I was sitting with friends, discussing that old favourite topic, what the world was like when we were kids. It was the usual smug stuff about how we made our own fun and life was tough but we were happy, we had no central heating and there was ice inside the windows in January, blah, blah. Then someone mentioned that the games we played were innocent but obselete – they wouldn’t be played nowadays. People mentioned kiss chase, skipping games. There was Hopscotch. Marbles. What’s the time Mr Wolf?

I didn’t really play any of the games above. In our village, we had different games all together. Many of them involved a great deal of risk and foolhardiness. It wasn’t a gender thing, either. Friends played together. Girls were as tough as boys. We’d all go tree climbing. And we’d find an old raft and go sailing down the Cherwell until it let in too much water and sank. I loved that.

Someone else said that the games they played were so dangerous, they’d be illegal nowadays, and that gave rise to a lot of reminiscing. Remember ‘Dutch Arrow’, sometimes called ‘Swiss Arrow’? It was a pointed missile we made ourselves, out of a thin piece of wood, the end sharpened to stick in the ground. There was a string used in a sling-shot method to propel the arrow. We used to make these and hurl them like a javelin. Lethal.

We’d make trolleys or go-karts out of old pram wheels, using thick rope and our feet to steer them, and a splintery plank of wood to sit on. We’d race them downhill, no safety helmets, no knee pads. There were two problems. You’d fall off a lot – they weren’t built for corners of bumps. And there were no brakes. Equally lethal.

There were a couple of games I excelled at. One was called ‘Stretch.’ I think historically it was called ‘Split The Kipper’ or ‘Splits’. It was easy to play on grass. You threw a sheath knife towards your opponent, aiming it to stick in the ground parallel with their foot, and they had to move their foot to where the knife was. Then it was their turn to throw. Both opponents ended up doing the splits. The person who fell over or couldn’t stretch any further lost. We also played a version of it called ‘chicken’, which was far more dangerous, as people aimed for their opponent’s foot. As I said, lethal.

Another of my favourite games was peculiar to my friendship group – it was called ‘Italian Football’, based on the erroneous and somewhat racist idea that in national football, Italians played dirty and kicked their opponents, then fell on the ground a lot. It was like ordinary football, but with no rules and no compromises. We each had to have an Italian name that was as rude as possible. Mine was Flobbagrini. Enough said.

There were games I avoided, like playing ‘chicken’ on the railway lines. I was too sensible for that. I suppose we had to draw the line somewhere.

We used to go to the local farmer’s barn when it was full of hay, climb to the top and slide down. It made a mess of the bales but the descent was awesome. The farmer would turn up and threaten us with a good hiding – remember that expression? – and we’d run like mad and laugh.

I had a doll, Yvonne, but I didn’t play with it much. It ended up sitting next to the fire with me, drying its hair, and its face melted. I think it was last seen impersonating Guy Fawkes on a bonfire.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” LP Hartley says in The Go Between. That’s so true in the case of childhood games.

We didn’t really watch TV, because we were out playing. We had books and comics and paper to scribble on – mobiles and laptops hadn’t been invented, although we’d attach string to two empty baked bean cans and pretend we had a walkie-talkie. The internet was a thing of the future, of Sci-Fi stories. We rode rickety bikes that were far too big for us, with faulty brakes . We had patched clothes and second hand shoes. Our heads were full of mischief and imagination and ideas. We broke rules, grazed our knees and tried to hide the trouble we got in from our mums.

But we had a great time.