• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • 1
    CommentGo Back
Download
 
Title: London Street Games (1931)Author: Norman Douglas [1868-1952]* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *eBook No.: 0300281.txtEdition: 1Language: EnglishCharacter set encoding: Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bitDate first posted: March 2003Date most recently updated: March 2003This eBook was produced by: Col ChoatProject Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editionswhich are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright noticeis included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particularpaper edition.Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check thecopyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing thisfile.This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictionswhatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the termsof the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online athttp://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html---------------------------------------------------------------------------A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBookTitle: London Street Games (1931)Author: Norman Douglas [1868-1952]FIRST PUBLISHED 1916SECOND EDITION REVISED AND ENLARGED 1931To an old friendH. M. TOMLINSONthis new editionPREFACEIt was a pastime that grew on you like a fever--collecting theseoutdoor sports in Finsbury, Hackney, Islington, Whitechapel, Stepney,Limehouse, Poplar, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Deptford, Camberwell,Kennington, Bermondsey, Rotherhithe, Shadwell, and God knows whereelse; it brought you in touch with new lives and new ideas. The firstresult of the craze was an article, a little Cockney study, in the_English Review_ (November 1913). By that time the game-microbe, far
 
from growing extenuated, had established itself firmly in the system;incipient stamp-collectors will recognize this symptom. The followingpages, published in 1916, mark another stage in the progress of theinfection; and I might have continued to note down Street Games tillDoomsday, and compiled a veritable Corpus of them, but for the factthat, owing to other occupations, it became increasingly difficult tofind the necessary tune. Time! It required time, days and weeks, tostalk these children and win their confidence. Whoever doubtsthis--let him try. ...One reviewer lamented that the book did not contain sufficientdescriptions of the sports. I could double their number at thismoment, since the old manuscripts, an enormous and fascinating bundleof play-rules written by the children themselves, are lying before me.But I does it matter how all of them are played? What matters isthat they actually are, or at least were, played. Their peculiarrules strike me as neither important, nor even interesting (see page85). I think it should suffice to have copied, for nearly everyseparate class of game, one or more of its playing-rules in theoriginal language without the alteration of a letter, no two of thembeing done by the same child. For an almost unintelligible specimensee note to page 39; others wrote surprisingly well.The typescript was offered to several publishers in vain, thoughAndrew Melrose took kindly to it. 'It is simple fact,' he wrote, 'thatyour _Street Games_ fills me with admiration for it as a literaryachievement of the most difficult kind triumphantly done.' Thatsounded promising. He would not have it, all the same; not evengratis. 'In short, I can't see a public for it.'He might have seen a public, I suspect, had the material been castinto the shape of an informative treatise. There is always a publicfor stodgy professorial dissertations on out-of-the-way subjects; andindeed, in the case of Street Games, the thing had already been doneafter a fashion. That was not my aim. I wished to produce a socialdocument, however unpretending. My point, my only point, was theinventiveness of the children. That is why I piled up the games into abreathless catalogue which, to obtain its full momentum andpsychological effect, should be read through, _accelerando_, frombeginning to end without a break. It is then that you fully realizethe youngsters' inventive powers. Hence the apparent disorder in myrecital and its impromptu flavour, which were deliberately contrivedto convey that sense of flurried accumulation. I thought I hadsucceeded in making this clear to an intelligent reader. Yet a criticcomplained of my 'undigested material,' and begged his readers to'forget the irritation caused by casual methods.' If he knew whatpains those casual methods had cost me!Another of them made a sager remark when he said that one marvels atthe 'stupidity of the social reformer who desires to close to thechildren the world of adventure, to take from them their birthrightof the streets, and coop them up in well-regulated and uninspiringplaygrounds where, under the supervision of teachers, theirimagination will decline, their originality wither.' That was wellsaid. For the standardization of youth proceeds relentlessly; it ispart of what Richard Aldington calls the insane process of makinggreat groups happy by destroying the personal happiness of everyindividual in that group; it is one of many steps in the direction of
 
that termite-ideal towards which we are trending. I wonder how manyof these games are still played?1931.There's not much for _us_ to do, down our way--in the way of sports, Imean. Nothing at all, in fact. When we come home from work wegenerally go straight indoors and have a lay-down, and a cup of teaand a pipe; or else we go out and watch a match somewhere. There'salways the 'Three Swans', of course. ...But the youngsters get on all right--seem to, at all events. Some ofthem have got bats and stumps or footballs, and off they go into thepark; and some of the girls have got shuttlecocks, and off _they_ go.But most of them haven't, you know; so they just lark about where theyare. PAPER-CHASE and ROUNDERS, for instance; you know those? They'replain sailing. But some of these games, like EGG-IN-CAP (also calledEGGET), are rather complicated; and as to MONDAY-TUESDAY (or NUMBERS;another kind of egg-in-cap)--it would take me till next Saturday_week_ to explain it. Perhaps you can make it out from thisdescription:'After clipping the throer calls out the name of the day in the wekeand the chap whats taken that day has to catch if he misses it theyall run away and shout no Egg if I move--becose if they dont thethroer can say a egg if you move--& that helps to make the quantity ofthe Eggs. The Misser of the ball throes it at one of the player and ifhe misses it is a egg to him and if he hits its a egg to the one hehit. After the throer has hit his man--the man has to throw it upagain. If one of the player catch the Ball they throw it up again andcall out the name, the total of egg to get you out is three. After thegame is over the winner has clockwork on the Losers; they each standup against a wall wile the winner throes at their heads with the ball.They can also claim 3 Hard throes or six soft ones.'Now you know how it's done.Then there's QUEENIE, which is really a girls' game. One boy standson the kerbstone with his back to the street, and they call himQueenie. He throws a ball backwards over his shoulders into thestreet, where four others are standing to catch it. As soon as oneof them has it, they all hold their hands behind their backs, and thenQueenie has to turn round and face them and guess who has the ball.If he guesses right, he goes on being Queenie; if not, the boy who hasthe ball takes his place.Why they call it QUEENIE? Because that happens to be its name. AuntEliza, who has travelled all over the place and can explain mostlyeverything (thinks she can) tells me that QUEENIE is a Chinese gameand that she has seen it played there and that it must have come toLondon over the docks. I daresay it did. But the worst of Aunt Elizais that you never know whether----
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
04 / 22 / 2011This doucment made it onto the Rising List!
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...