THANK goodness May is over – now I can have a rest! Three sons and two granddaughters are May kittens, and while the sons are just about past the stage of pop and party poppers, the little ones remain dedicated party animals.

When our boys were little, birthdays meant having a few friends round for tea, a couple of games of pass the parcel, and oodles of ice cream and jelly, but things have moved on a bit.

Instead of a select few, children now invite their entire class to some large venue, where a clown or entertainer of some description will perform, music will play and every guest will receive a crammed goodie bag on departure.

Modern children’s parties are attended by hosts of adults looking fondly on as boys charge around tripping each other up and sliding on their knees, while the girls do endless cartwheels and scream a lot.

I sometimes wonder what a child of today would make of a 1950s birthday party, when rationing was a not too distant memory and money was in short supply. There was no exotic fare on the menu – perhaps a plate of boiled egg, meat paste or luncheon meat sandwiches, a few buns and a wedge of yellow birthday cake, topped with the most modest scraping of home-made icing, followed by a few pineapples chunks topped with Carnation milk.

At a really posh party, you might get a spoonful of ice cream, providing the ice cream man was on his rounds, as no-one had a freezer.

Jelly was another luxury item, so rare in fact that the hostess of one party I attended served each child a small dish of jelly cubes, being unaware you were supposed to put it in hot water and let it cool first.

Party invitations were sparingly dished out, and such events were strictly one gender affairs – no boy would dream of attending a girl’s party, nor a girl go to a boy’s do. The only exceptions were brothers and sisters, who always made it clear they were there on sufferance, because if they didn’t go to the party they wouldn’t get any tea. There were no leftovers in those days.

One lad raised eyebrows by inviting a dozen of us to his ninth birthday party – six was the norm – but didn’t actually mention it to his mother, who was a little surprised and then furious to have a stream of shiny faced and Brylcreemed boys arriving at her door for a party that was never going to happen.

Presents tended to be modest, and girls would always get a doll, although my sister did get a mini brush and shovel set for her third birthday, so she could be a housewife, just like her mum.

Despite the gender stereotyping which would horrify modern hand-wringers, she loved that set, and spent hours happily sweeping away, until the day we heard her howling in the front room. In her enthusiasm to tidy up the fireplace, she got a little too close to the grate, and to her fury. the bristles on her little brush were blazing merrily.

Lads would invariably be a Dinky toy, a yo-yo or if they were really lucky some toy soldiers or cowboys and Indians. My brother and I had an enviable collection of plastic figures from all sides of every conflict over the past 2000 years, with Romans and Crusaders fighting alongside gaily war bonneted Pawnees and Sioux against Redcoats, knights in armour, soldiers of the Union and Confederate forces, British Tommies, and American GIs with flamethrowers.

Battles took days to set up, especially when sisters and dogs stumbled on the battlefield, scattering troops everywhere, but once set up, they kept us amused for many hours. We started off blasting the armies with spud guns before we graduated to firing paper pellets from chains of elastic bands.

Then it was marbles, originally rolled, but later fired from catapults, before we acquired a set of darts, and could pick off individual targets with deadly accuracy.

Even as teenagers, we continued playing with our plastic figures, but out in the garden, where we could blast them with our air rifles.

Were some future Robin Birley ever to excavate our back garden, he could well be non-plussed by the large number of tiny figurines, some with heads or limbs missing, and all pock-marked with dart holes, lying beneath the soil.