Growing Up - Part I !!!

The London riots got me thinking.  I wasn’t perfect as a kid, far from it, but when you see the kids nowadays it makes you see things now how your parents did when you were younger.  I called this ‘Growing Up Part I’ because there are so many tales I could write, but the blog would go on forever.  Maybe another day I will bore you with another tale from my childhood.

I done bad things as a kid.  Okay so I thought they were bad things and of course they were for children of my age.  I’m talking about things like stealing sweets from the sweet shop when I was about eight years old.  Don’t look at me and shake your head.  I’m sure every child, at some point in their youth, stole sweets.  There was a tiny sweet shop in the village where I used to live as a child.  I think it must’ve originally been the front room of a house and then that room was just used as a sweet shop.  I know this because the old lady that owned it had to walk from one room into this sweet shop.  When I say ‘old lady’ I really do mean that.  I think she must’ve been at least 70 and not very fast.  Us kids knew that if we got to the door of the shop and then prepared ourselves by emptying our pockets, we could get into the shop and stuff our pockets full of sweets before the old lady had managed to hobble from her house into the shop.   

We’d then spend about 5p on penny chews and go out of the shop knowing we had enough sweets to last us a good couple of days.  I know that was a very bad thing to do and we never knew if we would be more scared if it was the shopkeeper that caught us or whether, if we did ever get caught, they chose to tell our parents.  It was a small village and everyone knew everyone and kids our age were still scared of our parents !  I think this shop might even have sold cigarettes, but in my days the kids just weren’t interested in them.  Young children didn’t smoke like they do nowadays and we didn’t even think about stealing the cigarettes to sell to the older kids. 

Now we see the London riots with youths picking up any large objects they can find and then smashing them into windows of shops to gain access and steal whatever they can.  Stealing handfuls of penny sweets really doesn’t seem that bad now.  The 70 year old lady would stand no chance against todays eight year old kids.