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.
Most of them still exist. I know of shadow puppets with fingers and may even have tried it once but like your mother I wasn't successful. SNAP is still commonly played and probably is the first, or one of the first cards games learnt. Its good for recognising numbers and letters, and of course card game variants are used in teaching (eg., maths). Later cards included Last Card, Cheat, 500, gin rummy, and crib. Snakes and Ladders were popular with the Year 3s. And Ludo games are still played. What about Chinese Checkers ? Other games I remember were Mah Jong (but it would've been only for the toffs in your childhood), checkers and chess, and backgammon I never came across till older. When I was about 13, my older brother 15, and my sister about 18 Mum said she was going to teach us to play Bridge, I think my sister had asked. The first lesson lasted less than a minute and it was never referred to again (I have no idea what happened, I always thought my sister had done something subtle). Board and card games are also important with the more able intellectually disabled because it (1) teaches basic maths and reading skills, (2) provides an activity for the leisure tool-box, (3) teaches pro-social skills, and (4) provides a skill they can share with their peers and family. (also for jigsaws, jenga, Battleship etc.) The only danger is that the game can take forever, the student doesn't really understand and / or enjoy participating, and with the less stable student one always has to be on one's guard. One of my students had learning to play board games as an educational goal. He could only play with an adult and there was often an apparently random swipe to avoid.
ReplyDeleteAnd what about the boys ? The French film 'The Two of Us' (1967) starts with two small French boys attempting to steal a toy NAZI tank in a shop during WW2. They are caught and in the next scene one of the boys' fathers explains to him that he can't draw attention to himself because it puts him and his family in dangers (they're Jewish). In the film 'Empire of the Sun' the young boy is likewise playing with warplanes while the Chinese city he is living in is bombed. And there are other countless examples in film. So what games did the boys play in wartime Britain. Maybe war games replaced cop and robbers and cowboys and Indians. There is a film about the War of the Buttons in which the boys lose buttons from their clothes if they're caught causing strife when they go home (would have been an extra challenge in the war with rationing, but I think this film is Irish - haven't seen it.) When I was at Dilworth (about 11) we played a paper game in which you drew some islands in a sea and at one end of the paper a coast line with a guarded harbour. Your battleships cruised around and when you thought you had a clean line of fire you fired at your opponents' ship. There was also Battleship of course, which now has many variants. When I was older we played raisin box rugby on a table tennis table (& every so often table tennis !). WHen it was your turn, you flicked the raisin box and attempted to make it stop in the try area. If your got a try you then attempted a conversion. The opposing player would make rugby posts by putting his thumbs together and tips of fingers on the table. The 'goal-kicker' would stand the box vertical ands flick at the bottom of the box and if successful, it would go over. Kick off was taken in the same way. (raisin box was empty.
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