Produced by Alan Murray. HTML version by Al Haines.
FLOOR GAMES
by
(H)erbert (G)eorge Wells
Contents
I. The Toys To Have
II. The Game Of The Wonderful Islands
III. Of The Building Of Cities
IV. Funiculars, Marble Towers, Castles And War Games,
But Very Little Of War Games
Section I
THE TOYS TO HAVE
The jolliest indoor games for boys and girls demand a floor, and the
home that has no floor upon which games may be played falls so far
short of happiness. It must be a floor covered with linoleum or cork
carpet, so that toy soldiers and such-like will stand up upon it, and
of a color and surface that will take and show chalk marks; the common
green-colored cork carpet without a pattern is the best of all. It must
be no highway to other rooms, and well lit and airy. Occasionally,
alas! it must be scrubbed--and then a truce to Floor Games. Upon such a
floor may be made an infinitude of imaginative games, not only keeping
boys and girls happy for days together, but building up a framework of
spacious and inspiring ideas in them for after life. The men of
tomorrow will gain new strength from nursery floors. I am going to tell
of some of these games and what is most needed to play them; I have
tried them all and a score of others like them with my sons, and all of
the games here illustrated have been set out by us. I am going to tell
of them here because I think what we have done will interest other
fathers and mothers, and perhaps be of use to them (and to uncles and
such-like tributary sub-species of humanity) in buying presents for
their own and other people's children.
Now, the toys we play with time after time, and in a thousand
permutations and combinations, belong to four main groups. We have (1)
SOLDIERS, and with these I class sailors, railway porters, civilians,
and the lower animals generally, such as I will presently describe in
greater detail; (2) BRICKS; (3) BOARDS and PLANKS; and (4) a lot of
CLOCKWORK RAILWAY ROLLING-STOCK AND RAILS. Also there are certain minor
objects--tin ships, Easter eggs, and the like--of which I shall make
incidental mention, that like the kiwi and the duck-billed platypus
refuse to be classified.
These we arrange and rearrange in various ways upon our floor, making a
world of them. In doing so we have found out all sorts of pleasant
facts, and also many undesirable possibilities; and very probably our
experience will help a reader here and there to the former and save him
from the latter. For instance, our planks and boards, and what one can
do with them, have been a great discovery. Lots of boys and girls seem
to be quite without planks and boards at all, and there is no regular
trade in them. The toyshops, we found, did not keep anything of the
kind we wanted, and our boards, which we had to get made by a
carpenter, are the basis of half the games we play. The planks and
boards we have are of various sizes. We began with three of two yards
by one; they were made with cross pieces like small doors; but these we
found unnecessarily large, and we would not get them now after our
present experience. The best thickness, we think, is an inch for the
larger sizes and three-quarters and a half inch for the smaller; and
the best sizes are a yard square, thirty inches square, two feet, and
eighteen inches square--one or two of each, and a greater number of
smaller ones, 18 x 9, 9 x 9, and 9 x 4-1/2. With the larger ones we
make islands and archipelagos on our floor while the floor is a sea, or
we make a large island or a couple on the Venice pattern, or we pile
the smaller on the larger to make hills when the floor is a level
plain, or they roof in railway stations or serve as bridges, in such
manner as I will presently illustrate. And these boards of ours pass
into our next most important possession, which is our box of bricks.
(But I was nearly forgetting to tell this, that all the thicker and
larger of these boards have holes bored through them. At about every
four inches is a hole, a little larger than an ordinary gimlet hole.
These holes have their uses, as I will tell later, but now let me get
on to the box of bricks.)
This, again, wasn't a toy-shop acquisition. It came to us by gift from
two generous friends, unhappily growing up and very tall at that; and
they had it from parents who were one of several families who shared in
the benefit of a Good Uncle. I know nothing certainly of this man
except that he was a Radford of Plymouth. I have never learned nor
cared to learn of his commoner occupations, but certainly he was one of
those shining and distinguished uncles that tower up at times above the
common levels of humanity. At times, when we consider our derived and
undeserved share of his inheritance and count the joys it gives us, we
have projected half in jest and half in earnest the putting together of
a little exemplary book upon the subject of such exceptional men:
Celebrated Uncles, it should be called; and it should stir up all who
read it to some striving at least towards the glories of the avuncular
crown. What this great benefactor did was to engage a deserving
unemployed carpenter through an entire winter making big boxes of
wooden bricks for the almost innumerable nephews and nieces with which
an appreciative circle of brothers and sisters had blessed him. There
are whole bricks 4-1/2 inches x 2-1/4 x 1-1/8; and there are
quarters--called by those previous owners (who have now ascended to, we
hope but scarcely believe, a happier life near the ceiling) "piggys."
