When I was a child, our dad constructed a high jump bar out of scrap wood in the back yard. The risk of copping a splinter on the way over definitely helped you to leap higher. He dragged an old mattress on to the grass for my brother and I to fall on to. When that bar was raised half an inch and you scissored over the top without knocking it flying, you felt like an astronaut who’d finally made it to the moon.
There was long jump, too. Instead of a sandpit we had a dirt heap, but because we lived in a sand-belt suburb, the landings were soft. Occasionally there’d be some compost mixed in with the stuff you dusted off your bum after a jump. Eggshells and potato peels weren’t so bad. The leftovers from Mum’s crock-pot stews were best avoided.
