ing games of childhoods past - skipping, hula-hoops, marbles!

WE had quite a bit of reaction to our query last week as to whether children (and even adults) actually talked to each other any more, or just stayed glued to their mobile phones.

Catherine Mahon Buckley, who runs CADA Performing Arts, was quickest off the mark: “You are so right, we are really not living in the moment - it’s all the phone, the phone, the phone.

“When I’m taking rehearsals, I just don’t allow phones into the room. The performers have to learn to talk to each other, present themselves to a group, laugh, share their experiences.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have phones, but we need to get out of there and what it’s like to communicate with another human being.

“All this modern technology should be add-ons, not part of the fundamental human being, which is what they are in danger of becoming.”

About ten years ago, Catherine re wryly, she said as a joke that in 50 years’ time, someone was going to make a fortune just teaching people how to talk to each other.

“Well, it’s not a joke any more. I can tell you, we badly need to do it now. People simply do not know how to communicate any more.”

Job applicants, she observes, may well be adept at ticking boxes, filling in forms online, taking and attaching selfies, but how can employers judge from that if this is the right person for the job?

“Eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds just don’t have the skills for interviews these days,” says Catherine. “When I interview students for my courses, I ask them to just sit and tell me about themselves. And that is a real challenge for many kids today. They lose their nerve, go pale at the very idea.

Go online, get the app, the info, yes. Talk in an open way to another human being, not so easy. But it used to be!

Of course it did, she is absolutely right. Think back right now as you read this page. Don’t you talking constantly to your friends at school - during the lunch break, at dinner time, going home at the end of the day? Making arrangements to meet up later or on Saturday, asking their opinion about some game, or (at a later stage) the person you secretly fancied? And after the weekend, so many things to talk about on the way into school on Monday?

Not just kids either. As adults, we talked to each other over the garden fence, on the street, in the pub, in the shops. We exchanged pleasantries and gossip with the shopkeeper, the landlord, the er-by. Everybody knew everybody else, and if that elderly gentleman hadn’t been seen since yesterday, someone would be sure to mention it, and he would be visited to make sure everything was alright.

We talked, we exchanged information, we knew what was going on in our own small world, never mind countries on the other side of the globe.

Now, however, you don’t talk over the fence and indeed the chances are that you don’t know your neighbours up and down the road as your parents would have done.

Shopping today is done in huge, anonymous supermarkets and if you prefer, you can even check out your purchases yourself, without having to utter a word to anyone.

Oh what have we lost? And where are we going?

Catherine Mahon Buckley is worried too. She is genuinely of the opinion that we are overloading our minds in today’s world of instant news, instant communication, and leaving no time for reflection or thought.

“I think that is very dangerous for our brains. I think they are being overworked,” she adds. “The brain doesn’t need to be stimulated morning, noon and night. You need time to think about what you’ve learned, reflect on it, and then finally act on that information, instead of reacting instantly to a headline that might not even be true.”

Catherine herself refuses to do online meetings, “because we are looking at a wall, a screen, with nothing being returned to us. It’s that interaction in a real get-together, that hand movement, even that shuffle in the chair, which will tell you something hasn’t got across, or there is another issue which needs to be considered.

I always prefer one to one meetings, and get far more done than sending 20 emails in half an hour.

We do urgently need to get a major balance in our lives, stresses Catherine. “If we don’t put that balance on it, we’re going to be a computerised people, like a robot.

“I also think we need to teach our young people resilience, and you can’t do that on a computer. They need to express their feelings to you and share their fears, their anxieties, their laughter - all these emotions that we need to develop strongly. You can’t do that with technology, you do it by being with people and sharing experiences.”

Catherine even advocates that phones should not be in kids’ bedrooms when they go to sleep at night. 

“They should not be on them all the time. It’s an addiction and a dangerous one. The phone has become the person and that’s a sad way to live.”

Well, coincidentally we met a lady the other day who looks after her young grandchildren from time to time, and she told us that at her house mobiles are forbidden. They are taken away when the children arrive, and switched off until it’s time to go home.

At first they complained, but then they rediscovered the fun of playing games together, running round the garden, talking to each other and to me. Every grandparent should do that!

Yes, playing games together. those times? We asked you about that too last week, and got a lovely reply from Mícheál Kenefick who grew up in Whitegate.

“Isn’t it strange that, by the standards of today’s children, we had nothing in the 1950s and yet we didn’t have a second to spare and we didn’t know that there was a word in the dictionary that spelled boredom.

