Simple and free

[alan refail]

I fondly remember the wooden stick from my childhood days

What's your favourite simple and free nomination

[snooky]

Fields and woods to play on and in

[jane E]

food tins which were trains all the way down a long hall. I was 3 or 4 at the time.

[Clive.]

Sliding on the lino flooring...except for a mishap when Mum had polished the section in the toilet at the end of the landing....Instead of a controlled halt..I sped on...hitting a knee on the toilet seat edge leading to trip to local hospital and 2 stitches

At Grandmas a box of old matchboxes that could be opened and thus slotted together to form matchbox towers...

..and Mums knitting wool suitcase....trying to emulate Dads electric lines....stringing wool up and down the hallway...around banisters...up stairs and along landing.....

..and so into the 1970s..Skewering collected conkers and threading onto string..a very long string and many many conkers. ..then writing to Blue Peter..then getting a telegram back...to appear on the program...oh dear, a classic case of Clive follows a simple idea and gets himself in deeper than he had nerves to handle
....but I appeared following Peter Purves...live..hauling a string of Conkers across the studio...and got me a badge

Clive.

[Bren]

Cliffs, rocks, sea and sand and the odd rick of hay or straw.
Bren

[Primrose]

Empty match boxes, to which we used to attach long lenths of string and bunches of teaspoons. We would then toss them out of our bedroom windows and up to the bedroom windows of the kids across the road to make some kind of telephone system. When you tugged the string, the spoons all rattled to sound like a telephone ringing. Can't remember exactly what function the match boxes served now, but do recall that we rigged this up in my parents' bedroom one night, attached to the window opening lever and they woke around midnight and wondered what the hell was when my chums across the road started tugging and all the teaspoons started ringing in their bedroom!

And old branches being used to make dens in woods. Kids are so wrapped in cotton wool these days! Can still remember the joy of spearing sausages on twigs and cooking them over the fire we had built in our den (with not an interfering adult in sight)

[Tigger]

We want to see the badge Clive!

Photo - here - in the Blue Peter anniversary year.

I'm really jealous. Some other Forum member will now tell us they've got a Crackerjack pencil .

[oldherbaceous]

Building dams in the little brook.

[alan refail]

Wow! I awoke some fond memories there
I once spent a whole fortnight's holiday at my uncle's isolated farm fully occupied with a pile of sand and some stones - made an entire motorway system, though the first motorway was yet to be built.

[PLUMPUDDING]

Swinging from dangerous rope swings in trees on a high banking and seeing if we could swing out over the stream in a circle and land on our feet back at the other side without plunging down the banking into the stream. What fun!

The other good sport was "sledging" on a piece of cardboard down a steep grass banking.

You've set me off now - daming the stream, making mud pies, climbing as many trees as possible, making dens in the hay field and being chased by the farmer, collecting frog spawn, making bows and arrows from ash twigs and string etc, etc etc.

You rarely see children playing out now, it is such a shame.

[Johnboy]

Tch, tch, tch. I dread to think what Health and Safety would have to say about just about all the wonderful memories that you have all brought back to me! Thank you all.
JB.

[The Mouse]

Even though I grew up in the countryside, I lived on a building site - the half-built houses were our playground when we weren't roaming the local woods and moors.
Then there was the hugh mound of earth which I suppose must have been excavated before putting in the foundations of the new houses; we tunnelled into it like rats !
After the builders had finished for the day we would make cement 'bombs' out of what they left, and throw them at each other!
At the end of a local park, the stream disappeared into a tunnel. We would go exploring in there and get underneath the local tractor factory. Or we could crawl through another bit of this tunnel system (a drain, really) and come out in a wood. It never crossed our minds that the water going through it came from a little reservoir, and that they might let water out of it at any time
Oh, those were the days!

[Chantal]

My best friend and I built an igloo in her garden one snowy winter. Because we lived next door but one to each other, we rigged up a pulley system with buckets to get snow from our garden to her garden. This famously broke and squashed a load of the in between neighbours plants

The finished product was amazing and we could both get inside, plus her Highland Terrier.

The problem came when it warmed up as the garden was on a slope and we flooded her kitchen

[Catherine]

Being out all day in the country side with my dog and not having to worry about anything. Playing out in the snow when tiny with my sisters. Christmas with my parents and sisters when small. Hay making in the summer with my best friend and riding her horses every weekend.

[Clive.]

I forgot the dam building...thanks for the reminder Old H'...in the brook behind a friends house..and then with rocks in a stream that feeds the Goyt valley resevoir Derbyshire when on our holidays...streams near Goathland too when on N Yorks holidays....

Quarrying and road building in the garden and sand heaps with Dinky toys...at my Cousins with his Blaw Knox bulldozer and at home with the Michigan tractor dozer, the Eaton Yale loader, older Euclid dump truck with the winding handle tipper and then with a pair of the Aveling Barford sprung action tipping dump trucks...

Ref Blue Peter;....I have often considered another letter when there has been an anniversary...I could bluff out a good tale perhaps. ..and the conker chain is still, I believe, in an old suitcase in the loft...never looked at it not sure its state
.....but then I was in enough trouble back then when I bottled the rehearsals. ..but I knew I had to do it for real live...as all my mates back at school were going to be watching....some of them missed it though as they did not believe that BP was live.
I have never seen it..it was before the days of VCR etc...and no idea if my violently coloured flowered shirt is held for posterity on a tape in the vaults of the Beeb.

....and the next day back at school in Latin lesson the Headmaster says..."I believe one of us is famous"...."perhaps he would like to stand at the front and tell us all about it.?". ..I waffled on about the train trip and the taxi ride etc...but it took another 20 years before I owned up to nearly bottling it

He was strict..but no..I did not stand at the front of the class for 20 years..

Clive.