Sprung tales: the worst things you ever did as a kid

Nic says:

06:30am | 18/10/09

When I was about 4 my mum had decorated a cake for a christening and left it on the dining table before it was to be delivered. Me being very jealous that my mummy hadn’t made us one, took a very nice bight out of the front of the heart because I wanted to taste it too. Luckily she was a true professional and fixed it up and also didn’t have a lot of time to worry about punishing me too badly.

Never again says:

10:51pm | 17/10/09

I didn’t receive a scolding for this, but I certainly learned my lesson…

Back when I was six or seven years old, I decided to try floating with a parasol, like I’d seen in a cartoon. i only jumped off a kiddy-chair, thank goodness. Mum kept telling me to knock it off, but I was persistent and refused to stop until I could float gently to land. I slipped and fell, breaking the chair, the parasol and my left arm. My arm was broken in such a way that Mum went into hysterics, Dad almost fainted and they practically rushed me into surgery to get it fixed back into shape and put into a cast.

Never again did I even consider trying that after that unfortunate injury, and I encourage others NOT to try it as well, you’ll only just get hurt.

Jenno says:

06:31pm | 17/10/09

When I was about 5 years old my sister (who would have been about 4) decided we should do our Mum a favour by washing all her records for her. We filled up a large bucket with hot soapy water and to make sure we got them *really* clean used a scourer as well. We were so proud of ourselves until Mum came out and found us, happily scrubbing away at all her ABBA, Beatles, Bee Gees records… Needless to say she was not happy but at least we got out of doing the dishes for awhile

Binny says:

04:19pm | 17/10/09

You guys do realize that there is a good chance your children will read this.
My friends and I have a pact not to tell our kids anything we got up to.No point in giving them ideas.
I grew up in the bush and it chills my blood thinking, of my kids doing some of the stupid things we did.

led says:

02:40am | 17/10/09

Like all americans this lot will do anything to get a cheque,completely fabricated and bulls..t

stephen says:

10:35pm | 16/10/09

PS I’ve since returned it all.

stephen says:

10:14pm | 16/10/09

gettin’ sent up to Clarendon street to shoplift yer dinner. (true)

Big Fella says:

09:43pm | 16/10/09

With 3 brothers the stories of bad things are way too numerous, 4 young lads can do a lot of damage. Like breaking 6 fluroscent tubes in the garage within a few weeks of moving into a new house, there were only 4 so a couple had been done twice, yoyo damage to lights, teaching the dog to slide on a lino floor in the garage and /or crash into piles of paper for recycling (dog seemed to love it). Using a little kids bike to stunt jump down some stairs and yes skid and slide into that same recycling pile, when the frame bent on the bike after a while we just bent it back. Firecrackers, using the roof as a diving board into the pool, scaling the bathroom wall with the towel rail, it only lasted till the towel rail fell out. Add to that holes in the walls, smashed windows, so many broken toys in fights, so many fights.
You name it we did it and have the stiches, bruises, bumps on the head to prove it. We also had the most wonderful childhood filled with fun and love and to contradict that other silly blog a stack of smacks on the bum with hands and wooden spoons. Wouldnt have changed a thing.

Mick says:

03:51pm | 16/10/09

I managed to survive an Irish Godfather - who, I’m convinced, was determined to put children to devious tests that involved bon fires, reckless boating, and Neil Diamond. Needless to say - having reached middle age, and paunch – I look back fondly at his directions to throw fibro into the cracker night fire (impressive shrapnel for a bunch of young boys), full throttle through surf waves (thoroughly soaking everyone’s mum at the back of the boat), and driving the streets in a GTS with kids hanging out of the sun roof, blasting the neighbours with Hot August Nights (thus ensuring my ever fondness for Green Fords.)

