In the interest of fair play and equal time for opposing views, something I am very serious about if it will bring me another subject to write a blog about, I thought we might consider postcards which present another side of childhood than the cute, well-dressed, well-behaved tots we considered in our last column.
We wish here to look at postcards which consider the child as someone who deliberately does something antisocial, or at least something in contradiction to parental rules. There are plenty of postcards like the one shown here, where children are engaged in things that shock a parent because they just didn’t know any better. That’s not what we’re after here.
You will notice at once that cartoonists’ renderings outnumber the actual photographs this time around. This is because a nasty prank just doesn’t seem as realistic when staged as adorableness does, and few children posed for photographs of themselves doing things which would get them scolded, spanked, or left with no dessert at dinner. (This was, you understand, in the days before Social Media.)
We have discussed theft before, as with the young lady swiping sweets or this lad who knows where his sister keeps her mad money. This is a constant theme: children were EXPECTED to steal fruit (often unripe, leading to a different postcard theme) or jam or pie. (Oddly enough, stealing cookies—a standard gag in comic strips from the 1950s on, seems to be absent. Was it a rarer crime in those days than jam-stealing or just harder to draw?)
But children also engaged in more dangerous games: where they might risk capture and chastisement if seen. Some of these were stealth missions.
While others involved the laying of traps, many of which involved a risk of serious injury to the target.
Some of these pastimes were seasonal, of course. Anyone wearing a tall hat past a boy on a snowy day knew what was likely to happen.
While the use of out and out explosives was centered on the Fourth of July.
And some diversions which are now, alas, a thing of the past. When a train moved into a tunnel in days of lesser technology, the passengers would be plunged into darkness. Amorous couples took advantage of the darkness, and impish tots might, as here, light a match to show them in mid-embrace. (The boys involved in this sort of thing could piously protest that they were merely showing up the misbehavior of their elders. This did NOT prevent them having to make a quick escape into the train corridor.)
The standard upheld by the Katzenjammer Kids (and their opposite numbers in Foxy Grandpa) suggested that some children made a general career of being disobedient, loud, and disruptive. There is not a LOT of evidence to show these stories were so very far from the truth.
Many a parent has sighed with relief and satisfaction when their little bundle of bounce has finally gone off to bed.
So that they can sit back in a comfortable chair and reflect that, after all, people without offspring are missing so much of life.
Blogsy Babbles 