What games did you used to play after school?

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.

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!

Annika

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.

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 .....

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 !!!!!!

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

I remember marbles in the playground drain! Jacks, fives and most of all kisschase in the playground!

We had a whip and top season, we used to take out the leather thong that came with the whip and replace it with string cos it worked better, and we put patterns on the tops with chalks. Then there was a marbles season, I always lost mine, never won any. We also skipped, if there weren`t enough of us, the other end of the rope would be tied to a lamp post (gas in thos
e days). When we played hopscotch we used pieces of shale that came in the coal deliveries for drawing the grid on the pavement, we kept it under the hedge near the front gate, where the coal was dropped off from the coal lorry.
I can also remember liking bursting the bubbles in the tar at the side of the road in hot weather, even though I got into trouble for getting tar on my shoes.
And for a bit of stomach churning information, I was never allowed to have chewing gum, so I`d scrape up what people had thrown down on the pavement and chew that! It was 50-60 years ago and I`m still alive!
Oh, and hide and seek of course!

Gosh! I'd forgotten leapfrog – not allowed at school in case we broke bones or kicked each others' faces. Cats cradle, endless twistings of bits of string. I can see kids doing that now.

We also used to play marbles in the gutter. And I remember when the big tanker type lorry came round to empty the drains the driver would suction up the water, then swing the pipe round and let the water out over the road and the marbles we had lost down the drain would come out with it. We all scrabbled for them. I hope it was just rain water! (Don't remember hearing of any fatalities)

Leapfrog over each other bent double, cats cradle, walking on stilts and lots of the others mentioned above. No TV when I was a child but we were very happy and more sociable.

Hopscotch, roller skates, skipping, five stones and jacks, the big ship sails through the alley, alley-oo (however that's spelt) – that required lots of us, so not every day – made-up games of being grown-ups (about 17 but incredibly independent and wealthy), dens made from a blanket and the clothes horse (indoors) or the frame of the garden swing (outdoors). My friends and I also invented a game we played on the way home from school whereby you had to have your feet off ground whenever a car went past you, then we made it more difficult by insisting that you couldn't have your feet off ground in the same way for two or three cars running – so if you sat on the pavement for the first one, you had to kneel on the wall for the next and do a handstand for the third. We were always late getting home and had incredibly dirty and hands clothes from grovelling around on pavements. How many games did individual children invent that depended entirely on having a wall, a stream, a fence, a hard surface, a patch of grass, whatever, in particular places in relation to each other, so that balls and bats behaved in a specific way and a mind-boggling scoring system could be in place?