Relating stories

It’s late at night and I’m just leaving for home. It’s not children I’m working with in this instance but young adults with learning difficulties. I have a conversation with one young man: we’ve seen each other around and somewhat kept our distances. We say goodbye and he asks me to shake hands with the various toys he’s brought outside, and then I shake hands with him. I tell him I’ll see him tomorrow. It’s tomorrow and, again towards the end of the day, I see him going out. I’m looking out through the window and he makes a deliberate point of showing me the toy he’s taking out. Ten seconds later, and for a fraction of a second before he leaves — by way of the slight opening in the doorway — he sticks his tongue out at me.

It is a moment in which I instantly think: here is play. It’s also a moment in which I think that this is about the formation of relationship making. I write this story because of continuing thoughts on the nature of connections between people. This story is about two adults, both of whom seem to understand play in various ways; I use it to form a springboard into more writing on relationships between adults and children. Or, rather than this word ‘relationship’, as I was advised by a very good friend a very long time ago, shouldn’t we be thinking more about the idea of ‘relating’?

This post isn’t specifically about playwork thinking, though of course there will be links into it. This post concerns relating and play just ‘out there’. That said, it’s worth taking a quick poke around some playwork thinking. For a long time I was uncomfortable about this idea of the ‘phantom playworker’ (he or she who pretty much stays in the background and isn’t really noticed). In my experience, children could generally communicate with adults without the latter necessarily upsetting their play. Maybe I wasn’t doing playwork right? I don’t know. I just know that the idea didn’t always tally with my experience. I read more, met more people engaged in the practice, read more again, talked more, etc. I understood more. I got sucked into playwork. I couldn’t see the wood for the trees.

I got to thinking more about it all and so I write how it is ‘out there’. I started wondering if all the literature on playwork wasn’t missing something kind of important; that is, yes, let’s consider the play itself, and the space, and the playing children, and even the playing child . . . but what about considering the child as an individual? What about considering how this individual playworker relates with this individual child?

Co-incidentally, and annoyingly, this thought has popped up — in passing — even just this morning in my inbox. In an e-zine on playwork matters, the editor has suggested that play is often seen as more important than the child. OK, so maybe there’s a point to be had there. However, the editorial also includes the suggestion that maybe the child at play shouldn’t be what’s focused on; that is, the adults who are concerned with play should be worked with instead. At least I think that this is what it’s trying to say.

I haven’t formed an opinion yet on these thoughts. I’m still concerned with relating. Even the occupational standards in playwork (which learners for qualifications are assessed by) talk about developing and maintaining relationships with children and young people. So, on the one hand we’ve got some playwork writers who advocate a stand-off approach, and on the other hand we’ve got course learners expected to develop a good rapport with children, help them to respect other people’s feelings, and help them understand about positive relationships with others.

We need to cut to the chase: without relating we live in individual caves. Children can be very social creatures, and they can also be incredibly intuitive and astute. In our predominately ‘western/first world’ ways of thinking, children often get isolated from adults’ thinking processes. What the individual and particular child has to offer can be ignored. In other cultures, the connection between adult and child is much stronger (according to studies I’ve read on some indigenous tribal communities, Hispanic families, etc).

I have many stories I can tell (as all of us who’ve worked with children no doubt have). Arthur highlighted to me recently about the importance of titles for stories: so my working title for the following story is Show Me the Money. I will always remember this story because it still makes me laugh with a sort of gallows humour. A while ago I was visiting a holiday playscheme. It wasn’t a very popular scheme and, in fact, only a handful of children were in that day (all sat around a table colouring in ‘worksheets’, or whatever they were). It was a horrible windowless room. I knew one of the older girls from when she used to attend the schemes I worked at in the same town. I also knew this girl, Lizzy, when she was a lot younger: she was the one who was always climbing over the seats on the minibus when we parked up, banging the ceiling, and throwing things around when we were in the play setting. Then she got doped up and that sucked the play life out of her. Lizzy sat, doped up (I could tell), colouring in dutifully. She looked up at a member of staff at the playscheme I was visiting and asked him matter-of-factly: ‘Why do you work here? Is it because of the money?’

She said exactly what I wanted to say because later, when I was talking with him and his colleagues away from the children, he told me that he thought that children should basically be instructed on how to respect adults (i.e. him) and if they didn’t it would end in social meltdown all round! Lizzy, I still salute you!

