An enduring memory of being an early teen in the 1970s is the way that I seemed to take ever greater personal risks the more my parents urged my caution.
I’m tempted to say that being a teenager today is less dangerous. But then I look at the planet, its order and future upended by a trolling, extortionate, narcissistic wannabe king and in moral hock to tech bros who build gold castles on our own vanity and our kids’ online peril, and I think, well, maybe not.
I’ve tried not to helicopter over my kids. To let them make their own mistakes while being there as a safety net when they’ve fallen. It hasn’t always worked. Learning the hard way that you can’t always protect your kids from profound pain and danger holds no lesson beyond that you can’t always protect your kids from profound pain and danger.
But “be careful” to me was always such a red rag that I’ve tried hard not to say it to my own kids. Two of the three haven’t needed any more encouragement.
“Go out and play but make sure you’re home for dinner. And be careful,” was the mantra to most of us on school holidays as we set out to roam neighbourhoods as full of mischievous possibilities as they were with unchipped, unvaccinated dogs.
Taking a small motorboat out in heavy rain and wind at dusk without life jackets when we were 12 and surfing the storm-swell in it seemed like a very good idea at the time. Until we capsized and nearly drowned.
But we didn’t. And, so, this left us alive to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night which was never so much a single night but a week or two of wanton destruction and flirtation with danger involving vast quantities of legal explosives otherwise known as fireworks.
The “penny-bunger” was a “cracker” (read finger-sized stick of compressed explosive powder in cardboard with a wick) that really packed a punch. From memory they were about five cents each in 1974. And if you taped four of them together, conjoined the wicks (you’d set the thing fizzing with the cigarette in your mouth; we all smoked from the age of perhaps nine), what you actually had was a small, very dangerous stick of sort-of dynamite.
It seemed like a fine idea to covertly place these explosive devices in neighbourhood letterboxes, light them and run. You had to be quick. One kid in the ’hood, Tuddy, had a sort of “L” symbol semi-seared between his eyes for a while after the red-hot metal “7” of a house number was blown off a letterbox and struck him on the forehead.
Meanwhile, take a piece of metal piping and seal one end with a hammer blow. Bingo – a perfect musket-style weapon. All you had to do was light the penny-bunger, drop it down the tube, insert a marble on top of it and point it at your foe. Boom. Ouch. Hilarious.
We had teams: Goodies and Baddies. Nobody I know actually lost an eye although I did suffer damage to my sight in one when the cracker prematurely exploded in my tube before I’d inserted the marble. Come the end of those cracker weeks we’d be covered in painful blue-black bruises.
I can’t for the life of me think why the killjoys eventually banned cracker night!
Still, there were many other fun ways of flirting with danger. Like riding your bicycle down the very long, steep, straight path in our neighbourhood park … with a metal bucket over your head (it’s amazing how little you see beyond the path underneath without peripheral vision; who knew?) while your friends stood at intervals and lobbed stones at your protected head. “Buckethead” was a blast. If you got to the bottom of the path without crashing you didn’t have to do it again. You got to chuck the stones.
At one point just about everyone in my neighbourhood seemed to have a bb rifle. These we did not shoot at birds or neighbourhood cats or dogs. No – we mostly seemed to shoot them at each other. From memory the only rule was you had to aim from the thighs to the ankles only.
The danger seemed to heighten somewhat from the age of about 13 when skateboards and surfing (and surf-camping trips to the coast without adults; what were our parents thinking?) were added.
Drugs, (legal) alcohol consumption, cars and motorcycles, rock’n’roll for some of my friends, intimate relationships and rivalries, journalism, dodgy foreign back streets and bars and trouble spots further challenged one’s fight or flight instincts.
I’ve always thought my parents, alive until I was well into my 40s, didn’t know a tenth of the risks I’d taken as an adult let alone as a child. I think my dad didn’t want to. My mother always seemed to have an inkling, though. Perhaps that’s why, as she often assured me, she was forever praying for me!
Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
