When I was a member of the new crop we were all gits, long-haired gits, and what's more we didn't know whether we were Arthur or Martha. And every old fogey over the age of 40 would tell us how they used to milk half the nation's cows for three shillings a week after riding a horse 18 miles to and from school.

Yeah yeah yeah.

Now that I've set the scene I can tell you that I have resisted the temptation to say while my grandchildren are carted off to see a doctor, in one case up to several times a week, that as a child I never went to see a GP. In fact, I have no memory of seeing a GP until I was in my mid teens, and that visit was because I had to be vaccinated against hepatitis after my mother contracted the disease while teaching. The syringe delivered into my backside was a monstrous thing and I determined then to avoid doctors.

Apart from more vaccinations as I headed off overseas a few years later, I next saw a doctor at age 21 when I needed a medical clearance to work on oil rigs in the North Sea off Scotland.

The doctor in Aberdeen, Scotland, was so drunk at 11am that I had to hold him steady while he tried to measure my height. He warned me unnecessarily that if I told him I had a bad back I wouldn't get the job, then he asked me if I had a bad back, and it seems that he, too, saw me as a git.

Anyway, I recently I asked my mother, who has just turned 96, if my memory of a GP-free childhood was right. Other than to receive the vaccinations that weren't given at school, she told me, I'd not been to see a GP as a child, and that was because I hadn't been sick.

Oh, she said, I did have chickenpox, which ran its course without medical intervention.

My memory is that the vaccinations were given by nurses, and I suppose I was seen to by doctors when I went to hospital, with a broken arm, an air rifle's slug in a finger and a serious dog bite. I'd have much preferred to see a doctor than the dentist I saw too often in those pre-fluoride days.

My medical situation seemed to be the norm for children then. When we did glimpse a doctor it was a man who arrived in a car and who carried a Gladstone bag briskly into a house, and it was an event in the street. I would gather from the hushed chat among adults that so-and-so was very ill and, an expression I heard sometimes, might not pull through.

The difference in the reliance on GPs then and now seems extraordinary, and I wonder if the difference in environment accounts for it.

The big fall in the incidence of colds and flu so far this year, as reported by doctors, is down to the reduced interaction of people, as in COVID-inspired social distancing and isolation, and perhaps life in a less crowded town on the north NSW coast gave us some protection. I can't remember having the flu as a child, or even a cold, and I never had the inner-ear infection that has been a problem for my grandchildren.

Even though in our country town there were fewer of us spread over a bigger area, we were still in close contact often enough and surely close enough to catch someone else's cold or flu. The schoolyard for boys especially was rough and tumble from bell to bell.

We also lived much closer to the ground. One of my earliest memories is playing with Matchbox cars in the dirt under a frangipani tree in the front yard, aged two. I know it was a frangipani tree because I see its distinctive shape.

For years, later, my friends and I would spend hours making roads and bridges in the dirt under another house, and when we weren't doing that we were playing marbles in the dirt. There were for us no indoor mats printed with roads and train tracks.

My feet were in close contact with the dirt and whatever else every day because I didn't wear shoes, before school, at school or after school, and very few boys at my primary school did. My mother, by the way, insists that I did wear shoes but that's because she'd be horrified now if I hadn't!

We'd often spend a day at a time in the bush, goading frilled-neck lizards, batting away attacking magpies and trying to get lost. There was no weekend sport, at least none I was aware of, but we were fit and active.

Probably with few exceptions we were more active than children today, and probably more accepting of bumps and scrapes, and being more exposed to a hygiene seen today as less than ideal may have given us a certain tolerance. There were more flies on our faces at any one time than now over a month, and I still admire one of my playmates who would with his index finger and thumb catch every fly that landed on his face. He was busy all day.

My wife, who's the same age as me although I've always been more mature, says her family doctor was often attending to someone or other at her Newcastle home when she was a child, so maybe the difference is between city, as in her case, and country, as in mine.

And maybe the difference can be seen in the response to a boil. In my day in a country town boils, and there were plenty of them, were treated painfully with hot packs while in the city the boil-stricken child was bundled off the doctor. That's still largely the case, I think.

jeffcorb@gmail.com