Product of the Estate Part 2

It’s amazing—you start writing about your life growing up on an estate, thinking it’ll be a pretty quick endeavour. You jot down a load of headings to expand on, and suddenly you find you’ve written 1,000 (ish) words and have only got halfway through the list…

So without further ado—here’s part two of Product of the Estate.

I mentioned in a previous post two friends I had, both called Gary. Well… the three of us used to go round to another “friend’s” house called Richard. I use the quotes around Richard because he was a couple of years older than us and lived next door to the Gary my parents didn’t like—we’ll call him Gary B for clarity!

Richard, like Gary B, had parents who both worked full-time and was left to fend for himself during the school holidays. This meant we could play with no adult supervision, no parents telling us “don’t do that—it’s not safe.”

This led to us doing some pretty stupid stuff, like setting things on fire in his garden. 

In fairness, Richard had a really cool garden with a tree in it that had a tree-house. This tree had a plethora of really good branches to climb onto and jump out of. 

Instead of referring to branches as “that one there” or “this one here,” we actually named the various branches from which you could jump.. I can vividly remember two of the names. 

The first, and lowest, was called the Gary Daren't Jump Branch. This was cunningly named as Gary B wouldn't jump from it. Now some of you would think that this was sensible of Gary, but this branch was only about six feet from the ground and there was an old mattress that we would land on. The mattress was still in pretty good condition, with very few springs poking through, so we thought Gary was just being a wimp...

The second branch was called the 'Bumhold'

Copilot's interpretation of the Bumhold

The Bumhold was about 12 feet above the aforementioned mattress and there was no way Gary would climb up to this branch, let alone jump off it. 

One of the jumps we did was a Jedi Jump, in which you stand on the branch, step forward off it, spin 180°, and grab hold of the branch.. A bit like Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi.

We spent many a happy day doing this.

In between all of this frivolity we found time to hang out on the park on the estate. This park contained a 'big slide' - This was actually a big slide... it had a wooden frame and must have been about 30 feet high, a small slide - about 10 feet high, a set of swings and a roundabout that could only be described as a vomit-inducing steel ball of hell. 

The roundabout's design was a steel sphere mounted on a pole that ran through the middle of it with a fixed circular wheel at the top which one gripped and pulled. This force rotated the sphere that had a horizontal ring attached to it with four seats. 

Fantastic speeds could be achieved with four people all pulling on the fixed ring in unison and I lost count of the number of times, after the roundabout had finally stopped, I alighted and then staggered away at a tangent to an imaginary circular plane before collapsing onto the grass groaning, feeling intense nausea and wishing for the release of death. #TrueStory

Other fun on the park was gained in summer - mainly the act of attempting to burn down the slide using a magnifying glass to focus the sun's rays to a small point. We did manage to get a bit of smoke but the slide remained resolutely upright and flambé-free!

Stingies... (wistful, nostalgic chuckle). 

Stingies was a game played with a football and five or more players. One player was in goal and the rest were outfielders whose job was to score a goal. A goal could only be scored if it was a by a header or a volley. If a goal was scored without it being a header or a volley - that player took the place of the goalie. There was many an occasion in which the goalie would shield the ball - ensuring it crossed the line to force a goalie / outfielder swap. Likewise, if it was a header or a volley, and the goalie caught the ball - the goalie and outfielder swapped places. 

“Big deal,” you may say - "It's only being in goal"… Nope—you did not want to be in goal. 

At the beginning of the game everyone started on five points, and if a goal was scored with a header or a volley - this went down to four. When the last goal was scored, the poor sucker in goal had to endure 'stingies'... He had to bend over on the goal line while all the outfielders took a turn in taking a penalty kick, aiming to hit his butt. If you, as an outfielder, hit the goalies's butt - you moved forward one step and took another shot. Hence the name stingies - the poor sucker in goal could end up with a very stingy ringy*

I'll leave it there for this episode - I still have six more topics that would take up too much time to read for one post. It looks like there will be at least another 'Product of the estate' entry!

*Ringy = Ringpiece = Anus