Aside from the old wives' tales, what other things were you told and naively believed? Most of mine came courtesy of my brother!

I remember him telling me I couldn't sit in the front seat of the car as I wasn't old enough (I know you have to be a certain age, but I don't think it's as "old" as 6 or 7!).

I wasn't allowed to whistle until I was about 6, as it was "against the law". Needless to say, I spent most of my Birthday whistling I think a similar thing was said about burping lol.

On a similar trend, the legal age for drinking shandy seemed to rise every year until I was about 12, and subsequently, I was then allowed to drink it

Can't remember any others; although I used to fall for the "52 cards; pick 'em up" game for a few years...

My father had me say "TTFN" to him every morning, leading me to believe it was the Italian for "good bye".

I was told that the sound of thunder was God throwing furniture downstairs!

Sadly I somehow replaced that idea with the belief that it was clouds banging into eachother ...

When I first started piano lessons before my 6th birthday, from that point on my grandfather regularly asked if I could play 'The Wind blew the Turnips up'. For years I believed there was such a piece of music .

When I was at nursery was used to stop at about 11am each day to drink milk and eat "Nice" biscuits: That is the ones coated with sugar, and with "Nice" written across the front.

Now, clearly this was before we could all read, but we must have had some concept of writing. We were all absolutely adament that the biscuits had our names written on them.

I think I remember this, because I recall the sad day when I figured out that my name contained more letters than 'nice'. This rather suggests I could count before I could read, which suprises me, or maybe it was more of a spacial awareness thing. Either way, in my puzzlement, I asked one of the nursery assistants what was written on the biscuits.

My mistake was in then trying to tell the other children we'd been wrong and that they all said "Nice" and not our names. Obviously trying to change the opinion of my peers en mass was a total disaster, because the resulting ostracism has permanently etched the memory into my mind! Children are so cruel.

I was told by a school teacher when I was 10 that no-one in the class would ever be good enough to be a musician. Sadly I believed him and held onto that nugget of insecurity forever.

You know the zig-zag white lines at pedestrian crossings? My parents told me they were usually straight but when the traffic lights were red, a mechanism under the road moved the lines...

Also, right up in the north of Scotland where my Grandparents lived there was a short walk with some lovely rocks - my Grandpa called it Stonehenge although it was far smaller. You can imagine the confusion that ensued....

I was terrified of thunder when I was small, so my mother always told me that it was caused by Angels throwing buckets of water at each other!

SB

When I was growing up, grandparents and older or less mobile people sometimes used to say 'I can't do that, i've got a bone in my leg'.

Yes, I remember that one, too!

I can't specifically remember any I was told - but I do remember one from a radio phone-in on this topic. The lady had been told as a child that raspberry jam was made from crushed up bees, and the pips were in fact their bones. This person had never ever touched raspberry jam, and now even as an adult knowing it was a fruit, still couldn't go near it!

I was told that it was God rolling the beer barrels along.

What about the story that if you ate a cherry pip, then a cherry tree would start to grow in your stomach and the little branches would finally push out through your ears ?

I definitely believed that one and actually deliberately ate apple pips and cherry stones eagerly awaiting the exciting moment . . .

That is an interesting interpretation. I wonder if there was a hidden meaning there?

I also wonder what brewery those barrels would have come from?

SB

Nobody in my family ever told me any tall stories, so i grew up blissfully untricked, but here's someone else's story.

His dad told him and his brother that milk was made from ground up clamshells, and he refused to drink milk for months. His mum was really annoyed with his dad for that.

Oh yes, we had that one as well. Plum stones too.

My elder sister used to tell me that there were green men under the bed....terrified me for years!

Presumably pink, yellow, black, or brown men would not have been a problem ?

My father has always been a bit of a wind-up merchant. He insisted there was an image of an elephant in a picture of a bowl of fruit that we had on the bedroom wall, and as I'd seen puzzle books with hidden images in them I took this as truth and looked for that blasted elephant for weeks .

Thunder was the fairies having their coal delivered. As we had an open fire at the time, and the coal deliveries sounded quite thunderous, this seemed quite a plausible explanation for a 5 year old.

But his masterpiece (still talked about decades later) was when my sister was a young teenager and Wizard of Oz was on TV. She'd seen it before and was puzzled, because she remembered seeing it in colour, but this was in black-and-white*. Dad said "This won't do", stomped into the next room where the phone was and had a very loud conversation:

"Is that the BBC?...I want to complain...my daughter wants to see Wizard of Oz in colour and you're showing black and white...well, get on with it...this is not good enough...we pay our licence fees..."
Then back into the room at just the right moment to say that the BBC apologised and were sorting out the problem straight away

(*For those who have never seen this classic movie, the scenes shot in Kansas were in B/W but when Dorothy lands in Oz the action switches to colour).

My mother, in an effort to get me to eat sprouts, told me they were fairy's cabbages!!

