Re Andy Welch’s article on “Norwegian parenting” (How to be a Norwegian parent: let your kids roam free, stay home alone, have fun – and fail, 11 July), such willingness to allow children freedom was a feature of British life for many of us born five decades ago or more. I was not particularly unusual being put on to a bus at the age of five with a luggage label pinned to my coat for a five-hour journey to my grandparents’ house.
When there, my grandmother, who ran a seaside boarding house, would take me down to the beach in the morning with sixpence for the Punch and Judy show, and the instruction to be at the pier gate when both the clock hands were at the top of the clock. This was the era of the Moors murders, and child abduction was a public fear.
A couple of years later, my younger siblings and I were given free range of the Great Orme headland, with its cliffs and quarries and mineshafts, along with the warning that we should not go near the edges, a prohibition we respected until our late teens.
Robert Hardy
Cambridge
• Reading Andy Welch’s article, I can’t help wondering why things have changed so much in Britain. I was brought up in the 1960s in south London. I went to school on my own by bus at age seven. I knew most of the local shopkeepers and they knew me. On the downside, maybe, I was also regularly sent out to buy cigarettes for my parents at that age.
Mandy Lane
Ulverston, Cumbria
• As a six-year-old living in a London suburb in 1940, with my mother looking after a small sister, and father working all hours, I roamed the car-free roads in a little gang. We hunted for spies and picked oxeye daisies to sell. I was lucky – I learned to be independent.
Rita Hawes
Boughton Aluph, Kent
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