This is, of course, also about anti-relating, as it were. If we bother to consider the individual child, what might we see? Here are some more stories (because there are many):
 
The Story of Words and No Words

A very long time ago, maybe twenty years ago or more now, I sat on the step of the hall with Pippa, who was about five at the time. It was a Saturday morning. We watched the way of the world and she told me she was ‘all roasting hot, like a chicken’! Later, I was still sat there, though I don’t recall what else was going on. Pippa passed by, giving me a look (summing up her approximation of my mood, I suppose), gave me a quick hug, and off she went.
 
The Story of Facts and Bees

Not so far back, but still a long time ago, Tom (ten years old) sat with me and told me what it felt like to be in his head. He had a condition that made him get very angry very quickly, almost without warning. Or rather, as Tom explained it eloquently: ‘It’s like my head is full of bees and I can’t get them out.’ He would go through his necessary frustrations, fighting it all the way, grabbing hold of my hand or arm, then when it was over he would sit down, breathe, and go on to recite all the FA Cup winners for the past eighty years or so, or other amazing football trivia. Tom was amazing in many ways.
 
The Story of the Return of the Sith

At White City adventure playground in London, one of the children recently took to calling me Dooku (after Count Dooku, apparently, from Star Wars!) I don’t know why. The last time I was there, each day we prepared to open the gates for the afternoon session and I would hear the playful teasing of ‘Come on, Dooku. Open up.’ During the session, wandering round, I might get sucked into a game of football by hearing something like ‘Oh, it’s Dooku on the wing, great pass out, ping it back in, Dooku . . .’ I’m thinking ahead in this story: I fully expect the full Dooku treatment the next time I’m there. (It makes a change from having conversations about ‘are you a boy or a girl?’ — I have long hair, you see! — or the teenage observation of how I look like Jesus, or — on one occasion — a group of younger children asked me to role play being ‘Bad Jesus’, which I still can’t fully get my head around!)

It’s relating that marks us out as important to one another, and play feeds right into that whole scheme of things. That one person can ‘see’ another by way of playful interactions is something special. Better a world of truly playful connections (between any adults, or between adults and children), no matter how fleeting, than the ego-political posturing and games we see around us all the time in the adult world.
 
 

Heretical speculation about some children’s play wishes: from adulteration to a fusion of play

Following on from the thinking in my previous post on the observation of children’s play, the playwork term ‘adulteration’ is up for further consideration here. It’s often seen as a rather odd idea by playwork learners! Despite its meaning of ‘making impure’ it is, after all, a word confused with other areas of some people’s lives in relation to being unfaithful to a spouse! This type of adulteration, in playwork, isn’t the same kind (although, thinking about it, it does contain a certain unfaithfulness: that is, not being faithful to children’s play).

Two strands of recent thinking and experience lead me along this reflection this week: a recent teaching session in which I attempted to differentiate between the playwork terms ‘annihilation’ and ‘adulteration’ (which I’ll come to shortly), and consideration of blog- and social media material I’ve read where the writers seem to get quite excited about play or being involved in play.

It is my experience that playwork learners often confuse the terms ‘annihilation’ and ‘adulteration’. Why do they have to be such stupid words? is a common sentiment I hear! To which I often reply: ‘I didn’t write this stuff; take it up with Sturrock and Else.’ So, here are a couple of ways of explaining the terms from those authors (anyone further interested should go to Ludemos, which is the best place to find out information on matters of psycholudics, play cycle, and such terms as I’m addressing in this post):

Play annihilation is the end of the play for the child at that time . . . when [the play] has no more meaning for the child, when the child has got whatever they were looking for from the play experience.

Adulteration (from the Colorado Paper, 1998, by Gordon Sturrock and Perry Else): There is a danger that the play aims and objects of the children become contaminated by either the wishes of the adult in an urge to ‘teach’ or ‘educate’, simply to dominate, or by the worker’s own unplayed out material.

In my previous post I touched on this idea of ‘unplayed out material’. That we, as adults, effectively haven’t finished playing the things we played as a child, or that we’re compensating now for play we didn’t do, might come as something of an eye opener to some of us. After all, adults don’t play, do they? Adults get on with life, and children play. No, of course not. Of course adults still play. We go to the pub, play sports, tell jokes, dance, pull faces, etc., etc. We play. I’m still wondering if this means we’ve all got unplayed out material in us. If that’s true, if we’re invited into children’s play, maybe we can’t help but adulterate that play with our own play drives.

