Free A 1950s Childhood by Paul Feeney

continue hopping through the hopscotch, landing on one leg in single squares and two legs in double squares. At the end you would turn around and make your way back down through the hopscotch until you reached the square number ‘two’. You would then bend down and pick up the stone from square number ‘one’, hop into square ‘one’ and back to the start again. You then threw the stone into square number ‘two’ and repeated the hopping process as beforeonly this time hopping over square number ‘two’ as you made your way through the hopscotch. You repeated this through all the numbered squares, always hopping over the square with the stone in it. A player was deemed to be out if the stone failed to land within the lines of the correct square, he or she stepped into the square where the stone was, put two feet down in a single box, stepped on any of the chalked lines, or lost his or her balance while bending over to pick up the stone. If you managed to complete the whole hopscotch successfully then you hopped through thewhole hopscotch again without a stone in any box, and out the top of the hopscotch to finish.
    Girls and boys each had their own preferred ‘must-read’ comics and annuals.
    Hula hoop: The hula hoop craze hit Britain in 1958 with the arrival of the American Wham-O toy company’s lightweight tubular plastic hoop, made from a recently invented durable plastic, and called the hula hoop. It was a toy hoop that you twirled around your waist, limbs or neck for as long as possible, and you had competitions between friends to see who could keep it going for the longest time. It was most popular with the girls, and grown-up women also enjoyed it as a way to keep fit. It was a short-lived craze that only lasted for a few months. Wham-O relaunched the hula hoop in the late 1960s.
    Jacks: This game was very similar to Five Stones except it was played using a small bouncy rubber ball or a table tennis ball, and between five and ten small stones. You would bounce the ball once and pick up stones, catching the ball before it bounced again. As with Five Stones, you played ‘onesies’, ‘twosies’, ‘threesies’, ‘foursies’, ‘fifesies’, ‘sixies’ etc., but again, there were several versions to the game.
    Kiss Chase: There never seemed to be any rules to this ‘it’ game. Girls chased after boys to kiss them, and the boys ran away. If the girls caught a boy and kissed him then he would be ‘it’ and he would have to chase the girls for a kiss, but it never seemed to happen like that. The boys were always running away – although they did slow down a bit when they got to about ten or eleven years old!
    Knock Down Ginger: A game that was mainly played after dark and could get you into serious trouble with your mum and dad. In its simplest form, you knocked on street doors and ran away without being seen. Everyone hadknockers on their street doors in the 1950s. More advanced players would quietly tie cotton to a street door knocker and then reel the cotton out to the other side of the street, where you would hide and then pull the cotton until it broke, thus lifting the knocker and dropping it back in place to create a loud knock on the door. Sometimes you would do three or four knockers at the same time, but that was risky because there was more of a chance that one of the victims might come out and chase after you.
    Leapfrog: Players vaulted over each other’s stooped backs. There could be any number of players. The first player stooped and the second player vaulted over him or her. On landing, that player also stooped, a few feet in front of the first stooped player. Then the third player vaulted over each of the two stooped players. The game continued like this with each player joining the line of stooped players. Once all of the players were stooped then the first player stood up and vaulted over all of the other players, and so on.
    Lolly Sticks: Played with a bunch of used flat wooden