hi mrs. woods, is woodsy coming out to play?

A huge difference between our Sixties childhoods and now is that we played out as kids back then. 

Kids these days stay indoors a lot usually spending hours on Xboxes and watching other kids on You Tube on their Xboxes!

So what did we do back then that drew us into the uncivilised, rampant world outside the front door, where foul-mouthed teenagers smoked on every dark corner and phone boxes were always full of giggling girls calling someone called Gary?

Well besides all the usual stuff like pushbikes, football, girls [and boys] and getting away from our folks, there was an absolute load of games. These I suspect were created and perfected in post-war streets in the Fifties, when even bomb-sites were a cool playground.

The most popular non-sport street game we played as kids was kick the can. This was basically hide and seek with a football. The kicker - seeker would boot the ball as far as he could and whilst retrieving it everyone else would hide somewhere in the street nearby. 

This was particularly effective if the ball was kicked down a ginnel as it acted like a sort of ball chute going nice and straight down the whole long alley. The hiders would leap into back yards, drop behind hedges and generally disappear. 

If found you had to beat the kicker to the stationary ball [it was originally a can in tougher times]. This often involved rough and tumbles on the way. To beat the kicker overall you had to remain hidden and stay hidden till tea-time or till everyone had given up. I have a feeling that the found could also look for the hidden and speed things up but my memory is a little rusty ... like a can!

Another popular game was tig or It. This was essentially a tribal rite whereby everyone ran in a wild frenzy whilst the chosen one would try to touch or tig you at which point you became it, it being the chosen one. If you could dodge like a cheetah then you were never it. It was all a good excuse for some serious running round and screaming!

Some grassy lawn provided further fun and one game I played a lot was stretch. Stretch was Twister with a knife. Any knife would do as long as it could be thrown into the ground. Once stuck you had to stretch with your foot to that point. The widest stretch won. Rudolph Nureyev would have been good at stretch!

The provision of an outdoor brick wall afforded even more excitement as you could play pitch and toss. This was a form of junior gambling, which required a skill set honed whilst skimming stones at the seaside the previous summer. To win you had to pitch a penny towards the wall. If it landed touching the wall you were on to win. If, however, another pitcher landed his or her penny on top then he was winning. It went on pitching and tossing until everyone had played. The closest to the wall won. The high point of this game, its zenith, its dim mak was to land a penny stood upright against the wall. Once achieved you were more or less immortal for the rest of the day!

There were so many other things we did playing out back then. Can you remember what you did?