Playtime fun
Climbing trees, making dens, playing ‘dare’, we were an intrepid lot, reckons Yours writer Marion Clarke
‘Crawling along ditches and being stung by nettles was the norm’
Friends who have only ever known me as a riskaverse adult would be surprised to know that I used to be quite a tomboy. We lived next door to a family of three boys so there wasn’t much choice but to join in their games of ‘cowboys and Indians’ or tree-climbing (and yes, I did fall off a branch quite often!).
As Lesley Mason rightly says, safety was the last thing on our minds: “We played ‘tiggy-on-high’, which was a simple game of tag with the added element that you couldn’t be tagged if you were above ground level, so it involved a lot of leaping onto park benches, road signs or even garage roofs.
“’Squeak piggy squeak’ was a version of ‘blind man’s buff’ that we played on a roundabout while it was being spun. Strangely, I don’t remember anyone being badly hurt in any of these games.”
Irene Rogers’ playground was a tangled, overgrown sandpit:
“It was wonderful. My favourite game was when a boy climbed the highest tree as a lookout and the rest of us had to reach the tree without being seen by him. If we were spotted we had to go back to the start. Crawling along ditches and being stung by nettles was the norm.
“We built splendid dens among the bushes and we girls made them homely
with jam jars of dog roses. Many a game of ‘force, dare, kiss or promise’ took place there!”
Children were good at improvising. Maureen Rice remembers her gang using flattened cardboard boxes to slide down a nearby hill in the summer holidays. They also made box carts out of bits of wood and old pram wheels. She was an ingenious youngster herself, but not always with a happy result: “I was always in trouble for making tomahawks out of tin cans hammered flat with a stick for a handle, but Mum really blew her top when I managed to score a hit with my homemade bow and arrow, just missing my younger brother’s eye!”
Margaret Dinsdale wonders how many people remember the Davy Crockett hats that were popular in the Fifties: “I was given one for my birthday. When my friends played ‘cowboys and Indians’, I was Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier. I loved that hat so much I think I slept with it on. My sister still laughs about it.”
No doubt inspired by the likes of Davy Crockett, Winifred Rickard and her friends used to play hiding and tracking in the woods: “Our tracks were arrows made of sticks leading to our dens. My greatest indignity was falling out of a hedge into a bed of nettles. Although I was tingling all over, I didn’t tell anyone. No snowflake, me!”
Today’s ‘helicopter’ parents anxiously hovering over their children would have a fit!