A Door to Know-Where

I’m often asking people where they played as children.  It’s the quickest and most powerful way to dredge up those memories, to remind people of that peculiar way of seeing things that belongs to children.  When I try to conjure up my own memories of childhood, however, they sometimes seem baffling, baffled - as if I’m listening to them through a cardboard tube.

When in California this summer, I visited some of my places where I was young for the first time as an adult.  It’s a true cliche they seem small, but they astonished me with their depth of meaning.  All of a sudden, it was as though the cardboard tube had become a telescope, bringing distant memories into bright and sudden proximity.

It was not the beach that I remembered, but the tidepools.  Not the tidepool, but the tiny shells that nestled tight together within each little crevice.  I remembered thinking of them as individual creatures, coming together in friendships and whole cities, and how with enough attention these small places came alive with drama.

The one memory that I call up most often though, cannot be revisited.  It makes so little sense that I had to go to my Mum for confirmation that it even happened.

Near our house was a sidewalk that ran beside a busy road, and off to one side of it was a grassy patch.  There were a couple of bushes, perhaps, and papery wildflowers waving on thin stems.  It was scrubland, where my Mum and I paused from time to time but which I had never particularly loved.

Then, one strange and miraculous day, a door appeared there.  Inexplicable, but perfectly built, the door had an fully working frame and a knob which turned and closed with a click.  Open, it framed the world behind it, making it altogether different.  It created a threshold, a voyage, an opportunity for transformation of world and self.

I told myself that people had come here to build a house, but had discovered that this place was an Indian graveyard, so they’d left so quick that the door stayed behind.  Opening it and closing it, crossing through and back again, I played for hours with the changes that it made possible, with the idea that the world entered through the door was invisibly but fundamentally different to the one I’d left behind.

Leaving it, I remember wondering if I had been somehow changed by my passage through the door.  I wondered which world I was now in – the one I’d started in, or the new one that had been created?  How would I ever know for sure?  I looked up at my Mum, who smiled back, and even she seemed suddenly strange to me.

The thing was, my world and myself had already been changed – by the discovery that this ordinary world was one in which a perfect door could appear, without explanation, and make all sorts of new ideas possible.

Cindarella, Dressed in Yella…

I’m up visiting my parents in Yorkshire again, wearing layers of fleece and nosing through the bookshelves.  Dad’s a science fiction buff, but Mum’s background is in gifted education – particularly the kind of progressive, child-led, creative stuff that I am interested in.  When I first started reading books about childhood, she’d almost invariably have a copy already on the shelves, carefully labelled in her maiden name and with thoughtful notes in the margins.

The Opies’ Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, Rachel Carson’s A Sense of Wonder, even Summerhill: For and Against – all of these sitting there among many others, a quiet inheritance of words that she’d stored up over time, and the background of how she’d chosen to mother me.  An incredible gift, in many different ways.

There’s also a selection of novels that are in some way ‘true’ to childhood – or at least, resonant with recent and distantly former children.  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and a copy of I Capture the Castle that I added to the shelves last year as a Chanukah present. 

I’ve been reading Tree this visit, for the first time in years.  There’s so many quotes to pull about children’s street play, about the complex social negotiations of stoops and schoolyard recess, about the fears and perceptions and experiences of those who are small. 

“So in the warm summer days the lonesome child sat on her stoop and pretended disdain for the group of children playing on the sidewalk.  Francie played with imaginary companions and made believe that they were better than real children.  But all the while her heart beat in rhythm to the poignant sadness of the song the children sang while walking around in a ring with hands joined.”

It reminded me of a time when I was playworking at a school during break time.  Some of the girls were showing me one of their rhyming games, while two girls too young to be allowed in were watching from the sidelines, then practicing quietly on their own.  One was exactly the same as I’d played, beginning:

Cinderella, dressed in yella

Went upstairs to kiss a fella

Made a mistake and

Kissed a snake

How many doctors did it take?

One, two…..

 

And another one, simple in words but requiring fast and nimble slapwork, going faster and faster until their hands blurred.

Double double this this

Double double that that

Double this

Double that

Double double this that 

The social echelons of rhyming games became clear, as girls who knew the most games, were quick and proficient enough to master them, gained in social status accordingly.  They sometimes bent down to play with a younger girl, laughing and turning away as soon as they made a mistake.  Two sisters had developed their own fast-paced version, complete with kicks.  More than most games, clapping games require a common language of rules, gestures and rhythms.   They incorporate the sharing and celebrating of ability, skills and secret knowledge.