My mum told me that it was very important to brush your teeth or they would fall out. Unfortunately I took her advice a bit too much to heart and used to get up several times a night to brush my teeth so she got my dad to tell me that too much toothpaste was poisonous!

My try to get me from playing in the field behind our house my dad used to tell me there was ice cream in the oven! We didn't have a fridge at the time! It worked though!

Treacle mines ! , and Toffee apple trees.

One of my daughters was probably in her late teens before she realised the singing in the toilet didn't cause you to get locked in. This is after the instruction to sing when the lock was broken......

My mother told me she had married at 14, which enabled her to knock 10 years off her age. I believed her because I was young enough to consider 14 quite a ripe old age.

She was finally outed when I went to buy her a birthday card and told the lady behind the counter her alleged age.

... and here's one I DIDN'T believe but is true: "If you eat too many sweets, you'll be sick".

I was considerably older than 18 when I found this out

My brother was (and still is, suprisingly enough!) 9 years older than me, and as a teenager was always hungry. If we had an unusual pudding or cake, he would try a piece of his portion first, and then tell me that it really didn't taste very nice and he thought I wouldn't enjoy it. However, he would kindly offer to eat mine for me, so as not to upset the cook. I was actually daft enough to fall for this for quite a long time, and can remember refusing to believe my mother when she tried to tell me the pudding was perfectly acceptable!

Edit: Just realised that sounds as if we employed a cook, which certainly wasn't the case! But often we would go to grandparents or my parents' friends for meals, and I just meant whoever had cooked the pudding.

I'm loving reading these stories! I'm glad I wasn't the only gullible one!

I was told that I would lose my front teeth if I whistled too much. (I didn't, and I still do.)

My mother also used to tell me of a story when we were all invited around to the next door neighbour's house for tea. (I was too small to remember.) Apparently we had enjoyed the main course when Mrs Next Door went to the kitchen to get pudding.

Her little girl asked my parents whether we all liked blackcurrant and apple pie, to which mother replied 'oh yes, we love it'. 'Oh that's alright then' she said, 'cos my mum said if you don't like it you'll just have to lump it'.

SB

My parents used to say that if you pulled ugly faces and at that moment the wind changed you would stay like that for ever, also that if you sucked your thumb it would drop off and that thunder was the clouds fighting.

Actually, I never believed a word of it! But I did believe in fairies and Father Christmas for a very long time!

Did?

Ah yes; I remember that one too.

I also remember being told that the television and radio worked both ways. Whenever we listened to a BBC Radio for schools broadcast we always had to shout goodbye to the presenter at the end. (Does the BBC still make programmes for schools? Some of them were really good.)

I was also afraid to walk in front of the television at home unless I was properly dressed in case I could be seen at the other end.

SB

I do remember being told that Bagpuss was found under a gooseberry bush...

I remember aged 4 being told I wasn't old enough for a scooter - which I so badly wanted.

I was terribly upset and puzzled a few weeks later to find one at the foot of my bed on Christmas morning.

How could Father Christmas have got it so badly wrong???

Me aged 3; "Isn't if funny that we call this dinner chicken and we call those things in the garden chickens too. Why?

Mother; "Hmm, funny that isnt it dear? Dont know why!"

That dinner was quite probably actually rabbit but mother called it chicken as my older brothers wouldnt eat a bunny cos they had pet ones but didnt have a problem eating chickens!

And I can't remember when the truth dawned about the roast and the animal being one and the same but suspect a brother would have enlightened me fairly fast if they heard that conversation ( but out of mother's hearing).

That reminds me of a friend who is passionate about cooking, particularly meat dishes, and swore no child of hers would get fed at home if he or she became a vegetarian. When her little girl questioned about lamb in much the same way as the the chicken story mother replied "That's eating lamb on your plate, not baa lamb!"

Quite right! Children need to be properly instructed in these differences!

Remember not treading on the cracks in the pavement or the SPIDERS would come out and get you

Well I don't know about fairies but there was of course considerable evidence for the existence of Father Christmas.


I thought we all were.

Not quite so scary round our way 'If you tread on a nick you'll marry a brick'.

On the evening of every Christmas Day the fairies would come to my dolls' house! I used to take a little of each of the foods from our Christmas dinner and put it out in toy dishes for them in the dining room - my mum said they would be able to heat up the dinner in the toy oven. On Boxing Day morning they had always eaten all the food and washed up the dishes. And, best of all, they would leave a tiny thank you note written very small in pencil.

It was years before I tumbled to the fact that the fairy writing was awfully like my mother's! I kept some of the letters to show to my daughter, as evidence for the existence of fairies.

Wow. I stand corrected.

My daughter had her own personal tooth fairy. She wanted her autograph, so I had to write (with my non dominant hand) a note from Dentina Floss, and then one for my son from Ana Mel

I was told that if I travelled to the end of the Edgware Road (in London), I'd end up in New York...

Must have been tempting to check that one out ?