Our meeting place
Apart from the friends I had at school, I had many friends in the neighbourhood, whom I used to meet outdoors, in the street. Every afternoon, we would go out and gather outside our houses.
What we used to do when we were together
We loved playing dodgeball, hide-and-seek or tag. We sometimes rode our bikes or we went for walks.
There were no cell phones or internet in those days so we had to resort to our imagination for entertainment. And we certainly did. We created our own adventures. For example, once, after reading a book where some girls entered an uninhabited house and set a home for an abandoned baby there, we felt like doing the same (without the “baby” part, of course, because it wasn't that easy to find an abandoned baby around) So we spent more than two months shaping an old key with a file in the hope of being able to open the door of a for- sale house round the corner.
The neighbourhood.
The neighbourhood was very important for us. We knew everybody's name and we used to talk with the neighbours a lot. We loved gossiping and making up stories about the neighbours, especially about those whom we considered “mysterious”. Opposite my house, there used to live an old woman. Unluckily, she was getting a bit deaf. We thought she was “strange” because she used to shout when she spoke, and her appearance was quite dishevelled. Her house was very untidy, too. Every day, at half past six, she started preparing what must have been her soup, in a big casserole. We watched her through her window, and assumed that she was making a potion or casting a spell in her cauldron... We had no doubts the poor lady was a witch!
How we got in touch
We had no cell phones or social media, but we had the same desire you have today to keep in touch, so we devised two ingenious means of communication. The first one was a perforated brick we used as a letterbox, which we had placed at the top of the party wall that divided my house and one of my best friends´. The danger of this system was that we had to climb the wall every time we wanted to leave or get a message. The second one was a “flying potato”. We attached a written message to a potato and we threw it over the wall into our neighbour's garden. The disadvantage was that if you didn´t have good aim, your message would never reach its destination, and you would have to wait till your next opportunity to abduct another potato from the kitchen.
Information about sexuality, and the changes brought about by puberty
My friends and I knew the basics about the changes brought about by puberty, thanks to some talks given at school by Johnson and Johnson, but we knew really very little about sexuality.
When I read Spies for the first time, some of Stephen and Keith´s activities reminded me of my childhood games and adventures. It is good to bear this context in mind to understand the character´s innocence and the work of their imagination.
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