Daddy red-cap has a song beginning like this:
“Plaster of Paris has lost his hat—
Some say this, and some say that....”
and that’s interesting, because “Plaster of Paris”, of course, is all nonsense. And so is “Plaistow Palace”, as they sometimes call it. The real song goes:—
“Beadle Palace has lost his hat—
Some say this, and some say that....”
but the boys twist the words about, because they disremember who Beadle Palace was; and I can’t tell you either. Mr. Perkins, of Framlingham Brothers (Limited), once told me he knew all about it; he said that “Beadle Palace” stands for the Bishop of London, who really did lose his hat one evening; and “some say” it was blown off his head by the wind, and “some say” he gave it to a woman with red hair and a squint, and never got it back again. But he was a bit on, that night, was Mr. Perkins. Or else the Bishop must have been....
These are about a thousand of the outdoor games they play down our way—not a bad number, when you think that our children can only play after they come home from school or work, and that they hardly ever play on Sundays on account of their clothes, or in winter because the evenings are too dark, and that the rain often keeps them indoors anyhow, and that the lads over 14 don’t play at all. And yet, no doubt, I must have forgotten to tell you half of them; and I shall never stop forgetting, if I don’t stop trying to remember....
Now what I think is this. It doesn’t matter how all these sports are played. What matters is that they are played. To show how wide-awake our youngsters are, to be able to go on inventing games out of their heads all the time—that’s the point: my point, at least. The particular rules of all these different games—they don’t strike me as very important, or even interesting.
And you’ll agree with me that it’s as clear as daylight, and it all comes to this: if you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things. Because of course they only invent games when they have none ready-made for them, like richer folks have—when, in other words, they’ve nothing in their hands. As Mr. Perkins said: “You can’t play a ball-game, if you haven’t got a ball”, meaning that if you want to play, and have nothing to play with, you must play at something that doesn’t need anything. Give them bats and balls, and they soon forget their CHINESE ORDERS, and there’s an end of SHOWING NO IVORY, and nobody thinks of PULLING OUT FATHER’S RHUBARB, and OLD DEVIL may go to—well, where he came from. That’s what keeps them alive and “imaginative” (as Aunt Eliza would say)—having nothing to play with. That’s what makes them use up all they can find—clay and kerbstones and nuts and winkle-shells and clothes and empty condensed-milk tins and walls and caps and stones and window-sills and buttons and doorsteps and lamp-posts and rags and anything else that comes handy. And that’s how they come to play any number of games and to discover new ones every day, while better-class lads get into grooves and go on with their frowsy old cricket and one or two more all the time, always the same, year after year.