FUNICULARS, MARBLE TOWERS, CASTLES AND WAR GAMES, BUT VERY LITTLE OF
WAR GAMES
I have now given two general types of floor game; but these are only
just two samples of delightful and imagination-stirring variations that
can be contrived out of the toys I have described. I will now glance
rather more shortly at some other very good uses of the floor, the
boards, the bricks, the soldiers, and the railway system--that
pentagram for exorcising the evil spirit of dulness from the lives of
little boys and girls. And first, there is a kind of lark we call
Funiculars. There are times when islands cease somehow to dazzle, and
towns and cities are too orderly and uneventful and cramped for us, and
we want something--something to whizz. Then we say: "Let us make a
funicular. Let us make a funicular more than we have ever done. Let us
make one to reach up to the table." We dispute whether it isn't a
mountain railway we are after. The bare name is refreshing; it takes us
back to that unforgettable time when we all went to Wengen, winding in
and out and up and up the mountain side--from slush, to such snow and
sunlight as we had never seen before. And we make a mountain railway.
So far, we have never got it up to the table, but some day we will,
Then we will have a station there on the flat, and another station on
the floor, with shunts and sidings to each.
The peculiar joy of the mountain railway is that, if it is properly
made, a loaded car--not a toy engine; it is too rough a game for
delicate, respectable engines--will career from top to bottom of the
system, and go this way and that as your cunningly-arranged switches
determine; and afterwards--and this is a wonderful and distinctive
discovery--you can send it back by 'lectric.
What is a 'lectric? You may well ask. 'Lectrics were invented almost by
accident, by one of us, to whom also the name is due. It came out of an
accident to a toy engine; a toy engine that seemed done for and that
was yet full of life.
You know, perhaps, what a toy engine is like. It has the general
appearance of a railway engine; funnels, buffers, cab, and so forth.
All these are very elegant things, no doubt; but they do not make for
lightness, they do not facilitate hill-climbing. Now, sometimes an
engine gets its clockwork out of order, and then it is over and done
for; but sometimes it is merely the outer semblance that is
injured--the funnel bent, the body twisted. You remove the things and,
behold! you have bare clockwork on wheels, an apparatus of almost
malignant energy, soul without body, a kind of metallic rage. This it
was that our junior member instantly knew for a 'lectric, and loved
from the moment of its stripping.
(I have, by the by, known a very serviceable little road 'lectric made
out of a clockwork mouse.)
Well, when we have got chairs and boxes and bricks, and graded our line
skilfully and well, easing the descent, and being very careful of the
joining at the bends for fear that the descending trucks and cars will
jump the rails, we send down first an empty truck, then trucks loaded
with bricks and lead soldiers, and then the 'lectric; and then
afterwards the sturdy 'lectric shoves up the trucks again to the top,
with a kind of savagery of purpose and a whizz that is extremely
gratifying to us. We make switches in these lines; we make them have
level-crossings, at which collisions are always being just averted; the
lines go over and under each other, and in and out of tunnels.
The marble tower, again, is a great building, on which we devise
devious slanting ways down which marbles run. I do not know why it is
amusing to make a marble run down a long intricate path, and dollop
down steps, and come almost but not quite to a stop, and rush out of
dark places and across little bridges of card: it is, and we often do
it.
Castles are done with bricks and cardboard turrets and a portcullis of
card, and drawbridge and moats; they are a mere special sort of
city-building, done because we have a box of men in armor. We could
reconstruct all sorts of historical periods if the toy soldier makers
would provide us with people. But at present, as I have already
complained, they make scarcely anything but contemporary fighting men.
And of the war game I must either write volumes or nothing. For the
present let it be nothing. Some day, perhaps, I will write a great book
about the war game and tell of battles and campaigns and strategy and
tactics. But this time I set out merely to tell of the ordinary joys of
playing with the floor, and to gird improvingly and usefully at
toymakers. So much, I think, I have done. If one parent or one uncle
buys the wiselier for me, I shall not altogether have lived in vain.