M302

Culturally Specific Sources of Play.

When I was 14, we moved from the family farm in Cornwall to a suburban garden in Oxford.

My dad took a job with my mother's great-uncle in his auto-electrical store.  I went to a large and rowdy catholic school full of Irish immigrants.  Refugees from the violence.  With my rural clothes and rounded accent, they asked me what country I came from.

I spent a lot of time pacing around the garden, feeling constrained by its tall thin hedges, through which neighbours could be seen and heard.  The windows overlooking our damp square of grass imposed on my privacy, and the proximity of voices invaded my space. 

In Cornwall we kids used to roam across paddocks and moorland, woods and wetlands, china clay works, streams, and tracks with our invented games.  Mine were for a while based on Children of the New Forest, the story about a family of Royalists escaping the Roundheads and their murderous intent.  Or we dammed the stream, or built tree-houses, or created romantic miniature castles out of twigs and grass.  Once we found a dead ferret and I wouldn't let my brother touch it for fear it was diseased.  We carried it home between us on a stick.  When Mother's Day approached, my sister and I searched out the earliest opening primroses, then got up early on Mother’s Day morning to go out into the woods and pick them fresh at dawn.  Three or four was all we would ever find.  But the half light and stillness of dawn were like another world.

Sometimes my best friend and I would make up competitions of strength and skill, and perform them as rituals in the crumbling earthworks of an abandoned clay settling tank.  We recorded the results on small scraps of paper which we kept in a red plastic box, hidden in a gap between the stones of the wall.

We would explore the slag heaps and play 'commandos' around the open-cut clay mine while the miners were blasting, sneaking through the scrub on the steep banks, or racing across the stark white barren clearings in between the orange earth movers, our hearts pounding, desperate not to get caught.

There wasn't much scope for that sort of thing in a suburban garden.

But then one day I heard the little boy at the bottom playing an invented game by himself.  I was encouraged.  Perhaps it was a game I could enjoy.  I crept close to the hedge to listen.

"Look out Batman, they're behind you".  Biff! Biff! Pow! Take That.  He's getting away!  Get the Batmobile Robin.  I'll cut him off"!

I could see his yellow jumper, fragmented through the foliage, leaping around on the patio steps.  He spoke all the parts, gruff and determined, ordering himself about.

Was he remembering an episode, or was he making it up?  We didn't have a TV.  I hadn't seen the program.

His game felt more prescribed than my square of grass.

Play and Difference this site.