Childhood games
As we mark National Skipping Day, Yours looks back on the fun and games of school playtimes past
It’s almost impossible to think of childhood rhymes such as ‘Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn around. Teddy bear, teddy bear, touch the ground’ without remembering the thud of a skipping rope, while we desperately tried to jump in time to the rhythm.
Whether you were the fastest skipper in your class or just about got by without breaking your ankle, skipping was a rite of passage in the school playground.
You could do it in a group, a whole queue of children waiting to jump into a whirling rope, usually held by two girls with a knack for speeding up just as it was your turn. You could do it double dutch with two ropes going in opposite directions if you were very talented. And when you’d fallen out with your friends after they teased you that the number of consecutive skips you did dictated the initial of the boy you’d marry, you could huffily skip on your own instead.
It was a pastime for all times and of course even today many modern schoolchildren – despite the whizzy technology available at their fingertips – still enjoy skipping, thanks in some part to the annual National Skipping Day which every April promotes the joy of skipping in UK schools.
But of course, there’s always been more to playtime than just skipping.
Tig – or tag depending on where you grew up – was for most children considered the ideal way to run off the sponge puddings we’d inevitably had for school lunch and give ourselves a lovely sweaty fringe just in time for afternoon lessons. As cries of the dreaded, “You’re it!” echoed across the playground, we often experimented with variations of the game such as ‘stuck in the mud’ where you had to freeze with your legs and arms stuck out until someone grazed their knees
crawling through your legs to save you. Kiss-chase was another popular one that often ended with several players sobbing into the arms of dinner ladies with a mixture of heartbreak, jealousy and disgust.
Few playground games ended in quite so many tears, though, as the notorious British Bulldog. Originating in the UK in the Twenties, it saw generations of schoolchildren endure scabby knees and torn trousers after being charged head-long by a mob of over-excited boys. It caused so many injuries it’s no wonder that in many schools around the country British Bulldog has now been banned for several decades.
Even unassuming playground games could have a rough edge, though. Take conkers, the game that sent us competitively hunting high and low for the best horse chestnuts which we – depending on how we felt about cheats – might then coat in nail varnish or boil in vinegar to make them extra shiny.
Just a couple of ‘thwacks’ into that conker game and it was very easy to lose a fingernail or even all power of movement in the hand, which was always a useful excuse for missing handwriting practice that day.
And for those children of the Seventies who progressed from conkers to clackers, the injuries could be even worse!
Aside from the war wounds inflicted, many of our childhood favourite games are best remembered by their catchphrases or songs. How could we fail to remember singing Oranges and Lemons at top volume while two children made an arch with their arms for the others to run through? As the song went on, eventually the arch would come down and catch a player to the not hugely child-appropriate line, ‘Here comes the chopper to chop off your head’. Nobody wanted to be in the middle of that! And what about the unforgettable cries of, ‘What time is it Mr Wolf?’ as we all silently snuck up on the child with our backs to us until they span round and yelled – always quite demonically – “It’s dinner time!”
Yes, playground games could be a bit rough and tumble sometimes, but they were also the glue in our schooldays, bringing us friends and the valuable lessons of winning and losing into our expereinces of growing up.