Childhood as it was
What did your parents do that you would never let your children do? A reader writes about her Kiwi kid rural upbringing: "Dad would put my brother and I and usually the dog in the bucket of the front-end loader, lift it to maximum height above the tractor — maybe 3m and certainly tipping a bit backwards — then zoom around the orchard at top (tractor) speed, hitting every bump he could find while laughing almost as much as we were.
Then in our early teens, an old Triumph 2000 was written off by rust. He took the boot off and gave us the keys and a paddock. One of us would stand in the boot tray holding on to the roof while the other did doughnuts and fishtails. Eventually the boot got boring and we graduated to lying on the roof.
There were only two very important rules — no braking and no collisions (eg, fence posts, trees). Both our parents worked full-time and ran a productive orchard so we got a lot of unsupervised time. We used it to do all sorts of cool but now terrifying stuff, like the time we turned our compressed air slug-guns into flamethrowers by tipping petrol down the barrel and firing from the hip over a lit stick held at arm's length in the other hand. My kids are urban (no tractors, no doughnut paddocks) and will probably have their own kids before I let them walk to the dairy unsupervised."
