Games We Used To Play...
The School has recently been decorating the playground for Playground Games - marking out
areas for games, hopscotch beds and so on.
Several Former Pupils have written to us about the games they used to play, in the playground and
outside their houses.
The Editor will print more here, when he gets time, but please send us your recollections - the more the merrier.
"We girls used to have lots of fun in the playground, whole gangs of us
playing 'ropes' and chanting as we skipped, 'Who's got feet like Sammy
Dreep, ______ _______!', 'Down in the valley' and numerous others.
"Girls seemed to get along better together then and as most of us had no TV we
made our own interests and were outside playing a lot.
"We played marbles,
had terrific slides in the playground when it was frosty until Mr. Duggan
our 'Jannie' left and Mr. Jamieson came along to put salt on them. Many
of us had 'tackets' on our shoes to help the wear, or we would have had some
big holes.
"We exchanged 'Scraps' in winter in the shed. The equivalent
would be stickers now I guess.
"We played a lot of 'beds', known as
hopscotch here (Moira lives in Toronto now), but we had three different
kinds of beds, round beds where if you got into the centre and
back out safely you put your initials in a square and nobody else
could land in it, as well as six squares, where we did all kinds of
different things like hitting the peever with your toe, the side
of your foot etc.
"We used to use old shoe polish tins for peevers
but sometimes we got a piece of marble from the stone maker across
from the cemetery and if we were lucky they would round it off for us.
"I wonder if the girls now play two ball and even three ball like we did
against a wall. We chanted and did actions - plainy, clappie, rollio (rolled
our hands), backy, right hand, left hand, right leg (under the leg), left
leg, touch your heel, touch your toe, touch the ground, big birlio!!! Ah,
these were the days. We were so carefree."
- Moira Anderson, now Phippen, 1951-57.
"...Other memories are of skipping in the playground, and swapping scraps with
friends.
"I also remember being sent to Mrs Howie's (the HT following Mr
Garven) office to be told off for pushing my little sister into the boys'
playground!"
- Lesley Bloomer, 1967-74.