Product of the Estate Part 1

I mentioned in the first post in this series that growing up on the estate I did was idyllic. This post will expand on that somewhat and tell of some of the exploits in which a 7-11-year-old managed to engage.

As a recap, the estate was a 'one road in, one road out' affair which meant that there was very little traffic. Very little traffic meant safety, safety meant happy mothers and happy mothers meant more freedom. Freedom to explore...

The playing field ran the entire length of the estate (about 1 KM) north to south and parallel to the brook that ran along the west length of the field, there was a shallow ditch about 6 feet wide that had hawthorn trees that had been planted on each side. These hawthorns totally encased the ditch and left a tunnel between them and this served as the perfect place in which to assume the role of a Star Wars character and run up and down with a 'clumsy and random' pretend blaster or a willow 'elegant weapon for a more civilised age' (Lightsaber). Quite what it must have looked like to 'normal people walking their dogs', I'll never know. I hope they looked at it the same way as I look at kids today running around pretending to shoot each other: With a sense of wonder at an active imagination and innocence.

Along the brook, there were a few areas in which willow trees were planted, usually in groups of three. The estate was built in the late 1950s so by 1983, these willow trees were very well established and thus provided the perfect places to build 'bases' and tree-houses. I should probably try and explain what I mean by 'bases'. A base was a secluded area to which a path had been beaten flat through the nettles and cow parsley We used to hang out in these bases, sitting on branches of the willow trees, just talking and planning our next escapade, which was usually something as innocuous as beating a path to the next base...

There were, if memory serves me correctly, three of these bases along the length of the brook:

1. Tramp's Den - Named thus because, upon beating the path to it, we found an old pair of damaged shoes. Our young minds put two and two together and concluded that a tramp must have slept there! There was no other evidence to support this claim, but the name stuck, and Tramp's Den it was. It was located on the other side of the brook from the estate, and you had to cross a bridge to get to it. A pipe ran along the underside of the bridge, and not long after establishing Tramp's Den as a base, we graduated from walking over the bridge to climbing down and hanging from the pipe with our feet about three feet from the water, shimmying to the other side. Doing this allowed the flora to grow over and hide the path, affording us a place that looked inaccessible to the outside world.
   
   
2. Tree Base - Looking back, this sounds like it should have been the first base that we named, but it wasn't - it was the 2nd... Clearly primary school English and creative writing was wasted on us 7-8-year-old boys as this has to be the most unoriginal yet perfectly descriptive name we could have come up with. Tree Base consisted of quite a few really tall willow trees that had no low branches so climbing was out of the question. This base was mainly used for hiding behind trees and shooting each other with home-made bows and arrows*
   
   
3. Sandy Bay - This was pretty much opposite Tree Base and sat right on the bank of the brook. We used to go fishing (another post) here mainly.

At a couple of points along the brook, there were pipes that crossed it. These pipes were about 18 inches in diameter and had a 45° slope leading up to a horizontal section roughly 12 feet above the surface of the brook, followed by another 45° slope down the other side.

As this was the 1980s, there were no spiky barriers to keep kids from crossing, so my friends and I used to climb up and shimmy across the pipe on our bottoms, then down the other side. One of the tests of how good your trainers were back then was the classic: “Can you walk up the 45° slope without using your hands or falling off?” Needless to say, a good number of us did, indeed, slip off the pipe.

After a few attempts, we soon graduated to walking—or even running—across the pipes and timing ourselves to see who could get across the brook the fastest. I never fell off, but a few of us had some explaining to do when we got home soaking wet and nursing a sprained ankle.

Not the pipe we walked across, but a close approximation.

Away from the brook, one of my earliest memories of growing up on the estate was playing out on the road on which our house was located. 

The house was a three-bedroom semi-detached property with an incredibly long garden and three enormous forest poplars that my granddad had planted - apparently not knowing what they were. These poplars dominated the skyline of the estate and were quite possibly the tallest trees there. 

Anyway, back to the memory of playing out on the road. My brother and I were typical young boys - noisy, boisterous and favouring games that involved a fair bit of talking loudly - OK shouting. We had two sit-on toys that we used to race up and down the road on. One of these was a tricycle and the other a plastic racing car with pedals that drove the front wheels. These vehicles could make a fair racket and I remember one day a gentleman who lived on the tiny close, situated off our road, coming round to our house to complain about the noise. 

Bear in mind this was during the day, probably just before or just after lunch. The gentleman's main gripe was that he worked nights and thus slept during the day. My brother and I were clearly disrupting his sleep.

You may remember from a previous post—about the smacked derriere I received at Play School—that my mother was fair but fiercely defensive of her family. She politely pointed out to the gentleman that it was not our fault he worked nights, and there was no way she was going to keep her boys indoors during the day.

Maybe he could invest in a pair of earplugs... Proper earplugs... Not bread.

Whether or not he did, I have no idea. My brother and I continued to play on the street with our cars.

Happy days!