What did you do for fun outside when you were a child?

And we caught tadpoles in the stream…

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Street cricket
Fishing
Hopscotch
Tip-cat This explanation is right on the money except we used to score by measuring the distance between the circle and “cat” as the number of stick lengths needed.
Cycling
Kite flying
Model glider flying
Climbing derelict canal lock gates
Air rifle shooting

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What a brilliant thread!

Football (Jumpers for goal posts)
Cricket (Wickets painted on a wall).
Football-cricket (the wickets were a pile of blazers and you had to kick the ball instead of using a bat).
Rounders (Like the original version of baseball, not the current version, where the hard ball is thrown at the batter as they run, and it’s a kids’ game).
Climbing trees.
Exploring the local bomber base (returned to agriculture) buildings and air raid shelters. Bangers in cow pats was great fun. The smoking green and smelly crater always got a laugh.
Things powered by Jetex rockets.
Cycling.
Playing in the mud or the local disused gravel quarry and making aqueducts.
Making dams in a local stream then blowing them up with bangers.
Tig and it’s variants, tiggy bob-down, tiggy off ground.
Hide and seek.
Making dens.
Volleyball.
Rugby Union. (I played Rugby League once, but didn’t like it as much).
Hockey. I got more injuries during one game when we boys played the girls, than in all the seven years I played rugby.
Huskey Fuskey until the school banned it for being too dangerous. It involved a bunch of kids jumping onto the backs of other kids until the “horses” collapsed or the “jockeys” fell off.
Playing marbles across the road.
Playing Monopoly on the pavement on a calm sunny day.
Hopscotch.
Building huge bonfires the size of a lorry for November the fifth. Baking spuds wrapped in tinfoil in the ashes.
Kiss chase. I can still remember my first ever kiss at the age of ten when a big strong athletic girl called Jane Taylor caught me and pinned me against a wall before snogging me.

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We used to play Marbles in the gutters, there were no cars in our road in those days. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Ah, but did the earth move?

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We used to do this at school Mags in the rain gullys/gutters at the side of the playing field. One year the whole school went marble mad and you could be in “marble clubs” with mates where you would collaborate on your stash.

Especially the shooting.

A strange solitary child among other things I

…kept newts in a baby bath in the woods …
… dug clay out of a bank and made pots …
…bought little jelly sweets and melted them down with hot water to make one big strange coloured jelly …
…ran wild in the fields and woods and looked for ‘creatures’ in the stream like fresh water shrimps, caddisfly larvae and water boatmen.

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Oh my word!

I forgot about :kite: flying!
I really enjoy that!!!

I’d make my own kite :kite:

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Playing out in the fields from morning to dusk
Roller skating
(roller hockey in the road, almost no traffic in those days)
Cycling (again hardly any traffic)
Fishing
Having a ‘camp’ over the fields with others from the road where I lived
(a camp fire when possible, cooking potatoes usually)
Climbing trees (and falling down them)
Scrumping from an old disused garden
Archery
Airgun target practise
The usual ‘small crowd’ of us congregating at the local shops

Memorable days of total freedom, all I had to do was be in before the street lights came on.
Very different from today’s youngsters.
:grinning:

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I spent most of my childhood up to age 11 in Africa. School was mornings only and every afternoon would be spent at the European Club Pool. By early afternoon the men from the offices would turn up at the pool too and I would often be grabbed by one of the men and taken up to the top diving board, then climb on his shoulders and we’d both drive off. Other times when there were enough men, they’d form a pyramid in the pool and the smallest child (usually me) would clamber up to the top and at a given time, dive off. Great fun!

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Mud Pies!!!

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Leap frog!

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We climbed trees, onto the roofs of buildings, just to sit & watch the world go by. We spent time in a marsh area, as no one else went there & we were thus left alone. I helped out on the farms & was driving tractors by the age of 12. I went shooting & had a bolt action 410 in my early teens & several of us had 22 airguns before that. We cycled not just around the village,but to see friends in other villages too.

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oh what a fun thread.

We played hide and seek, played on the ‘wreck’ where we had a big seesaw, swings, roundabout among other playtime apparatus.
In the winter we’d sledge down from the top of the wreck to the bottom of the hill, in the summer we;d go down on cardboard sliding down the grass.
We tied skipping ropes to lamp posts, played chinese elastics, whip and top, I used to love the patterns I made with the colour chalk.

Did cartwheels and handsprings on the grass verge at the bottom of my street.

We’d go to Bluebell woods and swing on the very dangerous tarzan swing, would go newting and catching sticklebacks, bringing them home to show mum in a jam jar.

We’d walk through the streams, come home all muddy, mum never minded, said it was all part and parcel of being a kid.

I remember once climbing a tree and I got stuck, my daddy had to come rescue me.

We apple raided the orchard and got chased by the farmer, naughty but fun.

Ohhhhh, the memories, such happy days

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Tormented my two sisters as much as possible. :smiling_imp: :smiling_imp:

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Much like most others here - hop scotch, out on my bike, knock down ginger occasionally, and a bit of scrumping with my brother and his mates too. :grinning:

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What’s that please?

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@LionQueen@Percy_Vere … you’ve both gone and reminded me now of ‘chinese burns’ … I used to hate them and my brother was a swine.

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