It wasn't that it didn't appeal but it wasn't talked about in front of me by either of them so I'd only discover randomly it was 'Bob a Job" week and the like when they'd go out and bring home the completed forms to show what they did to take to Cubs or Scouts the next meeting.
Nor did my parents ever talk with me about joining, perhaps even inviting the cub or scouts leader to talk with me perhaps thinking disabled boys like me didn't have a place in Scouting although in later years I learned that during that era local packs did do this.
To me it was an essential part of being a boy, learning useful skills and values to help me make the most of it and a potential help in learning to integrate that I missed out on to the point when I started age regressing in my mid teens wearing the odd thing such as the green sock garters with their sashes and shorts was one my first steps back in time.
Reminds me of when in the cubs winning the conker contest and walking home with my grey shorts pockets stuffed with conkers as well as a couple of plastic bags full of conkers. Time of year reminds me as well.
ReplyDeleteExperience of discouraging from cubs in their shorts uniform era is I think a hidden era of child trauma. Cubs age is too young for kids to find out and arrange it on their own, and more so before the web. Families who either did not know the uniform mattered, or like mine, did not know it was worn at all. Never seeing cubs around living in a city, mine thought the 60s ending of scout shorts had included cubs! they had no idea. I was interested in joining cubs when a classmate did, we got as far as a failure to make contact, but because I hated football at school, and cubs includes some sports and my grandma had picked up locally that they did football, she persuaded us it made them unsuitable for me.
DeleteEntirely by that, I missed out on scouting, and without knowing of the shorts uniform until years too late. In a childhood hatedly in a region with a damp air climate causing nasal catarrh like a persistent cold, South Wales, where consequently the shorts school uniforms were not a thing and I went my entire schooldays without knowing they existed, and without having any information on year round shorts being safe to health and a real option, which the local catarrh stopped me finding out by myself. A catastrophe to childhood whose grief would be beyond your Regressors folks' imagining, and pitying compared to their memories is beyond my enduring.
I would have endured some football in exchange for the uniform, I should have tried out cubs, grandma got it wrong. But my mother much later seemed prejudiced that the scouts are paedos and maybe was too eagerly persuadable against it. Cubs today don't have to take part in any sport unchoosingly.