On Being Free Range

In the Northumbrian village Wylam where I was brought up in the 1960s, we felt that we children ruled.

Yes, there was the vile and violent village school, but all round the edges was Us. There were four of us in our household, four children exactly the same ages as us across the road; plus their neighbours, first a Canadian family with children and then a British one, same. Behind us were  family with three children, and along the road, another family with three. The latter two families belonged to a different social class to us (mcMum called them 'County'), and relationships between the parents cooled a bit after McMum and McDad outed themselves a socialists.

A lot of the time, ten or eleven of us would rampage through McDad's garden, swinging upside down from trees, playing with the water hose, tending bonfires (I made some particularly disgusting rhubarb and cauliflower soup in the pan McDad used to pour oil into the lawn mower), play 'pirates on a ship asleep' on the shelves of the shed amongst rows of waxy apples with bruised surfaces (maybe that was just me), climbing on to the corrugated iron that covered the woodpile, and running along the tops of walls which were probably five metres high at great speed. 

We got sent round the allotments with the dog for being naughty on Sundays, got locked in the old henhouse by a child who lived in another road, and ate sour raw broad beans straight from the shell.

I made miniature houses from sticks and muddy earth in the flower beds, tried to make fabric out of smashed nettle stems after reading about how linen was made, and swung upside down from a rope hung from a tree branch, with my hair swishing the dust underneath it as I drifted back and forth.

We ate ice lollies and too many sweets, and pretended to be Arabs (one of McDad's patients had given us the headgear). We swore and told each other the Facts of Life (how disgusting). Within our child-world, there were subsections: we would pair off, get up to age-appropriate (according to us) mischief, and then gang together again. Bruv and me would eat the flowers of Red Hot Poker plants to see what they tasted like, for instance. Little Sis and her friend across the road used to disappear off, we knew not where. Little Bruv's friend waited at the bus stop with a random lady and got on the bus with her to the next village, aged four.

We'd take the dog to the woods, where she learned how to pick blackberries and went back to ransack McDad's raspberry bushes. We learned Holly trees were great for climbing and hiding in (internal ladders and thick bristling carapaces), Yew for playing 'house' (twisty branches and thick, dense 'walls'), crab apples were too tart-tasting to eat as windfalls,  and even nice looking apples could be full of worms.

There were few broken limbs: Little Bruv broke his arm, and I dislocated a cartilage in my nose after whacking into a fence post face-first in a sledging accident. Once, Little Bruv had his arm in a cast and Little Sis had her leg in one too. 'Two cripples!', bellowed one of the 'County' neighbours delightedly when she came to the door one day.

A local admirer chap brought a bag of Brussel's Sprouts round for Little Sis once (she was about 13). We incorporated other children into our community. McMum once told me rather indignantly that the late Scottish poet Hamish Henderson came to stay and left his children with us, vanishing in a puff of poetic smoke for days before returning to collect them. One guest family brought us catapults, which disappeared just as rapidly as they appeared.

Overwhelmingly, we felt like our own bosses. The house was where food was (hooray) and where bed was (boo). Is it any wonder that I didn't want to grow up to be a 'lady', after all that freedom and wonderful chaos? I could not see the benefits for me, not one bit. I still can't, not at all.