What games did you used to play after school?

Forgotten about kisschase, but that was playtime, not after school. Oh, that Carol – she just wanted to be caught.

Hopscotch, skipping and ball against the wall...accompanying rhymes and a game all ages played for hours and hours was ''call a ball''.......in the road . I can remember standing in a circle....someone threw the ball in the air and we all ran for our lives and hid.....and the person had to serach for us and hit us with the ball...whence we waited in the middle of the road ready to re-commence the game !!!
We made 'dens' in the field and played out with very few toys from morning til called in. We were never bored and hardly watched any TV..certainly no computer/ games.

Happy Days !!!!!!

All the kids in my street (it was a cul-de-sac) would play "British Bulldog" amongst other things. Health and safety would have kittens now!

There was a wooden footbridge over the railway (east coast main line) that had some planks missing. A favourite game was to stand astride a gap as a train went underneath, sending smoke, steam and ash up our skirts.

Did any of you collect "scraps". You could buy them in sheets in a newsagents and kept your collection between the pages of a book. Then you could do swaps. I particularly remember that there was a great demand for "pre war" scraps - old ones which people had got from their mums or aunties. I also loved the ones which were pictures of angels/ cherubs sitting smiling on clouds. Not really sure what the point of it all was. I never remember sticking them in scrapbooks - the swapping was the important part. Happy days. Don't know if you can get them now.

Raggygranny, you reminded me of a trick we used to get up to, without parental knowledge I hasten to add. At the far end of the village there was a canal, and a lock. When the water was at the very bottom, we`d balance on and walk across the ledge at the top. I shudder to think what could have happened, but it didn`t occur to us then.

With my siblings I roamed the fields of what is now part of the M56. We played out every evening unless we were in trouble. I hated playing out because I wanted to stay indoors and read my library books, I used to smuggle them out of the house or they'd have been confiscated and I'd have been in trouble for reading!

It's interesting to se that someone else remembera that they had seasons for their games.I've often wondered how we knew when the season was changing.Nothing was said.
Did anyone else have dip-in books? You would take a large book and distribute cut out pictures,bits of ribbon, scraps or any other small token through the pages of the book.Then you would close the book, show it a friend saying "a pin ,a pin to dip in."Your friend would give you a pin, open the book and take out the token in that page.We knew how to live in Yorkshire!
One of my great delights ,although it wasn't a game was to help my gran to wash the steps and her stretch of pavement and to use white and yellow stone to edge the step.I loved my sacking apron and scrubbing the steps.Was this peculiar to th West Riding?

We made stilts out of the old National Health dried baby milk tins. They were quite big tins..banged a couple of holes at the top and threaded string for handles.
I think the baby milk powder came from 'the clinic' ?? White tins with blue writing. Also, bottles of very strong orange juice for diluting, bottles of cod liver oil and tins of Marmite.

We would play jacks, 'grandma's footsteps', marbles, leapfrog, hopscotch, conkers, skipping, kisschase, looking for frog spawn in ponds and streams. We would build a hide in the woods, light a fire and cook biscuits squashed with jam on a tin lid over it.

Notsogrand, our tins were Tate and Lyle`s golden syrup tins.
Westendgirl, we all seemed to graduate to the shops at the same time for our whips and tops and our marbles, don`t know how we knew when each season was! I lived in Yorkshire as well, as a child, near Barnsley. But "donkey stoning" doorsteps was done in Lancashire as well, great pride was taken in how good your doorstep looked, and heaven help you with your mother if you sat on it and got the stuff on your clothes!

In Ayrshire we had a form of hopscotch called 'peevers'. The peever was a flat stone, or sometimes a shoe polish tin filled with pebbles. You slid this onto the first square then kicked it round with the side of your foot. If you hopped twice in a square or kicked it into the wrong square you were 'out'. If you got all the way round, you then slid it into the second square and so on. We, too, collected and swopped scraps which we pasted into albums. Pre-war ones, probably purloined from mums' old albums, were particularly valued.

They had to get the fire engine out when we had a camp. It was in the grounds of a very big house. My Aunt and Uncle lived in the lodge.

Marbles were a great favourite, especially when there were coveted items to be won from others. Marbles used to be beautiful; the ones I've seen recently have been rather boring. We also played jacks (or 'five stones'). There were a lot of children in the street where I lived and communal games were very popular. I was hopeless at ball games (except cricket) but used to like skipping - especially "all in" which entailed someone turning a very long rope while anything up to six people would skip in it with others queued to get in. One person would jump out and at the same time someone else would jump in while the rope was still turning. The rhyme, sung to the rhythm of the turning rope, went, as far as I can remember "All in, all out, Jane (or whoever) jumps in and Sue (or whoever) jumps out". You had to time it just right to jump in or out and not stop the rope! If you did, you didn't get another go. Everyone used to join in, even some of the mums sometimes. Rarely saw a car in those days. We lived quite near to a main railway line and the boy next door, my cousin and I used to sit on the river wall and collect steam train numbers - I still adore steam trains. We also used to paddle in the river, which was filthy in those days, and collect water snails. Health and safety? Never 'eard of it! Dirty wet clothes were the only thing that got you into trouble!

I used to skip singing this rhyme
Jelly on a plate
Jelly on a plate
Wibble, wobble
Wibble wobble
Jelly on a plate
Thing is then I didn't have anything to wibble wobble but now .....

Anyone from Brighton remember a verse (was it for ball or for skipping?) that went:-

Queenie Queenie Caroline
Washed her hair in turpentine
Turpentine to make it shine
Queenie Queenie Caroline

I always thought that it referred to George IVs wife Caroline, who was said by him to be none-too-fussy about her personal hygiene - and I believe that turpentine was sometimes used to get rid of "lodgers" in the hair.

I've never heard of it anywhere else, and Brightonians did think more highly of Mrs Fitzherbert than of poor Caroline.

Annika

Does anyone else remember marching along behind the boys shouting "We won the war. In 1944"?

We were very proud.

Must teach grandkids that one. Couldn't teach it to kids as they went to a Euro school and they would prob have started another war!

Notsogrand, I meant to ask, did you ever make anything out of your French knitting? I used to make MILES of the stuff, but never actually made it into anything.

You all realise don't you, that these will all go in the next Gransnet moneyspinner book.

We won't see a penny.

That's stopped you in your tracks, hasn't it.

Does anyone remember the push out dolly at the back of a book that you then had to cut out the clothes for? The were affixed to the stand up doll by tabs. We used to make a whip and top out of a cordial bottle stopper and a leather shoelace.
Also, remember the excitement when the rag and bone man rang his bell? We used to run alongside his horse and cart and thought he was a very exotic figure.

Loved those paper dolls.

Scared stiff of the rag and bone man though.

I seem to remember making miles of french knitting too - my mother used to stitch them together to make hats for dolls and mats to stand teapots on. I found a Ladybird book when we were clearing out the loft recently on how to do french knitting and things you could make - I think it must have been my daughter's but I can't remember her making anything! I wish I'd kept the book now...

numberplease I remember french knitting you are right ,made miles ( wouldn't be miles now !) of the stuff . I wonder where it all went , bet we would have enough to go half way round the world.
Did anyone do french skipping ? we used lots of coloured elastic bands and tied them all together and then they were wraped around the ankles of two friends while the third friend jumped over it and as the game went on the band was put higher and higher up the friends legs oh happy days