Playing Angels

 To put this into context, the school of my childhood was regulation small. Two teachers with 20-40 kids across eight years.

The working bee to make the playground after the septic system was installed had several tractors at it's disposal, and a full contingent of outdoors men all trying to outdo one another.

It was the playground of kids dreams. 

There was a cubby house made of an old electric wire spool that could house three little kids - bright red with a door and a window cut in;

A swinging bridge with timber planks strung by high -tensile cables across 80 metres of gully:

A pyramid of logs bolted together with big industrial nuts - steampunk before it's day;

A treehouse with a ladder through the middle and rails all around, Swiss Family Robinson style. ***

There were four girls and a boy in my year. One, occasionally two the year above us and one, occasionally two the year below. **

There was J, the tall, confident one; S, the pretty blonde exuding a tough skin; H, the feisty, sporty redhead - and me, the nerd. I devoured long words for breakfast, dreamed over recipes for food that I would never eat, and observed from the sidelines in hindsight a lot. ****

This , of course, made it ideal for us to take on the roles of Charlie's Angels*, being action heroes across the swinging bridge in the downtown of our imagination. We would entice littler kids, who were always harassing us to get them to do so, to be the Mexicans or bank customers or spies in our dramatics.

J and S (& occasionally W from the year below) were hybrid Jill/Kris Munro characters, while H and I were Sabrina/Kelly girls. It is one of my strongest childhood memories.

That and the night where I wore pyjamas out to dinner.

* Recently at work I joked about us being (insert my boss's name here)'s Angels and realised that I am now from the television equivalent of three Charlie's Angels generations ago. I discovered that those that I work with have only a historical knowledge of the original cast, and were comparing the Netflix series with the movies! Plural!

** I went to a school jubilee - I was going to say the other day but it would be twenty years ago now - and saw the boy from my year. We occasionally granted him the role of Charlie, but generally we never heard boo from M.

"What did you do?" I asked him.

"I played a lot with boys either 2 years older than me, or 2 years younger," he replied.

*** A year or so after I left that school, the education department did a safety audit and found the playground wanting. The cubby house was a great place for kids to hide after lunch if they didn't want to go back inside, the swinging bridge was a falls risk and the cable was shedding shards of steel fibres, the nuts were accidents just waiting to happen and the logs were extremely effective at camouflaging snakes, and there was no paperwork whatsoever on the treehouse! It was demolished.

**** I only today realise what The Spice Girls were emulating - Us!!!