I’m also impressed I survived a 70’s childhood – that allowed the use of store bought explosives (bungers and poh-has) in the great letterbox demolition of ’76. Remarkably – considering the firepower we put together for most of our youthful adventures – the most damage a mate did to himself was burn off his eyebrows - & we used to make our own bombs to set off in a field near our homes…

Looking at kids now – poor things never really get a chance – so well done to the Balloon tacker and his brother for having some fun.

iansand says:

02:30pm | 16/10/09

If you throw a full disposable camping gas cylinder into a fire you get a very attractive mushroom cloud.

For information only.  Do not try this at home.  Make sure you are somewhere that no adult can see you.

Rosalee says:

01:47pm | 16/10/09

My mum had a tray lined with hand painted glass. When her friend and daughter visited I demonstrated to her daughter how to slide down a staircase on a tray, arriving at the bottom in a shower of glass. The other girl was most impressed, believing it was all totally deliberate.
I wasn’t hurt, amazingly - for once my mum was not angry, just pleased I wasn’t hurt - my second surprise of the day.

Verity says:

01:24pm | 16/10/09

When I and my Twin were 3 1/2 - 4 years old we got told off for something we had done (can’t remember what it was) but it was bad enough that we got sent to our room to think about what we had done.
but being double the trouble we decided that being sent to our room was completely unfair and we decided the only course of action was
to throw the entire contence of our bedroom ( Well what we could physically lift ) out the window - toys, clothes, bedding - you name it, it went out the window.
lets just say mum was not happy and we were made to pick every thing up - we got a little smack on the bum each time we walked out of the house and everytime we walked back in, until we had put everything back where it belonged…. neither of us did anything like that agian. but to this day everytime I think about it I crack up laughing.. - Memories. :o)

Romano Diviano says:

01:23pm | 16/10/09

Bill the Family at once!  What a douchey lil kid he probably thinks its super-funny. Loser!  Fail Spec!
The parents are nutty storm chasers, they should definately be made to foot this bill!

Lanai Vasek says:

01:21pm | 16/10/09

When I was 12, I tied my younger cousin to a chair in the garage, then tied her to a cupboard so if she moved the cupboard would fall on top of her.

We had a love-hate relationship and on this particular day she was obviously annoying me.

She didn’t move, and I managed to get away with 45 minutes of ‘free time’ without her.

But needless to say I was in a whole world of trouble when my grandparents (who were minding us that day) found out.

bella starkey says:

01:19pm | 16/10/09

Me and my younger siblings broke into our neighbours house because we were convinced thier kids had stolen our basket ball. They hadnt but we ate all thier chocolate anyway.

Was very fun untill we got caught and i go the blame because i was the oldest.

Disgraced at the column says:

01:13pm | 16/10/09

Cmon Paul Colgan, your seriously gonna let people write in so others can LEARN some “Fun” things to do, You should be ashamed

Dan says:

01:00pm | 16/10/09

On a school camp once we thought it would be a good idea to do the old “tin of baked bins on the camp fire” trick.  The resulting explosion covered everyone in boiling hot baked beans, covered everyones tents in red hot coals and sent the baked bean can flying over 100 metres.  Its just very lucky no-one was standing in front of it.

KD says:

12:58pm | 16/10/09

When I was 13, a friend and I thought it would be a great idea to do the coastal walk from Pearl Beach to Patonga.  We set off around 3pm, barefoot, and wearing nothing but our bikinis and twin sets, (it was the 70’s).  Accompanying us were a couple of older guys we’d met on the beach and had spent a few hours chatting to.  We knew how long it took to drive the distance, so figured it’d probably be an hour’s walk there and back, and therefore left our handbags, towels etc on the beach (a fact I long lamented afterwards due to being busted for smoking on top of everything else when my parents found my fags in my abandoned bag!)  Long story short, four and a half gruelling hours later, in the pouring rain and pitch darkness, we finally stumbled on our badly cut feet, utterly exhausted and bedraggled, on to the sand at Patonga, having spent the entire time clambering over the rocks while the ocean pounded against them, and seeking higher ground amongst the gnarly old tree roots when the tide started to come in.  Our parents had called the police fearing the worst when they’d found our abandoned gear on the beach, and there were Police cars and helicopters all out looking for us, as well as regular news flashes on the local radio.  We were so unbelievably relieved when we were finally delivered by the Police safely back to our parents, but all they wanted to do was kill us - go figure!

