Freedom to Play: We Made Our Own Fun

THROUGH THE EYES OF A NEWCOMER

the Mounties, given my inside track to them, and some of my greatest childhood glory had to do with being occasionally driven to school by my Dad in a police car, even more occasionally when he had his red serge on. The more kids who saw me the better! My parents were always keen card players, mainly of bridge, but they liked other games as well, and so my brother and I early on developed a taste for board games of all kinds, too. Snakes and ladders was a favourite, any number of versions of rummy and Snap, War, and solitaire were also popular. Chinese checkers and regular checkers were also popular in our house. In Grade 3 I had a teacher who encouraged us to write stories , and from that year on I always had some kind of writing project. By the time I was in Grade 5 and in that horsey phase many girls, at least in Alberta, seem to go through, I was writing a novel, featuring a girl and a horse naturally. Before that I wrote 2-3 page stories, usually based on a picture from a magazine. One story I remember writing in Grade 3 class, not based on a picture, was the Easter story as I understood it. I got it more or less right, but did sound a note of scepticism at the end by concluding that Jesus said he’d come again, but he didn’t say when. I remember being quite puzzled by that at the time, and obviously needed more certainty about his return that seemed to be given in the Bible. THROUGH THE EYES OF A NEWCOMER Tony Plomp shares his impressions of Canadian games. I grew up as a child in Holland in the 1940s and came to Canada with my parents in 1951. For children of my generation and circumstances (sports activities were not emphasized in my family ), soccer (voetbal) was the prime competitive sport. We played it in school during recess and lunch-breaks on our own with friends. The schools I attended during and after the Second World War had no gymnasiums or elaborate sports facilities and physical education as we know it in Canada was not part of my Playing Is Playing When Shared 103 schooling. We made our own fun, riding around in “cars” built by our fathers, cruising on our bicycles to school and on selfmotivated trips into the country-side and, during the winter, skating on the canals. There was a small lake near where we lived and my friends and I would sometimes rent a canoe or rowboat. Of course, in summer we swam, again in a tiny lake nearby, and, sometimes in fall and winter in public facilities. We also organized ourselves into “armies” and went about “conquering ” various plots of undeveloped land north of our street. These battles did get bloody at times! When I came to Canada I found myself as the proverbial “fish out of water.” For one thing, physical education was part of the school curriculum and with it pressure from stern machotype male teachers to perform. I always found myself inadequate before such types who seemed to devalue anyone who did not match their expectations. For another, I found myself playing sports about which I knew nothing, such as baseball. Although I eventually learned some of the rules of the game and participated as necessary, it never enthused me. I found it a dull and lifeless kind of sport perhaps, in part, because I found it difficult to connect the bat to the ball! Where was “voetbal” (soccer)? People enthused about “football” which seemed to us a brutish kind of sport in which apparently the aim of the game was to injure your opponents and put them out of commission. Hockey was not a sport known to me, but I came to like watching it most because it seemed clear and clean and fast. It was like voetbal on ice! Another sport that I had never encountered was lacrosse, which in my young immigrant days seemed more popular than today. I never played it but my future brother-in-law seemed heavily involved in it for a time. Basketball was also mostly foreign to me although I vaguely recall playing a game which I think was called “hoepbal.” I remember that in Holland my father, who was manager of the Dutch office of Canadian Pacific Railways and Steamships, had “connections” which in 1950 included...