No, my title isn’t a mis-spelling… last night in the pub, we were talking about our childhoods and what we did to amuse ourselves. My husband had a bevy of cousins and friends around his Surrey neighbourhood, so he was always out with them, playing whichever the sport of the season was, or just rambling off exploring; before that he lived in Cornwall by the sea and there are always things to do by the sea! My sister and I lived on the edge of Cambridge, which was little more than a large market town with a University in the middle, so we would play with the children next door or other children in our road, go off exploring on our bikes, or just wander around the rough ground by the allotments at the end of our road. So fairly similar really…
However, what did he do when it was miserable weather, or it was a dark winter’s afternoon or evening? Like us he painted, and drew, and made things out of Meccano, and listened to the radio; he didn’t write stories like I did but he made model aircraft and ships. However we also played games, from being quite small we had jigsaws and fuzzy-felt, and a pattern game with beads and a card board with holes in, but we also played board games such as Snakes and Ladders, draughts and Ludo, moving onto chess, Monopoly and Scrabble when we were older. We played card games such as Happy Families, snap, patience, sevens… we were never bored! (Actually sometimes we were, sometimes we just didn’t want to do the same old jigsaw, read the same old book, or play Scrabble again!) If I was on my own I would play Scrabble against myself, scrupulously not cheating with my phantom partner.
My husband never played board or card games and can’t really understand why people do, or why it is enjoyable. When we were first married I bought him a deluxe Scrabble set; he was very grateful and we played a few times, before I realised he was bored by it, didn’t really get why it was such a good game, and actually didn’t enjoy it and was only playing because he loved me! I thought he would have really enjoyed it! he loves crosswords… but scrabble… in the end we gave the set away!
Lois Elsden 
We always played board games like Ludo or Monopoly, and cards. My grandmother made a trunk full of old clothes available to us, so we could dress up and perform little “plays”, when the winters were really cold and nasty (we used to get about a metre of snow that lasted until early April). We made clothes for our dolls and bears, painted and learned how to bake things. My grandmother was an excellent cook and always willing to share her recipes. One of my friends – they were rather well-off – had an enormous model railway, a whole landscape complete with moutnains, towns, tunnels, people, fields and animals, and we sometimes played with that.
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I forgot the dressing up trunk! Yes we had one at home – hours and hours of fun with that!
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When the Barbie craze arrived in Germany, my grandmother made available an old wardrobe, where my best friend and I had two shelves each…for Barbie dolls’ luxury apartments. It was even better than a doll’s house, because you could stand up and play with your dolls, Barbie dolls visiting each other in their homes etc. Great stuff and hours of rainy afternoons passed by without any kind of boredom.
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What a wonderful grandmother! … and creative play makes imaginative children!
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Yeah, she was one in a million! I remember my friend and I once decided to be robots for the day – even at lunchtime! Sitting down at the table, we were moving and talking like robots (1960’s style, of course) throughout the meal. She didn’t bat an eye, the dear thing!
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I bet she was laughing like anything inside, and told all her friends about it!
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