“build up four stones, throw up the bonk so that it knocks down one of them; and so on till only one stone is left. Then throw up the bonk and catch it in your hand together with the four stones that are on the ground; if you miss one, you’re out”—
and TWOS AND THREES and FOURS and FIVERS and FIVES SIX TIMES and SAVING BABY’S LIFE—
“The way to play Saving Babies life is like this. First of all you pick out a stone which will be the bonk, then lay the remaining four on the left hand, and then by hitting the hand which holds the stones one of them flies into the air, then when it comes down the player must catch it or else he is out. When all the stones have been caught in this way they are laid on the hand in two’s, then in three’s, and when that is done all the four are caught, but this time the bonk must be picked up while the others are coming down.”
It takes some doing, this game; and it isn’t worth doing when you can do it.
Now proper boys won’t touch a marble that bounces from the ground—I can’t tell you why, but there it is; so they generally use a fifth stone instead of a bonk, as in this last game, which is the boys’ way of “Saving Baby’s Life”. But most of them don’t care about these things anyhow, and I don’t either; rotten games, I call them, fit for silly little girls and only interesting because they’re a sort of half-way (the old FIVE-STONES, for instance, is played both with common stones and with gobs) between marbles which you can’t manufacture at any price and real stones which you just pick up anywhere.
Talking of real stones, there’s no doubt whatever that games played with them are the oldest in the world, together with the mud-larks—excepting perhaps those that are not played with things at all, like hide-and-seek and some of the old “he” games. And it’s just wonderful what you can do with stones. But they are dying out, all the same; because the worst of it is, there are not half enough stones about, nowadays; not half enough. You can play DUMPING (or DUMPLING) with stones, and BUNG (also called GO-GULLEY) and NIP (also called TAP or LEG-ALONG—where you hit each others’ stones, each hit counting ten) and DUCK; and you can tell from these names how old the games are. Stones for LEG-ALONG—stones of the right kind, of proper shape and weight, flat on both sides and fitting nicely into the hand, are hard to come by and carefully kept. Duck (or DUCK ON) goes like this:
“About eight or nine can play; you make a hole in the ground and Duck puts his stone before it, then the Others come up close and have to knock his one into the hole with theirs; if they miss they must pick up there stones and run back to the Curb before he can catch his One; if he catch him, that man is Duck instead.”
Other stone-games are FRENCH PACKET and SHUFFING THE MONEY and FIVE-TEN and HESLING and TWO AND THREE HOLES and KNOCKING THREE’S and PENNY-TUPPENCE and COCK-SHIES and STONE CHASE and THROWINGS OUT and RINGING THE STONE and PUDDING.
Have you ever played DUCKING MUMMY? Probably not. But it’s a good old stone-game for small boys. Two of them take a stone each, and with these stones they aim at a third stone. The third stone—that’s Mummy. If one of them hits Mummy, he keeps on throwing till he misses; then the other has a turn at it; and so on. In the end they are supposed to count up who has made most hits—the loser paying a peppermint. Of course they try to cheat each other, and so it always ends in a free fight: that’s the best part of the whole game. Nobody ever gets the peppermint.
But they sometimes gets a black eye....