Breaking and entering
Unlike most children at my primary school, we weren't latchkey kids.

Oh no. I think my parents were too skint to get keys cut.

So, instead, when we got home from school, two or three hours or so before the parents (or longer - much longer - if they decided to go on the piss, a regular occurrence, because they were never too skint to do that), we had to break into the house.

Here's how we did it.

We grew up on an estate built in the late 60s/early 70s - the one where they filmed A Clockwork Orange, for film fans.

The main entrance was on a shared balcony on the first floor, but there was a back door at ground level which went into a utility room (effectively the houses were built on stilts because of the threat of flooding from the Thames).

There was a plastic pipe loosely attached to the water outlet from the utility room. So loosely attached that every day after school, whichever of us got home first would poke this pipe through the letterbox (and it's only as a type this that I wonder why the back door had a letterbox at all) and, once we'd got our hand and wrist through there too, whack the door handle a few times until it opened (it was one of those that could be opened from the inside, but not the outside, a bit like a car child-lock in reverse).

And for several years, that's how we got into the house every day after school, until the day that I cut my knee on some glass in the playground and the deputy head had to take me to the local health centre to get stitches put in. I still have a huge scar there thanks to the cack-handed doctor.

Anyway, kind soul that Mr McKenzie was, he insisted on giving me a lift home afterwards.

So there's me and him standing in the garden, and it dawned on me that he wasn't going to disappear until I was safely inside.

Oh well, time to show him the trick with the drainage tube.

I'd like to think he was impressed.

All I know is that my parents were summoned to the school the following day, and a couple of days after that we each got presented with a shiny new key and a nice bit of string to dangle it round our necks.
(Capo, Mon 24 Nov 2008, 14:14, 3 replies)

Did they do anything about the door?
The fact that probably every door in the estate could be opened that easily was surely disconcerting, no?
( wangmaster2000, Mon 24 Nov 2008, 17:22, closed)

That's a good point
And why didn't it occur to me to go on a mini-crimewave and turn the neighbours over? Hmmm.

We didn't have anything worth nicking which is probably why my parents were so relaxed about it.
(Capo, Tue 25 Nov 2008, 10:31, closed)

our front door was crap
i'd forget my keys most days and have to gain entry using a stick (left next to the door for just this purpose), the letter box and one double-jointed wrist.

Then we got double-glazing and one of those horrible white plastic doors and I had to start remembering to take my key.
(MrChimp previously Monsieur, Tue 25 Nov 2008, 17:59, closed)