Because our parents were poor or didn’t want to spend money on us children, we were forced to make games up, forced to come up with plans, ideas, and whatever to stop our holidays being boring.
In Huntly mother would kick us children out of the house in the morning and then tell us that she didn’t want to see us until lunchtime, and then after lunch we were banned from the house until dinnertime – mother hated it when it rained because we had to stay indoors 🙂
But she did, show us how to do some activities.

Middle-Class children were boring to us, because they were able to use their parents money to entertain themselves at the movie theater, or with TV, or expensive games, and go away on the holidays, something we seldom ever did.

When we went back to school after the Christmas holidays we were told to write an essay on where we went on the holidays, and of course we didn’t go anywhere, and neither did our mates.

But I think that the less fortunate children were exactly what people of the past were, thus they were more inventive, had more fun without parental influence, and spent time away from the house and went on adventures. We did this on the farms around Huntly that we were not allowed on, so we would sneak on them and go to the forests, chase the animals, ride on the sheep and just in general take risks and have fun. And yes, we did get hurt from time to time, and maybe someone broke something, and yes we got in to trouble for trespassing, but it was what you did when there was nothing else to do with yourselves and no money to spend on yourselves.

I remember an orchard, and we would sneak on the land and pick fruit off the tree’s and have a feed, and then return home not hungry for dinner 🙂

Sometimes we got home, got a spanking, and the next day go do the same things again, but we were more clever.

At school, the middle-class children and i would talk, and they saw no difference in me, but their parents did. The middle-class children would tell me that they spent the weekend watching TV, or going ut of town boating, or some such a thing, but as personalities they were terribly boring to talk to, because they didn’t have any adventurous stories to tell. They may have read Tom Sawyer, but sure as heck were far too frightened of having adventures of their own.

Also they stayed a lot with their own parents, became mothers boys, mummies girls, soft in the head and in body, no scars, no callouses, and all their school lunches were ‘the best”, and while I would like to have eaten like them, had their nice clothes and such, I would have hated to have been so boring.

You see, when children have lots of money in the family, or at least middle-class, they are boring but are so used to being boring that they find themselves as normal, and people like us children or little money or our parents just didn’t care as uncouth, rough, scary not because we were a tad rough, but because we were what they were not used to, and if they went on an adventure with us they would have been tired easily, frightened easily, scared of a spanking, fearing being growled at by their parents or other adults, scared of the results of just being silly children out on an adventure.

What we were doing, because we had to, was live the life of children that dated back to the first humans, and what the middle-class and wealthy children were doing was being groomed and “formed” in to social acceptance and conformity, who as adults loved society and the comforts of home, taking no risks, and fearing the simple things of life, because they were never taught as children how to think, how to use logic or common sense, or how to be inventive, adventurous, exciting in a clean decent way.