Catapult

If I had to guess, I'd say this song most likely is not about kids worrying about getting a spanking but rather about the fear of a possible nuclear war. "Ooh, we were little boys/girls," "cowered in a hole" and the refrain of "Did we miss anything?" could all refer to the civil defense air raid drills that children and families of the 1950s did, and "catapult" could be meant to link the medieval version of 'death from above' with the modern version. "We in step in hand" could be about how children learned in school to line up in an orderly way for fire drills or other emergencies, and "your mother remembers this" could also refer either to that or to similar drills during World War 2 a generation before. "Hear the howl of the rope" could refer to the sound of the mechanism of a catapult as it's drawn back or released, and perhaps thus to the sound of missiles overhead in the modern version.

In this context, "Did we miss anything?" could have a double meaning: the worried parents in the bomb shelter wondering if they remembered all their precautions, but also the more existential question of "Was there anything we could have done to prevent this impending apocalypse from coming to pass?" From the perspective of a late baby boomer or early Gen-Xer facing a bewildering world in the early '80s, when this song was written, putting those uneasy feelings about the unknown and uncontrollable into a song doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility.

Not sure what "It's 9 o'clock, don't try to turn it off" might refer to: perhaps a radio, a light switch, a TV broadcast. Perhaps none of the above. As for the other stuff, I'm not claiming to know any of it definitively; it's just the best I could do to make sense of a somewhat murky, "murmur"ing song that really got my attention way back when it was released. I still remember where I was when I heard it the first time, and how new it sounded, especially compared to the crap that was almost ubiquitous on radio at the time.