Freedom to Play: We Made Our Own Fun

PLAYING MARBLES THE ST. JOHN’S WAY

metal discs at pieces of paper stuck in the ground. On Sunday there was a sermon by Ralph Connor in the morning. That afternoon there was an open-air concert of singing, piping, and marching. On Monday there were all kinds of athletic sports, including races—both dashes and long distance—pole vaulting, high jump, broad jump, javelin throw, and piping and dancing. I would like to hear from members in the north or anywhere. PLAYING MARBLES THE ST. JOHN’S WAY Helen Porter, Below the Bridge: Memories of the South Side of St. John’s (St. John’s: Breakwater Press, 1979). Published with the permission of Breakwater Press. Copyright the author. Helen Porter recalls playing marbles South Side style. Somebody once defined heaven as “one eternal summer day.” I suppose the summers I spent on the South Side were no different from Newfoundland summers generally—short, with plenty of rain and cool weather, and the occasional hot sunny day. But in my memory that’s not the way they were at all. Summer was very long, something like a rainbow that stretched from school closing in June to that distant day in September when it would open again. And the pot of gold wasn’t at the end of it but had been emptied out and distributed throughout the seventy or eighty days of glorious freedom. I know there must have been summer days when we were bored silly, when we quarrelled and cried and sulked. But like the pains of childbirth, those days are quickly forgotten, at least by the conscious mind. The gold shines brightly, as gold should, and as the years pass it becomes even more lustrous. We prepared for summer long before school closed. On the first sunny day in March the marbles came out and though the wind blew bitterly and our hands were numb and blue with cold, gloves were discarded and often lost. If there was any strength at all in the sun’s rays, coats and caps were tossed in a pile on a fence or rail. “The mot is alive,” someone would shout Playing Is Playing Games 133 even as somebody else was shouting “The mot is dead.” I tried in vain to discover the origin of the word “mot,” and I don’t even know if I’m spelling it correctly. It is, of course, the small round hole, dug first with the heel and then smoothed out with the fingers, toward which the small clay marbles are thrown or rolled, and its life or death status makes a great deal of difference to the game, for if the mot is dead the marbles that roll into it are worthless for points, while if it lives it can add greatly to the score. Later on the drab little clay marbles were replaced by dazzling glass alleys, which were still being used the last time I checked out a game. We also liked to get hold of little shiny metal ball bearings. We called them ballbearions, and like the more exotic glass ones, they were always in great demand. If you managed to win some at a mot game or at “Chip, chip, how many” your partner would often decide that you really hadn’t been playing for keeps. CHILDHOOD GAMES IN THE YUKON IN THE 1930S Hugh was eight and Jim was four when the McCullum family left Dawson City for the “outside.” Hugh recalls: As a child in the Yukon in the 1930s it seems we were much the same as other kids of that period. There wasn’t much money, especially on a missionary’s salary, and what toys we got usually came via relatives in B.C. and Ontario. I seem to recall Christmas being a time when these items arrived, some of them repaired castoffs from cousins from somewhat wealthier families. Nonetheless, they were exciting to us. What they were I don’t remember well, but they included small wagons and trucks, definitely no guns or weapons of any kind. There was no television, and only the occasional static-filled shortwave radio which Dad listened to intently. One recollection still vivid some 60 years later is hearing Adolph Hitler (in German , I presume) ranting and raving and my Father saying some134 Freedom to Play ...