I’ve been reading various blog- and social media material recently and I know that those writers are on the same general wavelength as me in my approach to children’s play (because I know a lot of those writers anyway); however, I do wonder sometimes if the observation of children’s play, the involvement of adults in the child’s play, isn’t verging more towards being about the buzz the adult gets out of it all. My fellow playworkers, don’t get me wrong here: you are appreciated, and I get a buzz from play too. This is it though: our own ‘unplayed out material’ can be appeased in these ways of involvement in the play of children.

Is that play-healthy for the children? I mean, sure they’ll often let us know in no uncertain terms if we’re not wanted or needed, but when we are accepted into the play, does the whole buzz of play swing our way? We’ve all been there, let’s be honest, when we’re in the play and we have an idea of how things can shift direction, and we say it (as in, ‘I know, what if we try this . . .?’), and the child accepts, and we get the stuff, and we play the play, and the child follows along, and we have another idea, and before long the child moves on to something else . . .

Sometimes, in these ways of playing, the child can get the buzz too. All seems fine. Yet this is what I mean when I ask if it’s play-healthy: it’s not so easy to differentiate if you’re taking over the play or not if the child is buzzing along with it too. It’s worth repeating again and again that children’s play is not about you. Your play is your play . . .

Children do often invite (cue) the adult into play though, right? Children do often seem to very much want the adult to be involved. This is a really moot point for some playwork writers out there: children should play with other children and not with adults. I have no problem with the idea that children playing with other children is what they need most; however, in play settings (where adults are necessarily there, and this is often considered to be an unnatural state of affairs), and more pertinently outside play settings, in family situations for example, children do often — though not always — have a very great desire to involve adults in the play. This is what does happen. When this does happen, and here’s the repeated thinking again, isn’t that ‘unplayed out material’ type of adulteration bound to occur? (I write this as someone who has read in and around the deeper gestalt levels of the Colorado Paper, the ‘analytic third’, and so on).

Sturrock and Else write, in the Colorado Paper (about the ‘reflective integrity’ of the role of a playworker when trying to preserve the meaning of the play for the playing child):

Obviously, this is a delicate and sensitive task and open to many kinds of adulteration, but it is one we see as being central to the judgement and skills of playwork practice.

They’re saying, as I read it, that it’s children’s play but we may be sensitively involved in that. However, I come back to the idea that ‘unplayed out material’ adulteration is bound to occur if the adult is invited into the children’s play. In other words, being PC (playwork correct) about it all: children have invited the adult into the play (see playwork appropriate intervention styles: wait to be invited to play) therefore — now being non-PC — from their perspectives, children are accepting that adults will play too. Perhaps, and also whisper this quietly in playwork circles, children are sometimes actively seeking adult play ideas by way of their involvement.

I know, playwork aficionados: saying that is tantamount to heresy! I don’t write this to justify any personal recent involvement in children’s play, I write it because I’m thinking it through.

Let’s get back to towing the party line (for a few lines here, at least). My disclaimer is that I do understand the theory and the practice involved in the sensitive preservation (‘holding’) of children’s own play ‘frames’ (that reflective integrity), and the potential for adulteration and what that means, i.e. that we might be involved but it’s about the child not the adult. The idea of adulteration is that the adult can, but shouldn’t, impact negatively on the playing intentions of the child. In my own thinking, this amounts to an ‘unfaithfulness’ to the play and, I suppose, to the playing child. It’s true to say that all true playworkers, the converted to whom I preach, get a buzz out of the observation and consideration of play; some may even get a buzz from involvement by invitation in children’s play. The buzz could soon become more about the playworker though. After all, don’t we all have unplayed out material in us? Get back to the PC: we need to know that children’s play is not about us. We need to be able to differentiate between their play and our play. Yet, shifting away from the PC again, children do often invite us into play, and maybe — maybe — they actually want our play ideas sometimes too. The heresy of it!

