BMX jumps, bullrush and the freedom of a Kiwi childhood: Glenn Dwight

Take the BMX. Okay, mine was technically a Raleigh Twenty, but I’d taken the carrier off the back, which I figured transformed it from something your mum rode to the shops into a high-performance stunt bike.

And for a period of my childhood, there was nothing more important than seeing how far you could get a small bicycle off the ground.

We didn’t have purpose-built bike parks or professionally designed jumps.

We had a piece of plywood, a couple of bricks and the sort of confidence that only comes from being 11, when consequences were for grown-ups, and Newton’s laws of gravity only applied to apples.

Building a jump required very little engineering knowledge.

Somebody would find a piece of wood, someone else would drag over an old beer crate, and within minutes we had created something we believed was suitable for launching humans into the air.

We had the ambition of Evel Knievel and the pioneering spirit of the Apollo astronauts.

Nobody tested it, nobody stood back and said: “I’m not entirely sure this meets New Zealand building standards”.

You simply pedalled towards it as fast as your little legs would carry you while half the neighbourhood stood around hoping to witness sporting greatness or a spectacular accident.

And while we’re here, can someone explain why boys’ bikes had that metal bar running across the middle?

Of all the places to put a solid steel bar on something routinely ridden by overconfident boys, that seems particularly poorly thought through.

Helmets were technically available, although I don’t remember them playing a particularly significant role in proceedings.

Our primary piece of protective equipment was probably a pair of Stubbies, which offered excellent ventilation but limited protection from gravel, along with some cricket batting gloves.

And somehow this was completely normal.

The same approach applied to playgrounds.

Today’s playgrounds are magnificent things with soft surfaces, rounded edges, safety barriers and enough carefully considered engineering to suggest somebody has actually thought about what happens when a 5-year-old falls off.

Ours were different.

They appeared to have been designed by the same people who built oil rigs.

There was steel everywhere.

Steel ladders, steel monkey bars and enormous steel slides that, after half an hour in the January sun, reached temperatures normally found on the surface of the sun.

And underneath all this sophisticated equipment was the very latest in 1980s impact-absorbing technology: dirt.

If you were lucky, there might have been a thin scattering of bark to soften your fall.

And if you thought heading home meant returning to a safer environment, clearly you’ve forgotten the 1980s Kiwi trampoline.

Our trampoline, like most Kiwi trampolines of the era, didn’t have a safety net, padded poles or a zip-up entrance.

It was essentially a piece of fabric attached to exposed metal springs sitting several feet above the ground.

And if the trampoline wasn’t providing quite enough jeopardy on its own, out came the garden hose and dishwashing liquid, turning an already questionable piece of recreational equipment into the backyard equivalent of bouncy black ice.

But our parents would look out the kitchen window, see six children violently bouncing one another towards a row of exposed springs and presumably think: “Lovely, they’re outside”.

And we were outside. A lot.

You’d leave home in the morning on your bike with a sentence as vague as: “I’m going to Matt’s,” and that was apparently enough information for an entire day.

Matt may or may not have been involved in what happened next.

Within an hour you could be down at the creek constructing a completely unconsented dam, climbing a tree, building a hut or three suburbs away because somebody had heard there was a really good hill.

There were no phones, no GPS trackers and certainly no little blue dot reassuring your parents that you were exactly where you said you’d be.

Mainly because you almost certainly weren’t.

If Mum wanted to find me, the technology available to her was the telephone.

“Is Glenn there?”

“No.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

“Okay, thanks.”

And remarkably, nobody called the police.

You just had to be home for tea.

That was the contract.

Your parents didn’t necessarily know where you were, who you were with or whether somebody had recently constructed a “mean as” jump out of building materials of questionable provenance, but when the streetlights started coming on, you knew it was probably time to head home.

We even managed to turn the relative safety of a school lunchtime into something that would probably breach several current health and safety regulations.

Bullrush.

I’m not sure I was ever formally taught the rules of bullrush.

It seemed to be one of those games children simply inherited from the generation before, like marbles.

As far as I can remember, you started on one side of a field and attempted to reach the other while avoiding being folded into the turf by someone called Craig.

Someone inevitably broke an arm, and it was announced at school assembly that bullrush had been banned.

The ban generally lasted about two weeks, until someone discovered the obvious loophole and simply changed the name.

Bullrush was gone, replaced by the apparently much safer “cow charge”.

And somehow, just like most of us playing cow charge, we made it through relatively unscathed.

There is a temptation when you remember all this to conclude that children today are too protected or somehow missing out, but I don’t think that’s fair.

We know more now. Helmets are a very good idea. Safety nets have probably prevented thousands of broken arms, and I have no desire to campaign for the return of playground equipment capable of branding a child.

But I do wonder if there was something hidden among all that mild peril that was actually rather valuable.

We were given freedom.

We disappeared for a few hours and had to make decisions for ourselves.

We got bored, so we invented something. If something broke, we tried to fix it. If the jump collapsed, we rebuilt it, usually higher.

If somebody fell over, we checked they were okay and, once that had been established, laughed at them.

Our world was as big as we could pedal.

And that’s the bit worth holding on to.

Not the scorching slides, exposed trampoline springs or the belief that a Raleigh Twenty could briefly become airborne, but the freedom to head out the front gate and see where the day took you.

To explore, get bored, get lost occasionally, make something, break something and come home with a story.

Because years later, those are the stories you’ll remember and retell.

You might even end up writing an article about the afternoon you jumped on your Raleigh Twenty and went eeling in the Silverdale Stream.

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