george mamouzellos says:

12:42pm | 16/10/09

When I was about 11 my cousin showed me that a mix of icing sugar and a type of fertilizer created a dodgy, but fun, type of gunpowder. I thought it was cool as! ...and so made about 4 kilos of it, filling up a bucket with the stuff. Being 11 years old, I also didn’t really think that lighting small amounts of it with a sparkler, close to the motherload of 4 kilos, was a bad idea. It sort of was. I created my own mini volcano of burning gunpowder, with a flame that looked like those on a windproof cigarette lighter, about a metre tall. The wall next to the inferno turned to dust. The table it was sitting on turned to charcoal. The curtains caught fire. The fire brigade came round. I, however, pulled a Bin Laden and hid. Anyway it turned out well. The fire brigade thought I was very clever, and my parents were too perplexed as to how it actually happened to remember that they probably should have beat me up. Firebugs unite! hi5!

Keith says:

12:40pm | 16/10/09

Paul, you naughty boy, I’m going to tell your father! Perhaps not, in case you tell. We lived not far from the mouth of the river where the hull of the old SS Kooper of WW2 fame was dragged up a creek to be swallowed up by mangrove mud. It was soon spotted by the local kids, who explored its engine room etc. One of the kids found amongst a lot of parts and cotton waste, a tin box of what looked like bullets, but with a crimped end. It was soon deduced they were detonators., and a hush went over the kids. The chief honch, an older kid, (who incidentally, stole my girfriend), pocketed them, and as we climbed up the ladder, we spied a row of toilet bowls, ready of course, to be demolished. Grabbing a lot of oily cotton waste, we distributed the detonators wrapped in the cotton waste, amongst the 4 toilet bowls, lit the waste and decamped with haste on our bikes. I’ve never ridden a bike so fast. We heard a muffled explosion soon after, and it was reported in the Courier Mail, but never to be admitted. It took a week or so later, to come back to inspect our ‘handiwork’. All 4 toilet bowls were indeed reduced to fragments. Needless to say, I have an understanding of Tom Stanton’s adventures.

a don says:

11:40am | 16/10/09

When I was 4 the power poles in the street were being replaced from the other side of the road to new ones on our side. They put a white peg on the boundary of our house. I pulled it out and played with it and then stuck in into the ground in the middle of the front of the house. For years after my Dad would say “what on earth were they thinking putting that bloody pole there.”

My brother did a better one. When he was about 10 - before school he and his mate rode their bikes up to the army firing range looking for old bullet shells. It also turned out it was a munitions dump where they blew up old bombs. They found like a 12lb bomb and brought it back to school and with their mates standing around they were throwing it onto the concrete to see if it would go off - like a throwdown in their mind. They ended up taking it to class to show the teacher. He was a WW II veteran who recognized it immediately and they evacuated the whole school while the bomb disposal squad came to take it away.

hitchy says:

11:37am | 16/10/09

Huh, I could spend hours on these stories!....The beach we lived at had a storm water outlet that emptied directly into the ocean. The opening at the beach end was probably 4 ft high, certainly large enough for adventerous boys, armed with torches, to enter & ‘explore’.

We followed the ‘main trunk’ pipe up toward the township & eventually found ourselves under the main street, a few feet below one of the storm water entrances you see in the kerbside gutters.  One kid on anothers shoulders was enough to see ‘out’....now, I’m not sure who’s idea this was, but we decided that it would be funny to yell out “help, help, we’re stuck in the drain”, to attract some passerby’s attention….which it did. A lady was ‘comforting’ us while contacting the police & fire depts….again, we did the only thing 8 Y.O boys are likely to do in the circumstances…..we bolted.

