t oMy parents were always very strict about bedtimes except on weekends when we could make it as late as we wanted. During the week, we were sent to our rooms with the directive NOT to bother them again. Parents today would be shocked about this treatment as noncompliance was met with a wallop and dire threats if they heard one more peep from us. Nowadays,  I see tiny little children running around at midnight because their parents, having both worked all day and feeling guilty about not seeing enough of their offspring, think this is spending quality time with little Peter or Sara. Who has to be in school the next day at a quarter to nine sharp, the poor mites? And then they wonder why children now are so nervous and have to be tagged with all sorts of acronyms.

With a stay-at-home mum and a teacher as a father by 8 pm, they had enough of dealing with us, so we went to our bedrooms. We lived in the Caribbean, where the sun set and rose at 6 pm every day, so at least it was already dark by then. In those days, reading was promoted, so we could read as long as we liked but not play or talk. The latter was terrible for my two brothers, who wouldn’t read unless forced to do so, while for me, it was lovely to have as much reading time as I wanted. But sometimes, when I had nothing to read and was bored, we thought of all sorts of ways to get around being stuck in our room.
One thing was to remove the glass shutters from our windows, and we had adjoining rooms, sneaking out to talk to each other outside. We never went anywhere as it was just the thrill of being outside at that forbidden time. My brothers shared their room, but I was lucky to have my own as the only girl. 
Another exciting thing to do was use a long string with the ends tied together to communicate with each other. Before we went to bed, we made sure that in both our rooms, we had one end of the circle tied down and possessed a clothespin. So, after lockdown, we would exchange written messages by attaching them to the string and circling it until it reached the other room—very Enid Blyton.
It all must sound dreadfully dull in this day and age of being able to kill and maim whole hordes by pressing a few buttons on a console, but I can tell you that for us, the sense of outwitting the grownups gave us a tremendous thrill. Looking back, it also taught us resilience and being able to find solutions to problems. As those “adventures” tired us, we slept like logs and went to school bright and full of energy.

Their friends frowned upon my parents as being far too lenient with us. The late weekend bedtimes, being allowed to refuse to eat food we hated, porridge, sprouts, or any vegetables, and letting us roam wherever we wanted without supervision was not the done thing. You have to understand they were very young when they had us, and I must admit, they were a bit careless.
Looking back, I am sometimes amazed that we survived our childhoods. For example, on New Year’s Eve, my parents and most of their friends got together for a big party. We would be with about twenty children, with most of us carrying shoe boxes full of fireworks, of which some would forbidden entirely now as they could blow up medium-sized things such as letterboxes and limbs.
Some of us were lucky to have a cigar-smoking dad, while others had to use mosquito spirals to light our stash. The pack of us would roam around the neighbourhood throwing our firecrackers, bombs and ground spinners indiscriminately at houses, cars and each other. Now and then, one of us was sent inside to get snacks and drinks while the by-the-time quite inebriated grownups did not pay any attention to what we were up to. I can proudly say that we all made it into adulthood with all our limbs and eyes intact. The only casualty one year was my little brother C., who got his arm badly burned. This was actually on New Year’s Day when we all were up early, our parents sleeping off their party, to go around the neighbourhood to collect all the fireworks that had not gone off for some reason or other. We then would take one of our dad’s Gillette razor blades, cut all the leftover fireworks open, and shake the powder in one heap. The idea was to throw a lit match on it to get an enormous flash. C. was allowed to do this for the first time as his big brother had been sent off to boarding school. Well, to make it short. It was a great flash, but most of it engulfed his arm. We then had to wake up our hung-over parents to take him to a doctor.

When I see all these children now with helmets, knee and elbow protection and constant supervision, some even being tracked by electronica, I have to smile and feel pity.
Next time, I will talk abouur adventures at the coast.