacks with plumes of thick, charcoal grey smoke, swirling skywards in tornado spirals.

Cobblestone streets lined with thick black sticky tar ( we called it pitch) utilized into make believe liquorice lollys on discarded wooden sticks, twizzled around like candy floss. Never licked of course.
Coal bunkers, dark black cavernous places laden with debris of sooty ash. Cobs of coal would not only keep us warm, as fuel for the living room fire, on wintry nights but were great armory to slingshot over the backyard wall to land on them next door's metal tin bath, hanging on a rusty old six inch nail. If you were really accurate, a bullseye shot, smack between the two iron rollers of the dusty old Mangle, normally in use for squeezing out well worn, hand washed clothing, earned you a gold stick on star to be worn with great pride as a reward for this not so neighborly sport.

Ragged rope left in a pile outside the local Roto brickworks made great makeshift swings. The street corner lamplights had the perfect horizontal crossbar of green painted metal arms, to sling and tie our hessian rope over, supporting our skinny little bodies as we kicked off the ground and swung out, throwing caution to the wind up our skirts, propelling us around the street lamp in parachute fashion.

How different is the caution of childhood wandering in recent years. Would I allow my child to roam the banks of the River Irk, ratting, or gobble down lukewarm sticky porridge, enabling the day, played out in all manner of made up games, to last so much longer. Daylight hours filled with numerous adventures before dusk, wandering around our local neighbourhood, ambling through various cobblestone streets looking for simplistic adventure or someone to play with. Only the emptiness of hungry bellies would beckon our tired but elated bodies home for tea and shortly afterwards bed. There was no TV to use as an excuse to plead for extra time..

Where are all those dark and dismal mills now, that surrounded our landscape of childhood adventure....Demolished and disappeared forever from our green and pleasant land, replaced by numerous housing developments, where children play indoors on techno gadgets, residing in their own gardens, with a school friend invited round for a “ Play Date “

Were we protected then? No cocoon of safety. Just our own wit and common sense for survival. Who are the better off? We will never know the answer to that one, as we can never go back to “ That grassy place of childhood dreams. “