That’s part of why two of the girls conferred with one another, then pulled me aside to teach me a special one.  It went:

My boyfriend gave me an apple

My boyfriend gave me a pear

My boyfriend gave me a kiss on the lips

And threw me down the stairs

 

I gave him back his apple

I gave him back his pear

I gave him back his kiss on the lips

And threw him down the stairs

 

My boyfriend took me to the cinema

To see a dirty film

When I wasn’t looking

He kissed another girl

 

I took him to the sweetshop

And bought a pack of gum

And when he wasn’t looking

I stuck it up his bum

  

“Everyone knows that one,” one of the girls said.  She whispered it though, and checked first over her shoulder and mine, to make sure the male Teaching Assistant had turned his back for the moment.

The Hazardous Putty Knife

I have been taking a little time out from the play world lately, and am remodelling an apartment that’s been vacant for some time. It feels good to be doing slightly dull, practical things, to be methodical and physical, scraping and scrubbing to the sounds of the radio.

This project brought me to B&Q, for more masking tape, a putty knife, sugar soap. I was at the self-checkout, swearing under my breath at the little voice telling me to replace my items in the bagging area and fumbling with my wallet, when a red box flashed up on the screen.

Customer Service Assistance Required.

Really? I thought I’d been managing quite well with the stupid thing, but a helpful sales associate came up, punched in a number and headed out.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Age restricted item,” she explained. “I had to tell it you’re overage.” She giggled.

“Really? Which one?” She lifted up the putty knife from my bag.

“It’s a knife, you see.”

“Oh. And what’s the age, on a putty knife?”

She told me, and I nearly had to use the knife to scrape my jaw off the floor.

Let’s leave aside for a moment the arguable knife-ness of a putty knife, or the effectiveness of an age-related ban on such things (which are widely available in Grandmother’s kitchen drawers all over the country). Concentrating only on the age limit set, this was astonishing. Before I tell you, let’s recap other national age limits.

In the UK, you can legally smoke at 16 (presumably after you’ve legally had sex). You can work, and start paying taxes. You can leave school.

You can drive at 17, drink at 18, and get married without your parents consent ( though hopefully sober). You can join the army, and vote on how those taxes you’ve been paying for the past two years are to be spent.

Now where might you place the potential hazard of a putty knife, pictured above, on that scale? Alongside cigarettes or children? Military warfare? Marriage? Does a putty knife, in the hands of a young person, offer more or less danger to themselves and others, than those things do?

You’re wrong! It’s worse than all of them. Putty knives are SO TERRIFYING that you must be 21 to wield one.

I am imagining that this it a company policy, rather than a national one, but I don’t know. It’s the first time I’ve been IDed for one, at any rate. Even so, it makes a point about our fears of young people and how long we believe that youth continues for.  I can see why B&Q don’t want to be linked to any knife-related horror (oh, the publicity!) but this still seems absurdly inflationist about the nature of the danger, and how long that danger goes on for.

A person could be a professional interior decorator, with their own business which supports a partner, and children already in school, before being allowed to buy a putty knife at this store. They could have been working legally in the field for 5 years, and still considered incompetent, dangerous to the populace.

This is the kind of discrimination that illuminates our own panic about children, and paints them all with the broadest possible brushstrokes of violence and ineptitude.

What to do about it? I was wondering just that later, while scraping at the walls. The peelings of long gummy paper came away and revealed this – not the answer to my specific question, perhaps, but other Douglas Adams fans out there will recognize it as the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.

For now, that will have to do.

Monday morning comics

I was originally going to post a long rant about this under some inflammatory headline, but thought the following when I woke up:

1. I don’t have much to add to the general horror of this or discussion, other than a long hollow wail
2. No one wants to read about this case, or my associated wailings, first thing on a Monday
3. Much better to look at comics.

So I flicked through a cartoons of Kate Beaton, with whom I’ve recently become obsessed, and pasted a couple vaguely relevant ones below.

They don’t exactly illustrate playwork as such.  Because they’re conversations between the cartoonist and her younger self, they are more interested in clashes between the interests and assumptions of adulthood in contradiction to those of childhood – and in how the adult relates to the child self within.  By blocking her younger self’s playful engagement with the world, older Kate sets the stage for a clash.

Kate may not be a good playworker to her younger self, but she does show how childhood memories can sneak up on you with enormous power.

Play memories (and the astoundingly poignant materials that summon up their ghosts) are our own buried treasure, as playworkers and as human beings.

More comics available through her website, Hark, a Vagrant!, where she covers historical and literary figures (in addition to the career potential of racing tigers).

Have a great Monday!