News Remembering those days when we liked to make a splash!
According to one claim on the Internet, a town in Oxfordshire is home to England's oldest recorded puddle. But, in all honesty, Goole can beat that.
In the 1940s, in the back lane between Third and Fourth Avenues, two of those side streets off Pasture Road, there was a puddle some who were kids then remember with great affection.
It has to be admitted, though, that between our puddle of 60-odd years ago and that which has given rise to Oxfordshireís claim there is a distinct difference. Theirs has allegedly been around continuously since 1976. Ours came and went according to the weather.
Whenever the puddle appeared, to the kids growing up in that lane then, it was a highly-popular, if temporary, centre of attraction. After heavy rain it was a sign of true friendship if a pal came briskly calling at the back door with an urgent: "Are you coming out to play? We've got a big puddle!"
The message would inevitably be whispered because experience had shown that most parents were not wildly enthusiastic about their offspring playing in puddles. In any case, sometimes, if the rain creating the puddle had fallen during a thunderstorm, the pal who came calling would find the backdoor already open.
"Watch out for thunderbolts!" the older kids would urge whenever thunder or lightning threatened. "They can come down the chimney and if you don't let 'em out quickly they can set your house on fire."
So, during any daytime thunderstorm, those of us who then took such notions seriously would ensure the backdoor was at least partially open - just in case. Then, we assumed, if a thunderbolt did put in an appearance and emerged from the chimney it would obligingly depart through the doorway and head off for wherever it was ultimately intended.
With a thunderbolt threat behind us, getting out to play in our back lane puddle always brought a sense of relief - as well, of course, as a rediscovered enthusiasm for water-sports in Wellington boots.
Our back lane puddle owed its intermittent existence to a partially-blocked drain. In all probability it had never been cleaned out through all the years of the war. Apart from someone occasionally giving the drain a poke with a stick it received no attention until some time after the war either.
Even so, our puddle would last only an hour or two and then gradually disappear. So whenever the puddle was available for play there was no time to be lost. But in a back lane knowledge is handed down willingly. So we all learned that any fair-sized puddle could be walked across, run through or jumped into. It could be utilised, too, to see who could make the biggest splash. And whatever the aim or intention, if a passing girl happened to get splashed then that was a bonus. At the time those of us who were young then assumed that getting splashed by boys was the kind of thing girls were for.
At times imagination also played a part. With a little of that our puddle would become a canal brimming with crocodiles, a shark-infested sea or any river from the Ouse to the Amazon. Whatever the fantasy our puddle gave rise to, however, one was advised to keep watch for disapproving parents. Some seemed to take the view that the one thing we should not do with Wellingtons was wade through water. From others came the warning: "Keep out of that puddle, or you might catch something."
In time we came to understand that the warning referred to some potentially unpleasant disease, and not the possibility that a fish might take advantage of the flooded drain to make it all the way from the river Ouse to our back lane. All the same, on one occasion, one of the lads had a go at the puddle with a pin on the end of a piece of string.
On a day when the puddle exceeded all previous proportions, one of our group was inspired to inform us that Wellington boots had been invented by the Duke of Wellington so he could use them to walk through puddles during a famous battle. From then until we knew better we assumed that was why the battle was called Waterloo.
In that back lane between Third and Fourth Avenues, elsewhere in Goole and far beyond, many a puddle has come and gone since those days six decades ago. But, despite all the advances produced by the intervening years, those now too old to play out in their Wellies might wish to know that puddles remain widely regarded as something worth talking about.
There are more than eight million sites on the Internet which respond to the word 'puddles' and more than three million sites related to the topic 'Playing in Puddles'. And some of the latter category are one indication of how times have changed.
In our day, to be caught playing in a puddle was a sure way to incur a stern parental reprimand. Sometimes that could be as catastrophic as having Wellies confiscated until our puddle had disappeared. When many parents catch their child in a puddle nowadays, however, it seems the first thing they do is rush off and place a picture of the incident on the Internet.
Published on 14th August 2008 in News.
Add to: Digg | del.icio.us | Reddit
Comments
There are currently no comments
Comment
All comments are subject to moderation (during normal office hours) and may be amended.
Email addresses are required for administration purposes only.
By contributing your comments, you accept our terms and conditions.