Blades

[poliphilo]

I've been picking and top-and-tailing gooseberries- which takes me right back to childhood. How old was I was I when I was given a paring knife and told to get on with it- eight or nine, perhaps? Younger anyway than would happen with my grandchildren I think. My parents generation was blase about blades. Small boys had sheath knives; I had two. I could have killed someone with them- but I didn't.

I had penknives too. I can remember carving my school desk.

Comments

[oakmouse]

I was helping my mom cut up things in the kitchen by the age of six --- maybe earlier. I got my first penknife when I was maybe seven or eight, a hand-me-down from my brother, who had gotten his first really good Boy Scout knife as a reward for reaching some landmark or other in Boy Scout rank. I still have the penknife my dad gave me for my 12th birthday, a slim elegant knife with pearl-grey scales and two long, thin, sharply pointed blades.

Almost every kid I knew carried pocket knives, girls included, during the 1960s and 1970s. None of us ever hurt ourselves or anybody else more than a modest accidental cut or two, and none of us ever turned to knife crime. Except for carving things on the tops of our wooden school desks --- that's universal! ;-)

And now the "kids' knives" in American knife catalogs are wooden or plastic replicas of Swiss Army or Boy Scout knives --- or unsharpenable pot-metal replicas of movie knives. Gah. You helicopter parents get off my lawn!

[poliphilo]

Knives were just part of the paraphernalia of childhood. We didn't particularly think of them as weapons.

[oakmouse]

Exactly. They were tools, and also signs of reaching a certain level of maturity and competence.

[basefinder]

I remember having an official Cub Scout pocketknife at about age 7. Cut myself quite a few times learning how to whittle, but that was just part of growing up.

[poliphilo]

You couldn't get more respectable and mainstream than the Cubs- and a cub and his knife were inseparable.