This can’t be right, can it? All my playwork nerves are starting to get very anxious at the suggestion of it. I have an urgent need to try to talk myself out of this. Children’s play content and intent is about them; it doesn’t have anything to do with what the adult suggests. How can children’s play that includes the adult’s ideas then be the children’s play? The play becomes a fused engagement: it is the product of the play of the child and the ‘unplayed out material’ of the adult.

That can’t be right, can it?
 
 
Medial intervention (Colorado Paper): Following the issued play cues of the child, the playworker becomes involved in the essential structures of the play. The immediate frame of the child’s play now includes the presence/ideas/wishes/knowledge/authority and status of a playing adult. The playworker is reading this frame, and their involvement, at the same time as being a playing participant.
 
 

What’s in the observation of play?

In the observation of play, what is it that we feel? Or rather, why is it that we feel the way we do about that play? I ask these questions of myself, this week, but I also ask them of others in passing: there often seems to be a mutual adult appreciation of children’s play. Call it ‘appreciation’, ‘wonder’, ‘awe’, or any other word. Why is that?

Of course, this line of thinking doesn’t always apply. When children’s play becomes just a little too ‘beyond the edges’ of coping of any given adult, there’s no such appreciation. These adult edges are individual to each adult but often seem to have common themes: children’s physically risky play, play that involves a minor or major subversion of the norm or ‘the rules’, children swearing, children throwing things around, not sharing things, or any other sort of ‘not doing what’s generally seen as agreeable’. Just the other day I was walking down the street, in my own world, when I saw a couple of children playing out in the cul-de-sac. A woman soon appeared, shoving a pushchair up the road (presumably the mother), and she yelled at the children to stop jumping around. One child told her, without whining, just matter-of-factly, that they were dancing. The two children carried on dancing, much to the woman’s annoyance.

I hadn’t registered that they were dancing; I hadn’t stopped; I hadn’t even had a chance to consciously recognise that this was play here in front of me. I had, however, and on reflection, unconsciously recognised that something unusually usual was taking place here.

Take your children to the swimming pool and pay attention to what happens: you see adults diligently doing lengths, up and down, up and down, plodding away joylessly, and presumably with some self-improving goal in mind; turn your attention back to the children and there’s a bag of eels slopping around in all sorts of unpredictable configurations, in and out of the water, over the floats, and in and out of the pool.

Observing the play of children is like trying to keep track of the eddies and flow of a stream: you try to see where it all begins, or where it’s going, or how patterns might be forming in the flow, and it doesn’t matter how long you do that for because you’ll never find it. When we observe play, we can get hypnotised. What are we looking for in it all?

In playwork observation we know we observe for various reasons: to learn about play more than we know about it now; to try to understand about the use of various resources and environments; to inform our reflections on how we can best work to support and respond to the play. There’s something more to it too though: whisper it quietly because, although we know (or we should know) that children’s play is not about us, that we’re in service to the play . . . there is a small part of us that’s fascinated by the play that we’re seeing. It’s not just confined to the playworkers of the world: if it’s play that a non-playworker can accept as being play, then there’s that same appreciation, wonder, awe on their faces.

It might be wrapped up in phrases such as ‘that’s nice’, ‘how lovely’, or the like, but the core of it’s still along the lines of wonder. Why is that? Perhaps the whole ‘unplayed-out material’ thing (as Gordon Sturrock has it) does come into force here: that adults have an appreciation of their own child-play, deep down, and maybe there’s a need for it to be reignited again (even if only briefly). Some adults take this to the extreme, of course, and impact on the play of the children to such a degree that the children don’t get a look in. Do all adults have a certain degree of unplayed-out material?

Perhaps there’s a deep-seated need in all of us to escape the confines of what we call the real world. We escape sometimes by way of our own adult play; sometimes by impinging on the play of children to the extent of ruining it all for them; sometimes by observation of the possibilities of those ‘infinite variabilities’ of play. That we’re somewhat locked in to largely inflexible patterns in our adult lives (or so we might feel), may well lead us to those dopey-eyed expressions of wonder in the observation of children’s play. We’re troubled because we feel contained, and we’ve lost our naiveties. That naivety will never come back, so all we can do is envy and admire those who are more advanced in their fantasy creations than we are.

This notion of unpredictability might also come into the reckoning: it’s somewhat ironic to think that many adults seem to like the idea of a well-ordered, structured society in which everything ticks along for the good of everyone, yet in some deeper realm might they be in desperate personal need of a little of the opposite? In the seemingly chaotic scheme of things — under the control of the child player — unpredictability is embraced and tackled as it comes (not feared and shunned, as it tends to be in the adult world).

