Climbing trees, bows and arrows, scrapes and madcap adventures... - Toby Neal looks back on childhood before smartphones
Climbing trees, bows and arrows, scrapes and madcap adventures... It was what childhood was like before the digital slavery of youngsters through screens and devices.
And now that era is evoked in a new memoir by John Clegg telling of his upbringing in 1950s and early 1960s Ludlow. Called "Young Thoughts Of A Man," and published on January 16, it captures a time when in his neighbourhood only one house had a phone, until the late 1950s only one had a television, and laundry was done in the sink or boiler before being wrung with a mangle.
Yet it was a magical time in which children invented their own games and roamed far and wide from an early age without their parents fretting.
Countryside beckoned invitingly on the doorstep of his Clee View home, aptly named as in the distance loomed Titterstone Clee Hill, planting an ambition in young John to climb it one day - an ambition which would be fulfilled in an epic expedition.
"This book is a tribute to those I shared those escapades with, for we literally had the time of our lives," said John, who would become an antiques dealer in the town and now lives in Croatia.
"The first part has brief recollections of the Isle of Man, the move to the Compasses Hotel in Ludlow, then on to living in the remoteness beyond Orleton, before a year spent in Shrewsbury.
