Sunday, June 10, 2012

When I was a kid......Part 1

A combination of my dislike for video games and an article on the Internet that filled me with nostalgia got me thinking about how I spent my childhood and how I'd like my child to remember their childhood. I grew up on a standard Irish housing estate, neither poor nor rich. Video games started to become available at some point during those years, with the original Nintendo with Tetris and the Sony Mega Drive showing up in my friends' houses along with malfunctioning Commodore 64s. My parents never bought us any of these, probably more a cost issue than any concerns about their influence on the minds of children and to this day I'm glad they didn't although it was a great injustice to me at the time.

Consequently I have fantastic memories about the games we used to play and once I got thinking on that well my whole childhood has come flooding back to me and I feel I have to write it down, at least for posterity's sake. I was a child in the late eighties/ nineties and here are some of the games I grew up playing:

Games out on the street:

'Kerbs' was a game of skill and patience. You required two opposite pavement kerbs and a football. Each opponent stood on a kerb and took turns throwing the football at the opposite kerb with the hope the ball would hit the kerb and bounce back. This gave you 10 points. If you could run forward and catch the ball as it bounced back then that was 20 points. Hitting the kerb meant you could progress to the centre of the road and try hit the kerb from there. That was worth 5 points. But if you missed and your opponent caught the ball and could hit you with it before you had run back to your own kerb then you lost all your points. This game could go on as long as you both wanted, hours of fun!

Tip The Can was a game of hide and seek with someone being tagged 'it'. 'It' had to stand at a pillar or gate post -'the can'- and count while everyone else went to hide. Then It had to go and search for everyone and race the found person back to the can to successfully tag them. If you lost the race you were out and could only be brought back into the game if someone else successfully won the race and shouted 'tip the can I free (name)'! If you were the last person hiding and successfully won the race you could free all instead of just one and the whole thing would start again.

Elastics was mostly a girls game with huge coloured elastic bands being stretched around the ankles of 2 girls. You then had to jump over the elastics and from side to side while reciting a rhyme which ended in needing to jump on the elastics. If you failed or tripped you were out, if you were successful the elastics were raised higher and you did it again.

Skipping usually required one massive rope and you had to run in and skip to the rhyme while the rope was being swung.

Rounders was baseball played with a tennis racket or cricket bat since no one had a baseball bat.

Hop Skotch was big but I found it boring.

What's the Time Mr. Wolf was a chasing game where the chaser turned his back on the rest of the gang. They al had to stand well back and chant What's the Time Mr.Wolf?! and had to take the corresponding number of steps forward as the time i.e. 3 o'clock meant 3 steps towards him. At any given time the wolf could shout Dinner Time! and all hell would break loose as the gang scattered and the Wolf chased and caught his replacement.

Red Rover was one I hated because I wasn't particularly strong and I hated pain. Two teams would link hands and face each other in lines. Each team would call someone from the other team over with the chant: "Red Rover Red Rover we call Lindsey over!!" The person called had to run top speed and try to break through the linked hands of two people on the opposing team. If they did they could return to their own team, if not they had to join the other team. When a team was reduced to a final person that person could bring back another team mate if they were successful and so on.

In winter if there was snow, we used to find a hill and have races to the bottom by sliding down the hill on turf sacks. This was great fun but dangerous since our hill was a road on the estate!

In summer water fights would break out, with the cool kids having water balloons and the regular kids having plastic bottles of water. Rarely did anyone have a good water gun then though some had cheap water pistols from the pound shop!

Another summer favourite was grass fights, being just exactly that; hurling grass at each other for ages!

On our bikes we had things like who could ride the longest without holding the handlebars, slow bicycle races where the winner could ride the slowest for longest without falling off and obviously full on speed races. I loved my bike which was a red painted second hand no brand bike with the awesome power of the pedal backwards brake! Ride on!!

Throwing tennis balls against the side or front of your house was another game loved by the girls of my estate. Any number could play as long as you didn't drop the ball and could name a fruit or vegetable for ever letter of the alphabet with each throw you could be the winner!

Other summer favourites involved catching either ladybirds, caterpillars or bees in a jar. Your mammy warned you once about the bee stings you could get then it was your own choice. I distinctly remember ignoring her wise warnings when I was about 5 years old and being swatted away with 'I told you so !' and a dab of Sudocrem when I came crying with a sting!

Building tents or forts in your back garden from kitchen chairs and duvets was another summer fave though it was never warm enough on Irish nights to stay in them overnight. Dads seemed to love helping with this one, the big kids!

Since most of us rarely had pocket money we would each have a day where we would set up all our unwanted toys and junk outside our homes either on the pavement or on a little table and charge 20p for the doll that must have set your parents back a few quid on your last birthday or Christmas. We would all run home quickly looking for this exorbitant amount from Mammy quickly so we could run back and purchase ASAP because we knew 5 other kids were doing the same thing. All the earnings you made from the jumble sale went either to the Ice Cream Van man or on someone else's junk :)) One year my enterprising little sister made the fortune of about 5 pounds from selling painted rocks and leaves as she didn't want to part with any of her stuff!

As I'm no longer a kid I have no idea if the kids of today still play any of these games. I know that the kids in my old estate still hold jumble sales as my enterprising little 5 year old nephew last year held a jumble sale and made a 'catalogue' with prices so his friend could spend some time selling for him while he played a game himself. That's entrepreneurship and leadership with management skills all at the age of 5 bless him! We all laughed our socks off but had to admire him all the same.

I wonder if with health and safety gone mad, as well as video games, the imaginations of little kids aren't as fervent as ours used to be and what the streets will be like when my little baby reaches 4 or 5 years old. Board game anyone?

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