CHAPTER XVIII
GAMES
Children’s games form a study in themselves. Nobody who has once dipped into one of the two big volumes of that scholarly and intensely interesting work by Mrs. Gomme, entitled The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland, can fail to be struck by the importance of games as a mirror of real life. Indeed—to quote the words of Mrs. Gomme’s closing paragraph—‘it is not ... too much to say that we have in these children’s games some of the oldest historical documents belonging to our race, worthy of being placed side by side with the folk-tale and other monuments of man’s progress from savagery to civilisation.’
After reading her book I look back with a new sense of pleasure to the village school-treats, where I joined in the singing games played on the lawns of our old Rectory home in Herefordshire. It is a source of great gratification to me to think that in: Nuts in May—which should properly be read Knots of May, i.e. bunches of hawthorn-blossom—I reenacted marriage by capture; that in: Here come three Spaniards out of Spain, A-courting of your daughter Jane. Ans. My daughter Jane is yet too young, She cannot bear your flattering tongue, I personated the ambassador of a would-be bridegroom belonging to the days when marriage by purchase had succeeded to marriage by capture; that when I adjured the kneeling Sally Water to: Sprinkle in the pan, and then: Rise Sally, rise Sally, Choose your young man, I was calling her to the performance of a marriage ceremony the chief feature of which was some rite connected with water-worship, a relic of the pre-Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles; that when I formed one of a circle of little girls playing the ever-popular Who goes round my stony wall to-night? Ans. Only Johnny Ningo, I represented a primitive village, round which prowled by night a thief from a neighbouring village, or a wild animal from the forest, on a sheep-stealing expedition. But best of all I like to think that as the centre player in: Wind up the old Yew-tree, I personified a sacred Tree, encircled by a band of worshippers stamping on the ground to arouse the sleeping Earth-spirit. London Bridge was another very favourite game at those school-treats, but little did we know that it originated in the barbarous custom of foundation sacrifice. I cannot remember that we ever performed the game of: Mother, mother, the pot boils over, with its traces of customs belonging to fire-worship and the worship of the hearth.
Antiquity of Games
Of less hoary antiquity are the customs represented in Jenny Jones, where Jenny dies, and her corpse is dressed in white and carried to the grave by her maiden friends, weeping as they go. Our Herefordshire version of the song was a decadent one, for we always called the heroine Jenora, and we decided that commonplace ‘black’ is ‘for dead people’. Here we enacted the funeral to the bitter end, till Jenora—or her embodied ghost—rose up from the grave and chased the shrieking mourners. But in Wallflowers and Green Gravel we lamented the death of a maiden only by turning our faces ‘to the wall’ to indicate hopeless grief.
Even those apparently mere baby games which we played with the infant scholars, such as Mulberry Bush, accompanied by actions of daily life, and Ring a Ring o’ Roses, with its allusion to the ceremonial use of flowers, the bowing to the ground, and the sneezing, should probably be regarded with the respect due to survivals of ancient sacred dances. We learn, too, that the primitive element may also be traced in the simple games of Touch and Tig, where ‘he’ or ‘it’ would seem to be a tabooed person; and that in the game of Hoblionkers, so common in Oxford, may be found ‘evidence of the early belief that the possession of a weapon which had, in the hands of a skilful chief, done great execution, would give additional skill and power to the person who succeeded in obtaining it’.
Beside the games which exhibit traces of pre-Christian religion and social custom are the later historical games played by boys, such as Scots and English, and We are the Rovers, dating from the inroads of the Scots, or from the threatened invasion of Napoleon, games which, by comparison with the others, seem to be of mushroom growth. But it is needless further to recapitulate what has been better said elsewhere, and it would be hard to find a game of any sort which is not fully described in Mrs. Gomme’s volumes.
Terms used in Marbles
A bird’s-eye view of the game of marbles as played throughout the British Isles would probably show a larger and more varied vocabulary of technical terms and phrases than almost any other game. To begin with, there are the different dialect names denoting the different species of marbles, for example: balser, bobber or dobber, bullocker, dogle, dolledger, fifer, frenchie, kabber, ligganie, pot-donnock, &c., &c.; then the names for the different varieties of the game, such as: bungums, dab-at-the-hole, doorie, drop-eye, dykey, follow-tar, lag, langie-spangie, nanks, plonks and spans, rackups, ringhams, rumps, &c., &c.; and lastly, there is the rich assortment of exclamations and expressions used by the players, as for instance: A-rant! No custance! Dubs! Fen keeps! Gobs! Heights! Layers! Lights up and no bird-eggs! Lodge! No first my redix! Roonses! &c., &c.; to fub, to fullock, to gull, to grumphey, to hagger, to murl, to plonk, to strake, to play freezers, to play kibby, &c., &c.
Many of the good old nursery jingles appear in quaint guise in the dialects. The following is an Isle of Wight version of This little pig went to market, used when counting a baby’s fingers or toes: This gurt pig zays, I wants meeat; T’other one zays, Where’ll ye hay et? This one zays, In gramfer’s barn; T’other one zays, Week! Week! I can’t get over the dreshel [threshold]. In Scotland they say: This ain biggit the baurn, This ain stealt the corn, This ain stood and saw, This ain ran awa’, An’ wee pirlie-winkie paid for a’. A Scottish version of This is the way the ladies ride, used when dancing a child on the knee, runs: This is the way the ladies rides, Jimp and sma’, jimp and sma’; This is the way the gentlemen rides, Spurs an a’, spurs an a’; This is the way the cadgers rides, Creels an a’, creels an a’.