State of play
Believing that things are not what they used to be is a viral disease that strikes as you enter adulthood and gets worse with age, says folklorist Steve Roud. One symptom is the perennial complaint that children do not play proper games any more. In 1804, the demise of childhood games was attributed to the destructive effect of building over village greens and commons in the Scots Magazine; in 1860, it was the lack of playgrounds and the prohibition on street games that Lord Shaftesbury blamed for the decline of marbles, hoops, and tip-cat. More recently, the baleful influence of cinema and wireless, of TV, computer games and iPods, and now of modern teaching methods, and health and safety concerns have been added to the list.
Fifty years on from his own childhood, and 50 years after the publication of Peter and Iona Opie’s pioneering study of The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, Steve Roud has visited primary-schools the length and breadth of Britain and reports in his new book The Lore of the Playground that all is well in the schoolyard – children have not lost the ability to play imaginative games, it is adults who have lost the ability to make sense of what is going on amidst the apparently random and chaotic playtime activity. Modern children have just as rich a repertoire of games as had his generation, Steve says, and many of the games, rhymes, jokes, and rituals played out in contemporary playgrounds are recognisable as new variations on old themes that go back perhaps for hundreds of years.
Chasing games that would once have featured cops and robbers, or cowboys and Indians, now involve aliens and zombies, or different sorts of dinosaurs. The once ubiquitous eeny, meeny, miny, mo has been joined by new rhymes such as black shoe, black shoe, change your black shoe, O U T spells out. If you want to take time out of a game, you can still cross your fingers and shout ‘crucis’ in the Cotswolds, ‘fainites’ in London, ‘barley’ in the Midlands, ‘kings and crosses’ in East Anglia and ‘skinch’ in the north east. Girls still play skilful clapping and skipping games with the occasional reference to underwear, though today it is Madonna’s conical bra that is ridiculed in rhyme rather than granny’s voluminous knickers hanging on the washing line. Boys still buy marbles – but to collect and swap; Steve notes that they no longer play with them because the idea that you might lose your prize possessions in a game is seen as strange and incomprehensible.