If we dare to delve just a little deeper, might we find a lurking desire to be in contact with all that is a subversion of the ‘norm’? That is, ticking along is all well and good and suits many people, but isn’t it all a little . . . dull? Subversion is exciting and full of life. Play is a rebellion in itself. How much do we each have a desire to rebel?

We might observe in order to learn about play, and to understand the use of resources and environments, but we might also be in a state of wonder, awe, appreciation because we have our rebellious streaks; because we envy the ability to embrace the unpredictable; because we admire the creative impulses; because we’re still driven — at least in part, even as adults — by the innate need to play, or at least to be in visual contact with it. Knowing how not to let our own play drives obliterate, or even slightly deflect the play of children, is key here though.

This week I made observations of a student for her playwork studies at the play setting where she works. As we were talking, and over her shoulder, my attention was caught by the sight of one of the younger boys as he grappled with some large Jenga blocks. He was building with them, but then he started skidding them along the floor. I don’t know why. He was soon joined by some other children. I don’t know what I was looking for when I observed this, nor do I know where or how it all shifted or where it was going. I just know that the play took my attention.

I spent a good part of this afternoon sat in the sun, up on the decking at the top of the garden and sat at the wooden table: a two year old and a four year old were flipping mounds of little plastic counters around, before they graduated to poking them through the holes in the boards, and then the youngest got up onto the table to scatter the whole array of coloured counters, buttons, various plastic pegs and paper and tin foil plates and boxes across the table and benches and onto the ground. He looked greatly pleased with himself, as a baby dinosaur might do if munching his way through a herd of weaker, smaller mammals not destined to evolve. I felt fine in returning the play cues, being part of the whole scheme of things at the children’s behest . . . and then there was just one moment of quite consciously needing things not to get poked into holes (though I really don’t know why) before the moment evaporated. Many more things got scattered and thrown around and poked into holes and slots between the boards. Que sera sera . . .

I was part of it, of course, but I was also able to watch on from a short distance: it was a small incidence of rebellion; of unpredictability; of admiration of the creative impulse in the development of the play frame (and in the destructive); of a need to be in visual contact with that play. The play wasn’t about me, but the observation of the play did affect me, and I have a need to know why this is and why it seems to affect many adults in similar ways.
 
 

Of the importance of thinking

Lately I’ve been wearing many hats. I lose track of myself some weeks: sometimes trainer, sometimes trainee, sometimes playworker, sometimes independent learner. I work with children and with adults; I play with family. In amongst it all there’s a thread of thinking about what I’m doing whenever I wear any one of these hats (sometimes the hats are worn at the same time, and this can be confusing). So I’m thinking about thinking . . .

It occurred to me, earlier in the week, that some trainees just blindly follow what they’ve been told by the trainer. I’m a trainer myself and so I know what might go on in the minds of those doing the training: I find, despite myself, if I’m undertaking training, I’m often also paying attention to how the trainer works — not just what they say; I find I start questioning the ‘how they work’ and that then leads me to questioning the content. Of course I’m not perfect when I’m being the trainer myself, so there are things I can learn in doing that too, but after a while you do get to work out when the trainer’s blagging it, being evasive, not entirely sure, etc. because . . . well, let’s just say I’ve been there too!

It’s the questioning of what’s being presented, or taught, that I want to focus on here though. Sitting there nodding your head, moving the pen across the paper dutifully, or absorbing everything totally without it bothering your brain is all very well (and it might be just what some trainers want), but it won’t help you — the trainee — really. Sure, the trainer gets their evaluation form filled out with ticks in agreeable places, and they don’t have to deal with any awkward questions, but has anything really been gained here?

Co-incidentally, in the process of thinking this all out in my head, I received a message from one of my current playwork learners: she questioned my feedback to her, and put forward strong arguments for why she was doing this. Excellent! I thought. Now, there’s a brain that’s starting to think about children and play and playwork and reflective practice. This questioning also gets me thinking about what I’m saying to those I’m giving playwork information to: is what I’m saying actually playwork? Does what I’m saying tally with the ‘real world’? Am I just regurgitating other playwork writers’ ideas? Do we need to re-define what playwork actually is?

