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It's amazing what fertile minds younguns have, I think just about every kid who had a father or brother who worked in the pits new about carbide.
It was always amazing how high we could get stuff to fly after we had tamped down the lid of a treacle tin that contained carbide and water.
We'd experiment stacking different items on top of the tin to see what would happen when the lid exploded off the tin. I'd even stood with a foot on each tin hoping for ride but instead got whacked in the shin by a flying lid for my trouble.
Kids like me were probably the first ones to invent the skateboard. I can't ever remember owning a pair of roller skates. When you are the youngest in a family of seven you get the cast offs, so when it came to my turn to play with them I would be lucky if there was a single one left.
The straps and keys for the skates having been lost or broken a long time ago, I would nail the skate to a piece of wood and go down the hill sitting or standing on the wood.
The grassy hill above my house was a Mecca for kids in the summertime. The hill was a great place for sliding down on a piece of cardboard. We would all go to the Coop store in town and beg for some cardboard boxes to use on the hill.
We would start off with large amounts of cardboard to sit on but after a few runs and spills the cardboard would eventually tear into smaller portions until by the end of the day I'd be trying to slide on a piece the size of a postage stamp.
The backside and breeches paid the price in more ways than one. My parents took dim view of me coming home with holes in my pants and let me know about it in no uncertain terms. Didn't really want to slide the next day even if I'd had a cardboard box.
I wasn't always in trouble when I was a kid although it seemed like it to me. When the time was right for flying kites once again, that field above my house was the best place to fly them.
With help from my mother I'd make a kite out of brown wrapping paper and glue it together with flour and water sizing. After tying on some coloured rags for tailings I'd be off up to the field for the rest of the day.
All the kids would compete with each other trying to see how many messengers we could send up the string to the kites. These were bits of stiff paper with a slot cut into it so it could be slipped around the string.
The wind would send them sliding up the string unless you had a lot of knots in the string like I usually had. I used to have to tie pieces of string together to get enough to send the kite up high enough, but if you made the hole in the paper big enough it would usually slip over any knot it came to.
Playing with a Top and Whip or a Bowler was also on my list of favourite pastimes. If you got pretty good with the top and whip you could send it flying ahead of you for about 10 or 15 feet.
This was how we would race home from school whipping the tops along the sidewalk trying to be the first one. We would chalk on the Top with bright colours so that when it was spinning it would create a design.
The bowler, on the other hand, was just plain hard work and lots of running, but they did have a special noise. When a gang of us kids would get running full blast down the street with the iron handle rubbing on the iron rim the din was incredible.
I guess in those days the pleasures in life for a 10 year-old kid were simple, but if you didn't have anything else they did just fine.
Jim Dowson, USA, 2002
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