Games We Played Back Then

Although we didn’t have television back in the 1940s and by the 1950s longed to own a set we rarely seemed lost for something to do.   The wireless was very important and we listened in a very different way from today because rather than using it as background noise and chatter we actually paid attention to what was happening.   There was always absolute silence for The News for instance even when the war had been over for a number of years.   

When I was very small the government closed down all radio stations except the BBC to stop people listening to Nazi propaganda though I do wonder how many of us would have done so.  For quite a while there was only the Home Service and that seemed to exist solely to inform on the progress of the war.   But before long the populace became quite fed up with the lack of entertainment and so after a while another radio station was allowed to broadcast.  It was called The Light Programme and my mother said it was more for People Like Us.   There was a lot of more music and comedy shows.    Back then the stations were known as Sides and people would ask each other which side they were planning to listen to that evening.  Channels only emerged later on with television.  Once the war was over a new station was launched by the BBC called The Third Programme which we never listened to because it was definitely for the toffs and far too highbrow for the likes of us.  Nevertheless, when I heard snatches of it I was quite impressed, particularly with some of the music.

Apart from listening to the wireless we engaged in a number of activities that both amused us and filled in the time especially during long winter days.  One of the first I remember was cutting out paper people.   I didn’t actually cut them out myself because as a pre-schooler I was not too adept with scissors but my mother tirelessly produced them for me to colour in – rows and rows of little girls holding hands to whom I gave yellow hair and pink dresses with my crayons.   To play this game in the first place you needed a supply of paper which was hard to come by in wartime.   However, we were in the fortunate position of always having a store of various paper types in the corner kitchen cupboard of the house in York Road, Northfleet. In fact we had so much that occasionally I was able to donate some to Molly from number 31 so that she too could draw beautiful pictures.    The paper itself was courtesy of my Uncle Walter who luckily for us worked at Bowaters Paper Mills and I am now sure he acquired it via foul means rather than fair.  My favourite variety was what my mother called greaseproof and I liked it best because I could use it as tracing paper and with determination produce splendid pictures by tracing the outlines of whatever was in any magazine or book lying around.   On the more ordinary opaque variety I regularly made my own signature drawing which was always a house between two trees with two stick figures nearby representing my mother and myself.  This was at a time when my father was away at the war and my brother had not yet been born.

As the days grew warmer and the evenings lighter Molly and I sat on our front door steps and attempted to draw rows of houses.  This required a great deal of concentration and our efforts were not wonderful although hers were always considerably better than mine.   Those wartime summers were always very long and light because from 1941 to 1945 Britain was two hours ahead of GMT, operating on British Double Summer Time.  This was presumably done as an aid to farmers.  It certainly was a popular move as far as the children of North Kent, and no doubt elsewhere, were concerned because it gave endless hours for those already attending school, to play in the streets once the school day ended. 

As time passed and we grew older and definitely once winter was upon us again drawing games lost some of their appeal.   When toys appeared in the shops once more we were introduced to a new range of games that were played on a regular basis.  One of our favourites was Ludo a popular board game that I discovered to my amazement decades later originated in India and was once called Pachisi.  As long ago as the 1890s one Alfred Collier applied for an English patent for the game and pretended he had invented it but all he really did was change the name to Royal Ludo.  Most households seemed to have a Ludo game so most of us were familiar with the rules.   My Crayford cousins came by a set before I did and sometimes we made the trip on the 480 bus to the stop at The Jolly Farmers simply to devote an entire afternoon to the game usually seated by the fire in Aunt Mag’s Iron Mill Lane front room.   Then the aunts drank tea, tended to their knitting and exchanged gossip about the those who were not present whilst we children squabbled about who had to have the unpopular green counters and whether or not Little Ann had really and truly just thrown a second six so soon after the first one.

The board itself was split into four different coloured areas, yellow, green, red and blue and each player was assigned a colour and had their own personal hoard of tokens.  The object was to progress around the board by rolls of a dice and reach a place called Home with all these tokens before the other players could get there.     As everyone had to roll a six before they could begin to play the start of each game was extremely tense with much room for disharmony. 

