“You throw nuts against a wall and let them lay there till one of them
is hit, then he who hits has the lot. But if he doesn’t leave Mummy
laying down he has to pay six.”
With nuts (or cherry-stones or date-stones) you can also play YOU
HAVE ALL YOU GET and KNOCK HIM DOWN HAVE HIM and TIP-TAP and MOP
CHERRY-STONES and UP THE GUTTER-SPOUT; as well as another game for
which you need nuts and an old tobacco-tin. I can’t tell you its name,
because I don’t know it; and the lads can’t tell you either, because it
hasn’t got one--not yet. It’s quite a new game.
But some of the best sports are those which they make up without
anything at all, just out of their heads, like STAGS, and FOX-HUNTING,
and SHOEING THE WILD HORSE (you need confederates for this, and a
fresh boy; but it’s quite a respectable game), and TOMMY ALL ROUND,
and BLIND DONKEY, and SAILOR, and HORSE-SOLDIERS. HORSE-SOLDIERS (also
called FLYING ANGELS) is rather rough, and so is COCK AND HEN FIGHT.
Or hide-and-seek games like I SPY--SPIT IN YOUR EYE, which goes like
this:--
“Five or ten can play, one has to hide wile the Others hide. If he
sees you you have to come out of your Crib & twig & get home. The one
that hides can only come a little way from home--to get home you have
to run and touch the piller or Post where he was hiding”.
POINT is like I spy; but you need a lamp-post for it. MONKEY IN THE
WOOD is the same kind of game, but without a lamp-post; FORTY and INNER
AND OUTER are other hide-and-seek games. Or hunting sports like WIDDY,
which you play in winter to get warm with. There are different ways of
playing WIDDY; one is this:
“Say there’s ten of you, one is widdy, that’s Hee. He runs after the
others till he catches his one then there’s two that must hold hands
then they run after the eight till they catch another and so on till
there all cort and the last one to be cawt is widdy for next go”.
Or you can make WIDDY into a hopping game. One is “he”, they all gather
round him and sing--
Widdy Widdy way, I shan’t play,
Kick your post and run away--
and then he kicks his lamp-post and hops after them on one leg. I don’t
know what “Widdy” means, but I should think that all these hunting “he”
games are rather old (other “he” games are sometimes new). FISHING (or
FAG-OUT) is another of them, and COALER another, and LAST ONE HOME
another.
To play DELIVER UP THOSE GOLDEN JEWELS (or DELIVER UP THE BLACK
PUDDING) you need confederates. You go up to a soft boy and say “Let’s
have a game of Deliver up those Golden Jewels _and you shall be
judge_.” So the softy gets very keen about being judge, and sits down
“in Court” on a step or somewhere; then they lead up the prisoner who
is in the know, you know, and they ask him a lot of sham questions; and
as soon as the judge says “Therefore deliver up them golden jools”, the
prisoner--no, I can’t tell you any more about that game. It’s rather
rude. None of our boys are caught at it more than once--not at playing
the judge, at least. There are other games of this sort, like WHITE
MICE and HIGH TREASON and THREE GOLDEN BALLS and FARMER LEFT HIS HAT
BEHIND and SCORING and RUNNING TOO FAST and HIDE AND SEEK (_not_ the
usual kind); they can all be played in a respectable fashion, but
the worst of it is, they generally aren’t. Another is called P.....E.
That’s worse. I can’t say anything whatever about it except that you
need good confederates and a boy who is quite new to the quarter. And
some of them are still worse; not at all nice, in fact. If you want to
find out about them, you must come yourself and talk to a few of our
rough chaps. You might ask them about TOUCHING THE KING’S SCEPTRE. If
you can get that out of them, you can get anything....