The rules of the street games – the era of offline fun

There were chasing games, hiding games, counting games and songs

The man on the radio that morning was talking about gaming stress. Children all over the developed world, he said, were suffering from gaming stress: in other words, they don’t like being interrupted and dragged away from their online games. Parents and psychologists are trying to cope with the phenomenon.

Later, on the bus into town, two women were also talking about children and their games. Different games. Where, she wondered, were all the piggy-beds gone to? Her companion chimed in “and the skipping ropes, you never see the girls out skipping in the streets at all nowadays”.

The first lady demurred slightly, pointing out that the volume of traffic might render that a bit risky. But their conversation went on to an agreement that the kids nowadays didn’t know what they were missing, with their heads stuck in their phones all day long, and sure you wouldn’t know what they were being exposed to, not like in their day, God bless the mark, when they were as innocent as the day was long.

There followed a brief burst of wheezy laughter, which was interrupted by the voice of a younger woman sitting across the aisle in the bus, who leaned over and apologised for eavesdropping on their talk, but adding that she was a teacher.

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She went on to reassure them that the games they had referred to, as well as many others, were alive and well and being played in school yards instead of the streets.

The older women were delighted at the news. One of them thanked her for her contribution to the discussion before adding reflectively, “But of course, they don’t come from big families these days, so there’s not as many children to play with as we had.” She added that she had four older sisters and two brothers to play with – or even fight with sometimes. Her friend, not to be outdone, brandished an even bigger family, adding, “Sure there was never any room in the house: that’s why we had to play out in the road.”

Not every child had to play on the street. Others of that era were lucky enough to have gardens to play in, but they all played the same games, each one in its allotted season, which seemed to be arrived at by some form of osmosis. The clocks moving forward by an hour was the starting point: you could now be let out to play after tea! The excitement!

There were chasing games, hiding games, counting games and songs that were sung in hand-holding circles or while skipping or bouncing rubber balls off a wall. And they all followed the same rules – mysterious rules that had been handed down through the ages from one generation to the next, and then in turn from older to younger siblings.

Some of the accompanying songs sound strange today. One of the circle games opened with “The farmer wants a wife” and in no time at all the wife wanted a child, which was soon demanding a dog. Then there was “There lives a lady on the mountain”, who only wanted gold and silver and a nice young man. “Here’s the robbers passing by” ended with a decapitation, and the children singing about “Wallflowers, wallflowers growing up so high” always expressed their wish not to die.

But at least you were quite safe going in and out through the dusty bluebells.

Dusty Bluebells was the title given by David Hammond to a short BBC television documentary he made in 1971 about the street games and songs of Belfast children. You can still find it on YouTube – and it’s well worth looking for. The programme features the boys and girls of St Mary’s Primary School playing and singing in the quiet streets between the small terraced houses of their home town.

There is a charming innocence about them all, but, seen from this distance the programme also carries a haunting shadow, with the city’s looming years of trauma augured by the occasional glimpse of a fully-armed soldier watching the streets, and the odd sight of an armoured vehicle rumbling by. Oblivious to these distractions, the girls and boys keep on playing and singing.

Fortunately for posterity all the old games and their rules and rituals have been safely preserved – and it’s all thanks to the Opies. Iona and Peter Opie, an English married couple with a deep interest in folklore, spent much of the 1960s collecting all these games. They carried out an exhaustive survey in British cities as well as the Shetland Islands and other remote areas, and made recordings of over 10,000 children playing the games and explaining their ins-and-outs.

The results are all contained in their major opus Children’s Games in Street and Playground. They also published several other books, including a collection of old nursery rhymes.

The Opies were conferred with honorary MA degrees by Oxford University, and their vast collection of research papers, rare books and other material are housed today in the Bodleian Library.

It’s a long way from wallflowers and dusty bluebells to the online games that keep today’s children (boys mainly) glued to their screens.

But the response on both levels would probably be the same when told to stop playing because their dinner’s ready.

The indignant response of Father Damo (Craggy Island’s Father Dougal’s pal) come to mind: “I’ll be in in a minuh!”