“And in an extraordinary coincidence, I have no sooner written the above few lines when I see Michelle Obama on the telly with a hula-hoop and a skipping rope, so we might see them both in the village again soon and that would be great - the hula hoop and skipping rope that is, Michelle would be the icing on the cáca milish!”

Micheál adds: “The parish here today has facilities second to none in the world, provided both by man and by The Lord. The most wonderful of the natural facilities is what I call the 3000 mile swimming pool on our doorstep.

“My only recollection of a ’50s arena was Furney’s field, where I was at a hurling match between Whitegate and to the best of my recall Brooklodge. As a hurling entity, Whitegate didn’t last long. Maybe not even a season.

“In any event, on that particular day, someone having scored a point, the sliotar was lost in the high grass behind the goals but was found by me the following day.

To give one an idea of the times, a sliotar was like gold dust in those days, so much so that when the late Syd Godfrey heard of my discovery, he offered me ten 64-pagers for it.

“Ten 64-pagers (do you them?) was close enough to the Lotto in the early ’50s, so Syd got the sliotar and to be fair would make a lot better use of it than yours truly.”

For any reader too young to the 64-pagers, they were very popular and reasonably inexpensive ways of getting your reading fix. Sometimes abridged versions of classics, sometimes pictorial stories of great heroes like Davy Crockett or Roy Rogers, they were octavo- sized, lightweight, paperback, easy to tuck into a pocket, and usually very tattered from being read by many before you got them. Heck, does anybody swap books or comics any more?

But back to Mícheál’s memories. “Today, with facilities to cater for every age and taste, I still regularly hear young folk saying they are bored as ‘there is nothing to do’.

“ittedly, modern technology makes things redundant quickly (perhaps intentionally), but when we were young, games and pastimes lasted until a new fad hit the streets.

We spent endless hours playing marbles on the footpath - plain ones had to hit coloured ones three times and a coloured one had to hit a pulker three, times etc.. I have forgotten how many times a taw would have to hit a pulker but it must have been in the hundreds as we had no meas on taws.

“Joe Spicer was the best of us, and must at one stage have had at least a million of all shapes, sizes and colours.

“Imagine my surprise recently, while walking to Mass in a little village in the mountains in Spain, I saw two little boys playing marbles.

“I’m not sure how long the hula-hoop lasted but it certainly remained long enough for every child in the parish of a certain vintage to have one, and of course we thought we were the bees’ knees, even though we must have looked a sight.

“If I can find one, I will have a go again, but definitely in private.”

Micheál adds: “We played Cowboys and Indians from our camps in the three local woods - Day’s, The Island, and the Long Wood, with makeshift bows and arrows. We had an odd revolver and holster that someone might have got for Christmas and we used our hurleys for rifles.

“Bang!”

“ You’re dead!”

“ I’m not!”

“ You missed!”

A skipping rope would make occasional appearances on the street - a big one so that multi-skippers could be ‘in’ at the one time.

“Girls always seemed to be in the majority at the skipping and were better than the boys. I am beginning to wonder if they deliberately tripped us to get us out. Must ask Nuala and she might own up. Even when there were a few boys around, the rhyme still was:

“All in together girls

Never mind the weather girls

When I count your birthday

Please jump out.

January, February…. Etc”

“The girls were also better at a game of throwing a ball against a wall and performing a variety of movements while the ball was in flight before catching it. If the ball was dropped, they had to start all over again.

“Planey------- Play n ee

Clappy ------Cla ap ee

Roly---------Ro oll ee

Poly--------Po oll ee

A step in the wood,

A run in the wood,

A jellybag,

And a basketball!”

“I have seen an occasional yo-yo over the years but never like the craze when we were kids. You couldn’t walk up the street without seeing yo-yos of all colours spinning in all directions.

“Strangely enough, even in the modern world I have still to find a yo-yo with a string that doesn’t break. I find that a bit odd!”

Wonderful memories of a happy, normal childhood, Mícheál, when the day was never long enough for all the things you wanted to do.

Those skipping and ball bouncing chants are fascinating too - there were so many of them, familiar to every kid then, but now almost forgotten.

Can any reader some of those from your own childhood?

“Wallflower, wallflower, growing up so high, high, high”

or “Here comes Mrs Macaroni”?

Do let us know the games you played in childhood. Email [email protected] or leave a comment on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/echolivecork.