Toys, games & guns...

Over the last few weeks I've been thinking (& we've been talking in the office) about childhood toys and games.

For us, back in the Sixties, outside the house it would be "War", Cowboys n' Indians or hide and seek in the woods, up by the old canal or down at the "Rec".
You don't see this happening round our way anymore - just the occasional organised game (football etc.) in the local park, or youngsters just standing in forlorn-looking huddles.. The local woods and spinneys are left to the dog walkers.

I rarely see kids playing as we used to; making up our own games, building camps or dens, getting thoroughly mucky. In fact the only kids I have seen doing this lately are the camp children at re-enactment events; when the kids seem to run free, policing and looking after each other as we used to do (refreshingly, only just this last weekend I watched a bunch of kids of all ages at a reenactment event happily clambering around the broken wood and debris of a demolished building; constructing a castle from concrete blocks and posts and doing their own thing unsupervised - happy and confident and using their imaginations and having the same kind of fun we used to have. If only more kids had this kind of opportunity).

However... while we spent a lot of time healthily charging around outside, looking back our actual outside games (as opposed to building or climbing) were, as I recall, pretty much about warfare or hunting in one way or another. There were certainly lots of "war toys" about - and when we hadn't any toy guns we used sticks. It seems amazing now, but I had at one time, in die-cast metal, both a realistic Luger and a Webley revolver.

It gets worse; one Xmas my brother and I were given a "White Hunter Set" (see pic). I don't know if it was branded as that, but that's what it was; plastic cartridge belts & holster, binoculars,a plastic 45 automatic, a rifle fitted with telescopic sights - and which ejected brass cartridges - and a plastic solar topee..!!


Indoors there was drawing - and lots of cut-out or push-out paper toys; figures, soldiers, machinery or animals in the early days. Airfix and Britain's toy soldiers were universal - and almost obligatory (in passing - a friend's definitions heard last weekend: "In the old days, you knew you were a serious modeller if you had you own weight in Airfix models and a serious wargamer if you had you own weight in unpainted "lead" soldiers. Now, you know your a serious nerd if you have you own height in PC game CD boxes").

Family board games were Coppit, Ludo, draughts or the weird variety of activities found in the "Compendium Of Games" that we were given one year. Later, board games like Monopoly, Escape From Colditz and Campaign - and model making (plastic Airfix kits) came in.



I only mention all of this because the chats at work, recent reports about the new "gun culture" among kids and tales about children's use of the Internet to entertain themselves and to keep in touch after school (plus reports of bullying by means of messaging services etc.) set me thinking...

When we kept in touch, if we wanted to, we did so by going round people's houses or by making arrangements while at school (we didn't even have a telephone for much of the time) - interacting with adults more (if only with friend's parents).

I'm not saying that our way was better (indeed, once went to the Grammar school, some several miles away, I rarely saw any schoolfriends out of hours, so perhaps texting or the Internet might have encouraged me to keep in touch more - though I doubt it, because by age twelve I was pretty self-sufficient) just pondering on the difference is all.....

The use of toy guns with us was "normal". When there were real disagreements we had rough and tumble fights, but using weapons wasn't on the cards - ever! That would have been seen as a sign of weakness(knives were for weedy "foreigners". Oh - and kicking was as "girlie" as pulling hair; no kick-boxing thank you..).

Despite the nature of the games and equipment, none of the folk I knew and played with as kids grew up with a desire to own or use the real thing - or indeed to be as aggressive or prone to to the kind of violence, verbal and physical, I see among the children attending the local schools near where I live today. Maybe we got our aggressions out of the way in play, rather than bringing it into the playground? Who knows? Certainly not me.


Well, that's enough musing for now. Next time I will try to put in some more relevant odds and ends, and start telling of my stints in Iran.
If you have been reading... thanks.