The last summer of freedom

As we move into the final knockings of summer, my mind went back to that time I remember fondly as my last summer of freedom.

I can’t lie, I longed to go to boarding school. I’d been brought up on Enid Blyton’s “Mallory Towers” and “St Clare’s” books, and it sounded like so much fun. I think I was also ready to get away – from my siblings, from the younger kids in our gang, from the expectations that I – as the oldest – had to be not only responsible for everyone else, but also to do and be better than my peers.

But before that need to get away arrived, I experienced a few final months of freedom, of irresponsible fun, of just being a kid.

We lived in a bungalow on the water – my sister (a year younger than me) and my little brother (7 years younger than me). One one side was a family with two girls – one the same age as my sister, with her sister two years younger. On the other we had my father’s boss, with a boy the same age as my sister, and twins (one boy, one girl) who were three years younger than he. So we were a little gang, ranging in age from 4 to 10. In each home, there was a combination of stay-at-home mother, servants and some form of nanny, and while we weren’t allowed to leave home via the front gates onto the road network, if we headed to the water, our time wasn’t monitored or controlled.

With all three houses having frontages onto the water – what we called the creek – we could get a fair distance from home without any adult being any the wiser. Everyone always assumed we were in someone else’s house, ‘cos that’s generally where we started and finished. But by walking in the shallows along the water’s edge, across the slipways or the rare bits of sandy frontage, we could work our way down to the village in one direction, the yacht club and the harbour in the other.

We’d clamber about in building sites until we got chased off by the arrival of the workers, or got caught by the watchmen on closed sites, we spied into our neighbours’ homes from the water, and we admired their boats as we swam or waded our way around jetties. We got wet and dirty, for it was impossible not to when we were traversing the vast drains which emptied into the creek and – apart from driving the poor chicken farmer crazy with our constant dares to climb into his farm and get away before he noticed/or caught you and hit your legs with a switch – we just roamed about doing not much.

In time, we’d all learn to sail and/or waterski, and have our own boats to mess about in, but even before that day came, we could all swim and simply loved messing about in the water. We learned to climb, to deal with rip tides, to look after one another, to get into and out of trouble, to handle scrapes, scratches and bruises, and to stay out of our mother’s hair. As we got older, the enjoyment we got from simply rambling about would prove not to be enough, and demands would be made to be taken to the pool, to play tennis, to the cinema, to go shopping, to listen to music and to read. Or maybe our parents just got wise to what we’d been up to and decided to fill up our days in a more structured manner 🙂

Those final months of freedom are a time I remember fondly. For after them puberty arrived and I became one moody teenager – no fun to be around at all. Indeed, the younger kids from that rambling group started to bait me instead of the chicken farmer 😉 the only difference being I wasn’t allowed to hit them on the rare occasion I caught them!

Were you in a gang when you were little, or more of a go-it-alone kid? Did you get up to naughty stuff, or were you a good kid?

© Debs Carey, 2025