It was some hours later that we were ‘up the street’ with Mum going to the butchers (or some such)....Mum was most concerned by all the police & emergency services crews that had opened the drain cover & were searching for the ‘lost’ boys.!. She said, “stupid boys, I know you lot have more sense than to be getting into the drains”.

A padlocked grate appeared on the beach pipe outlet, only days later, curtailing further adventures to the ‘underworld’

Charlie says:

11:35am | 16/10/09

When I was only about 4 years-old I redecorated my entire nursery with the contents of an industrially sized pot of baby cream. Wall, curtains, bed, pages of all my books, anything and everything within the reach of my stumpy little arm got doused in gloopy white gunk.

SM says:

11:26am | 16/10/09

@hitchy - Mornington Peninsula by any chance. I think I remember…

hoofman says:

11:22am | 16/10/09

I’m interested in how this story captured world attention. What turned out to be a false alarm of a child at risk attracted worldwide live coverage. Millions of children around the world are at continual risk because of war, famine or disease, yet that’s accepted as normal and worthy of little attention. Is the attention to this story a sign that we switch off to real and continuing tragedy but open up to something that wasn’t a tragedy at all, but a bit unusual and with a happy ending, especially if it comes from somewhere where ‘the people are like us’? It reminds me of that headline ‘Hundreds killed in Indian Earthquake’ with the sub-heading ‘No reports of Aussie casualties’.

Janine says:

11:04am | 16/10/09

When i was 12 i was caught smoking a cigarette while sitting in the family garage, on top of a 44 gallon drum of petrol, while swinging off the hand pump bowser protruding from the top of the drum.  Needless to say i was whipping of my life, which didn’t stop me smoking, just made me choose a better location to do it

Thomas Stanton says:

11:03am | 16/10/09

In year 7 at school one of the boys in our group decided to bring some .22 bullets in for our amazement. Feeling that looking at them wasn’t exciting enough we put the bullets into empty pen lids and set them alight in the middle of the school quad at lunch time.
We figured at the time that hiding behind bushes and trees was a good idea.
They all went off flying in different directions and we made a pact never to do it again.

hitchy says:

10:48am | 16/10/09

Living at the beach beside 100’s of acres of Ti tree, it was a natural ‘attraction’ to boys & provided many, many happy hours of ‘adventures’. School holidays, we’d be over there, dawn till dusk without any adult supervision. Anyway, one of our favourite games was ‘toy soldiers’...I’m sure most blokes of my ‘era’ (mid 40’s) will remember the bags of plastic toy soldiers you could buy in various poses.. etc

We’d set up various ‘armies’ in the dunes & wage ‘war’ day after day….(the toy soldiers being ‘assisted’ by us ‘real life’ commando’s!). To ‘spice’ the game up,  we’d add the realisim of explosions provided by ye olde ‘penny bungers’...we’d chuck ‘em at each others armies like hand grenades (remember this was the mid ‘70’s before OH&S & the ‘nanny’ society began to rule kid’s lives!)....anyway…it appears that some Ti-tree may have allegedly, perhaps, maybe, caught fire as a result of our ‘war’...we couldn’t put it out, so did the only thing we could do…..we ran.  The fire brigade arrived & worked many hours into the night to control the fire…we never told, although I suspect Mum was onto us & curtailed the activities of WW 2.1

Simmo says:

10:12am | 16/10/09

My twin brother and I were about 4 or 5 and our neighbour across the road had just got some nice white rocks put in his front garden so we thought it would be a fun game to stand on either side of the street and throw the rocks back and forth.  This was going great until the old guy down the road came driving past in his brand new car at the wrong time and I threw a stone that smashed his back passenger window. he got out of the car grabbed both of us and told us he was going to “tell your mother what naughty little boys” we were.

I responded by telling him mum wasn’t home, only problem was he could see her through the front window of the house…..

We had to do jobs at the man’s house to help pay for the borken window and were told if we ever threw another rock dad would put our fingers in the vice in the shed, needless to say we never played that game again…..