Play time!

I don't know what games children play nowadays during their breaks from lessons but I do remember what we played 60 years ago when I was a pupil at junior school.

My school was a Victorian building on (I think) three floors. We had no grassy playing fields and our playground was surfaced in asphalt with iron railings to prevent us children escaping. Education in those days was a single-sex affair, except for the very youngest, so there were on girls at my school: the girls' school was a separate part of the same building and had a separate playground. What games they played I have no idea, but our boys' games depended in part on the season of the year. In the autumn we would gather conkers and would try all sorts of tricks like baking them or soaking in vinegar to harden them before playing with them. Any reader unfamiliar with the game of conkers can find a description here.

Other games were less dependent on the season of the year. There was one we played with cigarette cards. Many cigarette manufacturers distributed small cards inside their packs. These depicted all sorts of things: footballers, cricketers, army regimental badges, steam locomotives - the list was virtually endless - usually in a series of fifty cards. Some boys collected them in the same was as they collected stamps but others used them to play a game. The cards were smaller than playing cards and slightly thinner, but one could be held between the index and fore fingers and then flicked through the air. The game we played involved propping one card against the school wall as a target and then taking it in turns to flick other cards at the target. Whoever managed to knock the target card down won all the other cards lying around that had been unsuccessfully flicked.

Another popular game involved marbles. This was usually played between just two boys although on occasion there would be more involved. The first to play would flick his marble away. The other then had to flick his marble in an attempt to hit the first one. The players took turns until one had succeeded in hitting the other's marble, which he had then won. The only other rule (as far as I can remember) was about how the marble had to be flicked. The index finger had to be curled over the thumb and the marble balanced on the thumb.

Fivestones was popular for a while. The game is sometimes called jacks, but we knew it as fivestones. There is a description in Wikipedia but the picture they show is not of the five stones we used. Our five stones were small cubes of wood, each painted a different colour.

Then there was car racing. Our cars were Dinky toys, the first mass-produced model cars (I think) made from metal and with wheels that worked. The playground had a slight slope and we would push our Dinky toys down the slope to see whose car would run the furthest. We got up to all sorts of tricks to improve our cars' performance like greasing the axles with Vaseline.

(I had a Dinky toy racing car just like this one.)

It will probably not have escaped your notice that most of our games were fairly sedentary: at least, we didn't have to move about much while playing them, except, perhaps, for marbles, which could go a fair distance across the playground albeit not at a very fast rate. "It" was different. "It", as we called the game, was what most people would know as tag. One person started as "it" and it was his job to chase after the other players in an effort to make contact with one. That person then became "it" and so the game went on. Players could rest and catch their breath by jumping onto the low wall into which the railings were mounted and hang on to the railings, thereby claiming sanctuary. But woe betide the player who clung on too long!