Oh no, we shouldn't do this, I'm getting some really weird flash backs.

Do you REALLY want to go this far back in time? There'll be no mention of shampoo and stuff, since we had no hot water and could only bath once a week anyway!

I remember my very first day in primary school. I was absolutely scared stiff. My mum delivered me to the entrance of the school playground, a mad noisy place with kids racing around all over the place. I was tightly holding on to a mug and an empty tin which we took with us for the cocoa distribution. We used to get gift parcels from the Red Cross, and cocoa was distributed in school. The first thing that happened when i ventured out into the playground was that someone ran into me and I dropped the mug. I was destroyed! No cup of hot cocoa for me! What was this harsh world I was being forced out into!

In grammar school, if you were really naughty, you got 3 or 6 of the best, with a long bamboo cane, VERY hard. The gym teacher would also regularly beat us with our gym shoes. The maths teacher was a genuine sadist. His reaction to a wrong answer would be to stab the pointed end of a pencil into your scalp. That really hurt!

"CAFETERIA FOOD" - oh my goodness, the school meals! If you didn't eat it all up you got beaten. I remember seeing one poor kid forced to eat the dessert and immediately spewing it all up again. The one that we all really hated was semolina I think. We used to call it "frogs spawn" and it was absolutely disgusting.

There was also the inescapable, pervasive fear of "The War". I can remember regularly seeing the whole sky full of low flying bombers (ours luckily!) on their way out to Germany, since we were right under the flight path. The noise was amazing, and the ground literally shook under our feet. Once when I was about 5, I was in the garden playing in the late evening. I asked my mum why the sky was all tinted red on the horizon. The answer? "Oh, that's London burning". Such things do tend to make an impression on a young kid.
Since there was so little food and nobody had any money, we kept chickens and rabbits in the back garden, and had a vegetable patch. Sometimes I would have to go with my mum to a sort of soup kitchen, a huge barracks building with long tables where hundreds of people would sit in rows and eat their cheap gruel.

We didn't have "knockers" but we had "conckers". They were hardened chestnuts (on a string too), and they certainly gave us some decent bruising! You hung your concker on a string, and your opponent tried to destroy it with his concker. One mean trick was to soak them in vinegar overnight, so they went rock hard and could almost break your opponents finger!

We had no television in the house until after I left England, but my friend just down the road had one (wow!), so I used to go down there every tuesday (I was about 12 to 14 I would imagine) and see "The Quatermass Experiment", a real sci-fi horror series. I used to take my evening meal down there on a tray (always fried eggs on fried bread!), and we'd make model airplanes and stuff. I can remember being totally freaked out by Quatermass, and running frantically back home in the dark with my tray rattling away, shaking like a leaf!
We also had an old wind up gramophone and played 78's in a tent in his back garden. My favorites then were The Sheik of Araby and Stardust, probably by Mantovani or some such dance band. Later my taste developed to the blues, then rhythm and blues, rock & roll and goodness knows what!

So I'm afraid if there are any kids out there that think they're having a hard time nowadays, I have little sympathy! Admittedly it's a tough world, but as far as I can see, the majority of problems we have nowadays are self inflicted or what I call "luxury problems".