In the Building Next Door
opies-skipping
One of the nice things about travel, and I suppose about life in general if one is willing to play along, is how even inconveniences and detours can yield little perks and surprises. When we arrived in Oxford, the usual room we rent was not available, and our hosts apologetically escorted us to a building next door where they had arranged for us to stay instead. The owner of the building didn't live there, but there was a tenant in residence, a pleasant young man named Joel who taught at one of the local colleges, and so we would have a flatmate. I invented a secret backstory for Joel; making up stories about people is something I've been doing since childhood.
Joel really did have a mass of curly dark hair, a girlfriend in Italy, and a motorcycle. These are the facts. Sometimes we would cross paths with him in the kitchen area as he finished his tea and dashed out the door, and occasionally we would hear him in the front room playing his guitar, but mostly Joel was gone, and that's as far as he figures into this blog post. (I took the picture above of a few of his defining artifacts.)
Still, the unexpected relocation was like a flashback to student days in the 1970s, when you'd rent a cheap room in a big old house with just a mattress and a beat up chest of drawers to call your own, maybe an Indian print bedspread for decor, and of course a shared bathroom and a kitchen stocked with motley stuff of ambiguous ownership and uncertain identity. In the cupboards here in our temporary flat there were brown paper bags with bulk tea and and unfamiliar spices, jars of crystallized honey and instant coffee, and open packages of dried apricots, ramen noodles, and dusty looking muesli. It even smelled like the 1970s: some vague essence of cannabis, patchouli oil, and laundry detergent.
"Well, here we are, being young again," I thought, and pretended it were so. (Making believe is another skill I honed in childhood.)
Two flights of creaky stairs led to the attic room that was our base, but there were bookcases all along the way, and they were filled with an impressive assortment of reading material. They were the kinds of books an academic would have purchased for classes: text books on art history and design, esoteric discussions of philosophy, hardbound volumes about science and poetry. It would be hard for me to generalize what exactly was the owner's special interest, but I surmised that the books of more than one owner and field of study had been pooled here.
A title caught my eye: Children's Games in Street and Playground by Peter and Iona Opie. I picked it up, and browsed it over the course of a few evenings. That's all. But it was fascinating. How did I not know about the work of the Opies? They were a husband and wife team of folklorists whose particular interest was in the play of school age children (mostly in the United Kingdom). They weren't interested in formal games and sports supervised by parents or teachers but rather in "the rough-and-tumble games for which nothing is needed but the players themselves."
They recorded the rhymes, chants, and folk terms that accompany play, described the games that they observed, in all their variety and disorderliness, and organized them in categories such as chasing and catching, seeking, hunting, racing, dueling, exerting, daring, guessing, acting and pretending. They discussed the concepts of designating someone as "it", of declaring certain materials or boundaries as "safe", and the play-acting of good versus evil dramas, all of which are universal.
I recognized many of these games and rituals from my own 1950s childhood in Brooklyn. (And the settings were wherever we happened to be.) This kind of play hones resourcefulness, imagination, the ability to solve problems, entertain oneself, and get along with peers.By the 1960s concerns were already emerging about children becoming too addicted to spectator amusements and reliance on adults for materials, ideas, and oversight. The issue is even more extreme in today's era of helicopter parenting, computer games and parental desire to fill kids' days with organized activities. The Opies pointed out that children are quite capable of self-organization and that these kinds of child-led games are essential to their development.
"However much children may need looking after," they wrote, "they are also people going about their own business within their own society." I fully agree. The Opie book led me not only on a journey into nostalgia but also, in the words of one Guardian reviewer, "into a sharper recollection of the un-cramped imagination and brilliant nightmare of childhood." Well said. We need to have more faith in kids.
Anyway, here I am, still playing and pretending, and I enjoyed this particular little detour so much that I when I came back home I did a bit more searching and googling about childhood games, rhymes, and songs, and the work of the Opies in general. I was delighted to discover this recording of children in England demonstrating their songs and discussing playground games with Ione Opie. There's something so sing-song-ingly familiar about it.