My grandmother always demanded to join a Ludo game if she knew one was about to be played which was not great news as far as anyone was concerned and this was because she was totally unable to control her behaviour if she thought she was not going to win.   She was more than capable of accusing us of cheating, of somehow making sure that she was not able to throw sixes and more than once was known to throw the board in the air ensuring that the game was spoiled for the rest of us.   Invariably all games involving her ended with several of those under twelve dissolving into tears which was anything but a happy state of affairs.  Even at the time I was completely aware that her conduct was quite unbefitting an adult of her advanced age.   Somehow my mother and aunts managed to tolerate her tantrums, laughing them off and telling us she’d always been the same and the trick was to not allow her to play.  Easier said than done when you are seven or eight years old and in any case preventing Old Nan from doing anything she set her mind to was unthinkable.

I was given a Snakes & Ladders set on my seventh birthday but I never grew to enjoy the game as much as Ludo.  Clearly neither did Old Nan because I never knew her to demand to play.  Each time my mother suggested a Sunday afternoon family game my heart sank because I was quite frightened of the slide downwards on each malicious looking snake.   Again it seems to have first been played in India long ago and had been created by Hindu spiritual teachers for children to enforce the idea of good deeds and bad deeds and the importance of living a good life.   The ladders represented values such as faith and kindness and humility and the snakes were bad omens and amounted to everything you didn’t want in your life.   I definitely didn’t want to have anything to do with them and most of the time did not want to have much to do with the game.  The underlying message had originally been that a misbehaving child can attain salvation through performing righteous deeds whereas incorrigibly bad children were destined to mingle forever with others similar to themselves in a lower form of life.  This was of course way back in a time when the young could safely be labelled Good and Bad rather than Going Through a Stage and none of us had even heard of Aspergers.   This rather scary game eventually made its way to Victorian England where it fortunately took on a more benign form and was enjoyed by generations of the young and often the not so young as well.  

One of my favourite games was Consequences and for a number of years it was at the very top of my list and I was always very keen to initiate a game.   It was played as follows.  Each player was given a sheet of paper and wrote down the name of a female and usually this would be someone in the family such as Aunt Mag or someone famous like Shirley Temple.   The word `met’ followed the name and the paper was folded over to obscure the name before handing it to the person on your right.   They wrote down a male name such as Uncle George or Charlie Chaplin.   Another fold in the paper was made before it was handed on.  The place where they met was then added – The Majestic Cinema in Gravesend for instance.   The players continued to contribute sentences without of course knowing what had gone before.   At the end of the game the stories created were read out and might go something like this: 

Aunt Mag met Charlie Chaplin at The Majestic Cinema in Gravesend.  She wore a swimsuit and he wore his best suit.  He said to her `would you like to dance?’   She said to him `It’s raining today’.   The consequence was that they ate fish and chips together.

For some extraordinary reason, especially as a young teenager I found this game hugely entertaining though my enormous enthusiasm was not shared by the rest of the family, certainly not by the Crayford aunts and cousins and Old Nan said it was as dozy a game as she’d ever come across.  But then as Aunt Martha’s Pat sensibly commented, she would say that because she couldn’t read and write so was never in any danger of being asked to play. 

The games my father encouraged us to play were generally of a more informative nature like The Minister’s Cat where players described the cat with adjectives going through the alphabet but my mother always got completely confused and agitated so we didn’t play it very often.  She was much happier with Noughts & Crosses and quite liked a card game called Snap.

When I was younger and my father newly home from the war, he introduced the game of Shadow Puppets which my brother and I found quite magical.   On winter evenings after Sunday tea he would turn out the lights and begin to cast images of animals against the kitchen wall.  He would curl in his index finger, lift his thumb and suddenly there was a Labrador or a spaniel in our house.   Sometimes he would show us a rabbit or an eagle.  From time to time there was a witch on a broomstick and once an angel looking down on us from Heaven.  At times he would tell us a story to go with the shadows and then of course we were completely captivated, including my mother who seemed quite unable to perform this magic herself.  My little brother, then under two years of age would squeal in delight and at the same time be just a little bit afraid of what was happening.   Years later in his house at Cape Wrath he said one of his fondest memories of our father was the shadow puppet stories.   He added tentatively that overall although we were always very poor, at times we didn’t have an especially bad childhood – what did I think?   So I did think and to some extent I was forced to agree.  But then all my schoolmates and my cousins seemed to be totally familiar with similar family activities and therefore joined us in our not especially bad childhood.   I have to wonder how many children these days would recognise any of the games we played.