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Board with games: when childhood was slow

I’ve wondered, recently, what on Earth I did with my time when I was a little child.

Seeing the manic smorgasbord of potential entertainment options for the very young these days makes me suppose my own distant early childhood must have been exceedingly dull by comparison. There was no internet, no instant access to streaming videos on mobile phones and way fewer toys than are around today. Television turned up in our family when I was about four or five, but its offerings for children were limited and my parents rationed it – at first, anyway.

What toys I had were generally pretty unsophisticated. Building blocks of various sorts I remember, supplemented by plastic bits and bobs from cereal packets. I remember some plastic clowns whose arms, legs and heads interlocked in a variety of ways to form circles and suchlike – at least they did until they were chewed to the point where they no longer interlocked. I remember some marbles and some of those green plastic soldiers and perhaps a capgun and a battered die-cast toy truck or two. That was about it, I think.

By the time I got to seven or eight years old and my parents had a bit more money then things got busier. I got Lego, for a start. In those days Lego didn’t seem to have much readymade stuff: you built it yourself from the basics. Later I was given the Lego motor and gears and so on, so I could make windmills and cars and whatnot with wheels that turned. And I got a microscope. And an electronics kit. And an optics kit. But that was all later.

The earliest toy I remember getting excited about was a tinplate talking robot from Japan. My grandmother gave that to me, and I named him Max. He had a yellow button on his belly that, when you pushed it, produced one of a number of recordings. I remember him saying “I am a mighty man with one thousand horsepower of energy inside of me. Do you get me now?” and also: “I’m leaving now for the outer limits boys, goodbye, see you again”. The rest is forgotten. Max was involved in number of Lego-related adventures that I can no longer recall. I’ve often wanted to see Max again, but robots like him are valuable now and I can’t justify forking out that kind of cash. He wouldn’t be my Max anyway.

My grandmother, bless her heart and may she rest in peace, was a bit clueless when it came to gifts. She was a keen gift-giver but I think her selections were often a bit random. Books from Nanna might be about anything from bushrangers to motor-racing or cattle-droving. Didn’t matter. I was so hungry for reading matter that I read them all from cover to cover, again and again. I recollect the time she got me a book entitled “Grand Prix”. I called out to my parents to see this great book, with a title that I innocently pronounced phonetically. I wondered what the odd expressions on their faces signified, as they patiently told me the proper pronunciation. Another time Nanna – a staunch churchgoer and Salvation Army veteran – gave me a Ouija board. I suppose she thought it was a fun board game. I forced my parents to hold a couple of seances with me, but I don’t think anything spooky happened.

One way I know I whiled away many hours of my early childhood was with board games. My favourites – because I could play them by myself – were the simplest kind, where you moved a counter along a numbered path on the basis of the roll of a die. Different spaces had different advice or consequences that affected your progress to the end of the game. Although technically these games were designed for more than one player I seldom had a playmate available so it was me against myself. I cheated atrociously, of course.

Snakes and Ladders is a classic example of the kind of game I mean. I’ve written about it here.

Games of this sort were common because they were so cheap to make. Those awful Santa stockings we used to get at Christmas, with a selection of rubbishy novelties and a bad comic or two, often had an extremely cheap little “board” game, usually on flimsy paper.

The Anglo-French Channel swimming contest board game: from a dodgy Santa stocking

Many of the annual-type children’s books had games in them too, printed across a pair of pages. My favourite one of these – in an old book my father had owned when he was a boy – was called “Red Jake’s Treasure”. Even now it takes me back to those times when, playing against myselves, I vividly imagined jungle adventures as I rolled the die and slyly cheated myselves on the way to the treasure at the end of the twisted trails.

Red Jake’s Treasure. It’s more or less Snakes and Ladders, when you think about it

These days I keep an eye out for interesting old board games, simply for the fun of it. Here are some I’ve gathered over the years.

Sir Ross Smith Aeroplane Race Game. I actually had a plastic model of Ross and Keith Smith’s Vickers Vimy, but my brother accidentally jumped on it.

Who knew a collapsed wing would merely send an aircraft back to the depot, or that you had to descend for water?

The ultimate game of chance.

This one’s a commercial job, advertising the wonders of Gibbs’ dental care products. The Gibbs Fairy just wants you to reach the land of Health and Happiness. We must protect our Ivory Castles.

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