Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs by Norman Jacobs Page B

Peter’s reputation as a grown-up ‘man of the world’.
    Johnnie Walker was a very quiet lad and, although he enjoyed playing football and cricket with us, he always seemed happier when we decided to settle for a board game or a game of marbles – something less energetic anyway.
    As with all the others, I got on well with Howard Bradbury, but he was also a rival of mine when it came to running. We were both fast runners and often raced each other on the fields after school and in the holidays. But the real test came with the School Sports Day every year. This took place on Millfields atthe back of my house so I was always on home ground. There were four houses at school, Red, Yellow, Green and Blue, and we used to compete against each other in various events such as running, jumping and throwing to win individual prizes and the overall team prize. Those were the days when there was proper competitive sport in schools, none of this non-competitive stuff they have these days to spare the losers’ feelings. As a fast sprinter, I was always entered into the 50 Yards for my team, the Reds. In each of the four years I was in Junior School, the 50 Yards came down to a race between Howard, who was in the Blue Team, Patrick McConnell, Yellow, and David Brown and me for the Reds. We were the first four every year. Patrick was always the one to beat and he won the race three times, his only loss being to David. Second, third and fourth varied and I did manage second on a couple of occasions. Even if I couldn’t win, it always gave me a great sense of satisfaction to be able to beat Howard.
    The seven of us used to play together at playtime, not without any others, but always together. The games we used to play included football, Cowboys and Indians and ‘War’. The Junior School playground was divided into two sections, one for the boys and one for the girls, as presumably it was felt that the boys would play too rough for the girls. The girls’ playground was behind a wall but there was an opening through which we could see them playing.
    Mostly we weren’t interested in what they were doing as it seemed to consist mainly of ‘cissy’ skipping games or Hopscotch. But sometimes they played at handstands against the wall, and being upside down, of course, meant that their dresses droppeddown over their heads to expose their knickers. When this happened there would usually be a crowd, particularly of the older boys, round the opening, trying to get a look. Why they bothered to do this was a bit of a mystery to me as we used to do P.E. together in our normal mixed class and saw the girls in their vests and knickers then anyway.
    Meanwhile, back in the boys’ playground, at the beginning of playtime, two boys would quite often get together, link arms and walk round the playground chanting rhythmically, ‘Who wants to play Cowboys and Indians?’ (Or whatever it was they wanted to play.) If you wanted to play, you’d link arms and this would go on until there were enough boys linked up to make a decent game. Sometimes there could be as many as ten or twelve boys walking through the playground in a line, chanting. The game would then commence. If it was Cowboys and Indians, you would be given the choice of which side you wanted to be on but as nearly everyone wanted to be a cowboy there was always a certain amount of coercion on the part of bigger and stronger boys to make sure others ‘volunteered’ to be Indians. The game then proceeded with everyone using their fingers as guns, pointing the index and middle fingers and making a shooting noise, which was a sort of a guttural ‘K-K’ sound. One of our teachers once said to us, ‘Why don’t you say “bang” instead of making that funny noise?’ We thought this was a remarkably silly thing to say as everyone knew that guns went K-K, not bang. When you fired at someone, they were supposed to die,