Back To The Past While In The Future, With Friends

Who says that one should never look back to the past? 

Whoever that was must have had much to be regretful, sorry and ashamed about as well as being a plunderer of the future with no respect to learning from the past.

The Maori have a proverb that says one cannot plan for the future without looking back to the past and learning from it. 

As I am on this journey of going back to the future I am finding reflections of the past are a large part of making the future.  Indeed, I have spent the past twelve months dwelling on the past that was and reflecting on the great loss I now have in my future that made so much of my past blissfully happy.

As a result of the many months of soulful reflection on what once was, reflecting on the past, I now feel that moving forward is happening with a little more optimism of looking further to the future.  At least, I am telling myself that all the time, as rather like the paragraphs above, repetition can consolidate the thoughts.

Anyway, looking back to the past has meant it has been a corker few days these past days. A corker few days of reflecting on the past but on this occasion not reflecting back over the past twenty years but reflecting way, way back to the past, to the long ago nostalgia of childhood memories. 

Coincidence created and recreated some wonderful moments to actually ponder on the past, on nostalgia and on reflecting this week.

Coincidence had it that I was invited to stay at night at friends’ home this week, a very old friend and her warm and gorgeous husband.  She could, and would, be considered old in both terms of age and friendship;  she is one year older than me (hah, how I love mentioning that), and old in terms of our friendship.  I first met her when our family moved from a country town into the big smoke of Auckland city, sometime in the late 1950’s; our family moved into the house next door to her family, therefore that makes us really good old friends.

She and her husband now live in Mangawhai, living the lifestyle many dream of – at a beachside village where life can be as busy or as quiet as one wishes it to be.

This invitation to stay with them has been a long standing invitation which we made into a firm plan last week.  Coincidence then had it that our tutor (or lecturer, never quite know what she is or what to call her) at the writing course I am now attending had informed us that we would be given a task of writing about our childhood this past Wednesday evening.

Whenever I think childhood nowadays I instantly think of the friend mentioned above and another one of the then neighbourhood kids with whom we had all reignited our friendship some ten or twelve years ago.  It so happened that the street we lived in had a number of families with many children yet as far as I can recall the real central figures in the street in those times were centred around the three of us. 

Knowing I had to write something about my childhood I messaged these two friends earlier this week and asked them for their own prompts of what childhood meant to them.  I received back a couple of enjoyable paragraphs from each which instantly threw me all the more back to those times as if emerging from a time machine and was once again on Netherton Street where we played, and played and played.

I had some horrid incidences happen to me in my childhood, yet when I reflect back to those years between being a five year old to a fourteen year old, the instant emotion within is one of happiness, and play.  Play was all that matter.  There was no other major feature or factor of importance in my life growing up except who I was going to play with, when I was going to play with them and what was it we were going to play.  And it was all outside.  We were never allowed to play inside our homes.  That just was not done, not to be contemplated; children were to be seen playing outside and thereby give the parents some peaceful hours. 

Play was either in any one of our front or back yards, or more often on the street where bikes were ridden, trolleys were made and tennis was played.  Then there was all that skipping, and hop-scotch, and French skipping.  Cowboys and Indians featured a lot, with real pop-guns and those guns with the suction darts.  Those lead knuckle bones, the marbles. Blind man's bluff, and of course, bull rush.

                                 

The greatest childhood punishment for me was not the hidings I used to get, but it was any occasion when I was forbidden to be allowed outside to play.  I was a most miserable child if I could not play with the neighbourhood kids.  As an adult I often reflected that perhaps my focus on childhood playing was unusual, that others must have been more serious children that I, that surely no one else grew up with little else to focus on than playing.

Well, it seems I was probably incorrect when thinking I was unique.  This has been borne out by the paragraphs the other two forwarded on.  Their recollection about summed up my own, so will paste them here.

The first is from Dene, the skinny boy from across the road.  Dene was one year young than me, thus two years younger than Linda.  This put me in the primo position of having more play time with each of them at different times as with Linda being two years older than Dene, childhood sophistication meant he was just that too much of a little kid for her to play with all the time, but perfect for me – with the bonus I could boss him because I was one year older.  Besides, Linda had two other brothers and two other sisters to fill her playtime up with whenever I was not around to intervene.

Dene recalls:

Very much a working class group of families. No pretentions. Families fed from the railways, waterfront, New Zealand Post Office, The Herald etc.  While most kids got on well there was still the 'favoured group' or cliché at any particular time, that also constantly changed.

Kids having fun without the expensive items, maybe a bike that was put together from parts or a tennis racket, or even two pegs jammed together to make a gun. Wimbledon in the street, Eden Park on the front lawn and an Olympic running track around the block.

Food at all the other houses was always better than home. Boys were boys and girls were girls and there was not thought of the other 'sex' at that stage. Fathers worked from daylight to dark and mothers brought up the kids. Veges were delivered from the back of a truck and the butcher delivered the meat on Friday wrapped in brown paper. Milk came in glass bottles with tinfoil tops and was put in the letter box at night. The lawns were cut on Saturdays and everyone looked after and was proud of their little plot. Hells bells talk about the rambling of an old man!

He thought he was rambling, I consider it charming reflections.

Then Linda sent through her piece of her reflections.  Just as charming:

 

We were free and happy children, allowed to walk to school, shock horror. Verna - remember our bike trips up to Mt Albert and Mt Roskill? - a few swings and then bike back home. Such freedom.  Brown as berries, hair flowing in the wind.

Remember the time we gave cheek to some lads and they chased us on their bikes and we took refuge with some people working in their front yard till the boys lost interest, and we carried on biking home. Remember the floods with the heavy rain, and we all went down to Valonia Street to paddle or make rafts. You said on one occasion that you weren't allowed to go down there that day and you did it anyway, went home to get your smack, had the requisite time in your room then went straight back to play at the Hunt's next door. All worth it!!

Running and rolling down our steep front yards. One time when doing that you broke your arm! And there was the make believe play acting of 'Clint Kincaid' with hideouts up the old wattle tree, and cowboys and Indians with complicated story lines supplied by little bossy friend. Xx

                                        

These ramblings, as Dene called them, ignited such a full memory recollection of life between five and fourteen.  It certainly was a most wonderful childhood and has confirmed we were lucky enough to grow up during one of the best eras in this country.  We played from dawn to dusk and only went back home at meal times.  We would walk or ride for miles and explore whatever looked exciting at the time, including the flooded Oakley Creek and building sites with bulldozers. 

Ah, looking back to the past and reigniting that joy of living when you were a child is good and positive time spent .  We can learn from looking back.  We can learn to from our childhood.  Learn not take things so seriously.  Learn that the more you play the happier you are.  It’s a simple recipe for happiness.  Play. 

This reflecting back and philosophising on childhood and the past has now given me the great grown up dilemma of the now, the present. I am in great quandary.  I don't want to take myself seriously.  My dilemma is ....  who am I going to play with tomorrow?  And will their mother let them come out and play?  What shall we play?  Oh, decisions, decisions …..