I was in a
supermarket in London last month.
I watched three
young children, around five or six years old, sliding up and down the store
squealing and pulling stuff off the shelves. They were like chattering,
screaming meerkats on a hunt through the Kalahari Desert.
I looked for the
parents and spotted three women chatting to two men. Every now and then, the
kids would huddle round them and then bound off screaming again. The parents
were pushing those extremely expensive three wheeled prams and feeding organic
seaweed sheets to a baby who was spitting it all back out. One child had one of
those wooden bikes with no pedals, let's be honest pedalling is SOoooo last
year.
That wee munchkin
was crashing into giant displays of organic cereal. One child ran up and kicked
it's mum right on the shin, she merely rubbed her leg and limped off.
It made me recall
childhood shopping trips with my mammy in Shettleston. She would frequent the
King-Co shop, the nearest thing we got to a supermarket in Glasgow’s East End.
It contained about seven aisles of food, a few shelves containing bleach,
carbolic soap and some household goods, with maybe four till points. There was
a cold meat counter and usually two women in men's socks wearing slippers,
pushing a steamie pram full of washing tied in a tight bundle.
Before we entered
the glass doors, my mammy would grab me by the neck of my damp duffel coat and
read me the riot act: “If you touch anything, I will stamp on your neck”
I would walk the
cool aisles of that store, scared to even look at stuff. If my mammy caught me
making eye contact with the ice-cream freezer, she would hiss: “Don’t even
think about it!” The rest of the shopping trip would be spent with me staring
at the ground.
Then we would waddle
down the road, struggling with our shopping, a string vegetable bag full of
papery onions scratching my legs and plastic bags full of cans cracking my
knees. Once we got home, she would take the bags off me.
“Go out and play!”
she would yell. “Take your skate with you!”
Rain or shine, we
all went out to play, even if it was with just one broken roller-skate tied to
the ankle with a discarded brown nylon our mammy could no longer wear. That was
how I spent my long summer holidays. You weren't allowed back in for ages or
your mammy would shout "you are either out or you are in bastard
face" It was illegal back in the 60s to open and shut a door too many
times (obviously a joke).
I know I must be
getting older, now that I start to tut at other mothers’ parenting skills.
Today’s kids even
answer their mammy back! I don’t know anyone who was born in the 1960s who
would have dared to mouth off at their mammy. We didn't come from mothers who
tolerated a kick to their shins. I would still be in a coma ward to this day if
I had.
I know better than
most people that the old days weren’t as good as we think. I know there was a
lot of poverty, abuse, robbery and murder, but I still believe that kids didn’t
dare disrespect their parents the way they do in today’s society.
Then again, in our
day we didn’t have shedloads of TV shows that explained how to make your child
behave. We had The Golden Shot and The Avengers: two things my mammy was already
good at. She could fire a sling-back shoe like a warrior and – trust me – she
could avenge like no one I knew.
Ah …the good old
days.
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