Recalling halcyon days roaming free in Cork suburbs during summer holidays

WITH the cost of summer camps and entertainment for kids during the long summer holidays running to around €3,000 for a family, according to one report, you have to feel sorry for parents.

The childcare provided at school is suddenly wrenched and parents often have to send their offspring to summer camps.

Granted, they’re not all hugely expensive. Sports summer camps, in particular, sometimes only cost around €70 per week. But for families with several kids, paying maybe €200 a week for summer camp that might involve drama, art or other activities, not to mention extras like money to keep the kids fed, watered and transported, it all adds up.

And then there is the nightmare of trying to find childcare for the hours that the little darlings are not at summer camp. Often, grandparents have to step in.

It’s a far cry from the days when mothers stayed at home and kids roamed free in their neighbourhoods.

I remember those halcyon days when, after wolfing down a breakfast of cornflakes and being given a few bob for ‘the baths’, we bolted out of the house, knocked on the doors of our friends and hotfooted it into the former Eglantine Baths in Cork city.

The chlorine and steam would nearly choke you but we were a hardy crew, used to the downside of a busy municipal swimming pool, located at the back of City Hall where there is now a multi-storey car park. It was where many of us learned how to swim.

Afterwards, we would go to a sweet shop known as ‘The Dainty’. Money seemed to stretch quite far long ago. For a modest amount of pennies, you could buy sherbet, a Macaroon bar and maybe a bit of donkey’s gudge. That latter ‘delicacy’ was a type of Chester cake, supposedly made from the left overs from fruit cakes with some icing on top to make it vaguely fancy.

These days, parents would strongly object to their children eating so much junk before dinner which was served at lunch time. Yet, there didn’t seem to be the same level of obesity in children back then compared to now. Was it because we were more physically active than today’s children?

Certainly, we were brought up with a certain amount of benign neglect. 

We’d be gone most of the day, every day, during the summer holidays, running, swimming and climbing trees in what was an old orchard close to where I lived.

There was a derelict house there too. My sister and a few friends found money in a ‘secret drawer’ inside a dresser in this old house. They told their respective mothers.

I’m not sure what happened to the money, but I do know that the youngsters who made the find celebrated the auspicious day every summer with iced buns, ice-cream and, I suppose, Mi-Wadi orange. I know this sounds like something out of an Enid Blyton book (minus the ginger pop) but it’s a true story.

We had a great time as kids. Chatting to a friend who was brought up on a farm in Munster revealed the sheer hard work that she and her siblings had to engage in during the summer holidays.

The traditional reason for getting nearly three months off secondary school and two months off primary school was so that children could help their parents in the fields.

My friend says she had to help save the hay, pick up stones that had dislodged themselves from stone walls, feed the hens and cater for the contractors who cut the silage. These men had to be given great big dinners in the middle of the day in the family kitchen.

The jobs on the farm were “endless”, says my friend, who added that her family never went on holidays and were lucky to get to a beach of a Sunday. What deprivation!

She doesn’t think it was character building. It was more of “a nightmare. I hated it.” And here’s the ultimate insult. Being a girl, my friend didn’t inherit a single inch of the farm. In the old patriarchal style, it was left to her brothers. All that thankless work. For nothing. (Apart from being reared on the produce of the farm.)

Oddly, my friends says she thinks she’d now like to run an organic farm. Not quite a busman’s holiday - but not too far off it either.

We were lucky. Our parents brought us on holidays for a fortnight every summer. There was no issue with childcare. 

We looked after ourselves with the smaller children attached to their mothers’ apron strings. Now, childcare has to be factored in. And at such a cost.

Life, long ago, was uncomplicated but tough on career-minded mothers. For today’s mothers, life is complicated in other ways.