You note how these sizes fit into the sizes of the boards, and of each
size--we have never counted them, but we must have hundreds. We can
pave a dozen square yards of floor with them.
How utterly we despise the silly little bricks of the toyshops! They
are too small to make a decent home for even the poorest lead soldiers,
even if there were hundreds of them, and there are never enough, never
nearly enough; even if you take one at a time and lay it down and say,
"This is a house," even then there are not enough. We see rich people,
rich people out of motor cars, rich people beyond the dreams of
avarice, going into toyshops and buying these skimpy, sickly,
ridiculous pseudo-boxes of bricklets, because they do not know what to
ask for, and the toyshops are just the merciless mercenary enemies of
youth and happiness--so far, that is, as bricks are concerned. Their
unfortunate under-parented offspring mess about with these gifts, and
don't make very much of them, and put them away; and you see their
consequences in after life in the weakly-conceived villas and silly
suburbs that people have built all round big cities. Such poor
under-nourished nurseries must needs fall back upon the Encyclopedia
Britannica, and even that is becoming flexible on India paper! But our
box of bricks almost satisfies. With our box of bricks we can scheme
and build, all three of us, for the best part of the hour, and still
have more bricks in the box.
So much now for the bricks. I will tell later how we use cartridge
paper and cardboard and other things to help in our and of the
decorative make of plasticine. Of course, it goes without saying that
we despise those foolish, expensive, made-up wooden and pasteboard
castles that are sold in shops--playing with them is like playing with
somebody else's dead game in a state of rigor mortis. Let me now say a
little about toy soldiers and the world to which they belong. Toy
soldiers used to be flat, small creatures in my own boyhood, in
comparison with the magnificent beings one can buy to-day. There has
been an enormous improvement in our national physique in this respect.
Now they stand nearly two inches high and look you broadly in the face,
and they have the movable arms and alert intelligence of scientifically
exercised men. You get five of them mounted or nine afoot in a box for
a small price. We three like those of British manufacture best; other
makes are of incompatible sizes, and we have a rule that saves much
trouble, that all red coats belong to G. P. W., and all other colored
coats to F. R. W., all gifts, bequests, and accidents notwithstanding.
Also we have sailors; but, since there are no red-coated sailors, blue
counts as red.
Then we have "beefeaters," (Footnote; The warders in the Tower of
London are called "beefeaters"; the origin of the term is obscure.)
Indians, Zulus, for whom there are special rules. We find we can buy
lead dogs, cats, lions, tigers, horses, camels, cattle, and elephants
of a reasonably corresponding size, and we have also several boxes of
railway porters, and some soldiers we bought in Hesse-Darmstadt that we
pass off on an unsuspecting home world as policemen. But we want
civilians very badly. We found a box of German from an exaggerated
curse of militarism, and even the grocer wears epaulettes. This might
please Lord Roberts and Mr. Leo Maxse, but it certainly does not please
us. I wish, indeed, that we could buy boxes of tradesmen: a blue
butcher, a white baker with a loaf of standard bread, a merchant or so;
boxes of servants, boxes of street traffic, smart sets, and so forth.
We could do with a judge and lawyers, or a box of vestrymen. It is true
that we can buy Salvation Army lasses and football players, but we are
cold to both of these. We have, of course, boy scouts. With such boxes
of civilians we could have much more fun than with the running,
marching, swashbuckling soldiery that pervades us. They drive us to
reviews; and it is only emperors, kings, and very silly small boys who
can take an undying interest in uniforms and reviews.
And lastly, of our railways, let me merely remark here that we have
always insisted upon one uniform gauge and everything we buy fits into
and develops our existing railway system. Nothing is more indicative of
the wambling sort of parent and a coterie of witless, worthless uncles
than a heap of railway toys of different gauges and natures in the
children's playroom. And so, having told you of the material we have,
let me now tell you of one or two games (out of the innumerable many)
that we have played. Of course, in this I have to be a little
artificial. Actual games of the kind I am illustrating here have been
played by us, many and many a time, with joy and happy invention and no
thought of publication. They have gone now, those games, into that
vaguely luminous and iridescent into which happiness have tried out
again points in world of memories all love-engendering must go. But we
our best to set them and recall the good them here.