A fair amount of taking on board (I won’t necessarily say ‘learning’ because there’s an active element to this) what’s being taught could easily have something to do with the ‘believing in’ of the person who’s doing the teaching or training. The same can be said for the things that ‘playwork people’ are saying, out and about, online, in journals, etc. When someone becomes un-believed in, all their thinking might well become un-believed as well. There are some playwork people who I believe in a lot; there are some I struggle to believe in because of what they say or do.

As in other fields of work, playworkers can become sucked into the whole ‘this is the way it is’ scheme of thinking: so-and-so says or writes such-and-such, therefore it must be true. There needs to be more thinking done all round. I don’t just limit this to playwork: anyone who works with or around children should be thinking more about what they, the adults, do and about what the children are doing. Why? Children deserve consideration.

Here’s an interesting viewpoint I picked up on recently from the ‘field’ (that is, people I know out there in playwork-land): it’s something I’ve kind of known about for a while, but I feed it in here as an example. Writing about children from an ex-teacher’s point of view, John Taylor Gatto is of the opinion that:

The ordinary citizen in command of an active imagination is dangerous. Realising this makes it easier to understand why so many great philosophers and theologians — dependent for their bread, butter, and status on selling useful advice to rulers — recommended mass schooling of the young as the best way to weaken imagination and make subject populations manageable.

Socialising imagination is the most important job mass schooling does in the interests of those who value social stability over individual development.

For school to do its work, it must centre itself around obedience, deference, competition, routines, and memory, but those are only minor parts of an education.

Almost nothing school offers is educational in the fundamental sense that it offers understanding and hard-nosed skills. When you emerge from school, can you build a house, make clothing, grow food, repair a machine? Do you know the ways of the human heart so well it would be hard to fool you? Can you concentrate? Can you associate skilfully in any kind of human situation? Are you self-reliant, resourceful, strategic or tactical at your own discretion? Do you trust your judgment or do you subordinate yourself to ‘experts’?

Will you be able to steer your own ship through the years of your life, or have you only been trained to be crew on someone else’s ship, and to listen to a stranger as your captain?

Strong stuff. Are children given the scope to be able to think for themselves (in their own play, at home, at school, in play settings, out and about)? By the same token, are playwork trainees being encouraged to think enough, to question the received wisdom of the ‘great and the good’, to say ‘hang on, that’s not what happens in my experience’?

If adults and children aren’t in positions where they’re free to really think, and really question things, then isn’t there something very, very wrong going on? So, I put it to you — whether you’re a playwork learner on a course or not, or if you’re someone who works with or around children in other ways, or if these children are your own children or part of your family — question what you see and hear and what you’re taught or what someone you believe in tells you: ultimately, children deserve that consideration, that process of your thinking.
 
 

Exploring the idea of children and boundaries

‘Do you think that children need boundaries, Bob?’
‘Perhaps you’re asking the wrong question.’

Private conversation with Bob Hughes, 2012
 
 
I’ve been troubled by the idea of ‘control’ for quite a while. It doesn’t sit easily. There was a time, a way back, when I first worked with children and I admit — though the heart was in the right place — there was a lot of adult need in the practice. It could be said that, in some or even many who work with children, there’s still an adult need (though that’s a story for another time). The need I’m looking to investigate further here is the control need.

This is a recurring theme in my thinking and writing, I realise. What is it that troubles me so much? After all, in our adult lives we often try to impose requirements on others: pay me my dues, abide by the laws we tend to all subscribe to, treat me as you’d expect to be treated yourself, etc. Is this a form of attempting soft control?

We have in-built interpretations of ‘what is fair’. That is, we’re settled if we (the centre of our own universes) are roughly in balance. When someone or some organisation or some situation unsettles that equilibrium, we are ‘unfairly’ treated. Is attempting such soft control on other adults justifiable because of ‘fairness’? On the other hand, what right have any of us to impose upon another? Perhaps the ‘right’ can be activated after others have unfairly treated us. I don’t know for sure.

When it comes to the idea of ‘boundaries’, I find myself tying in these concepts of ‘fair’, ‘rights’ and ‘control’. If a child plays in a certain way (expressing themselves loudly, say, or throwing things around to see what will happen), causing the adult’s system to be imposed upon, is it justifiable that the adult then impose upon that child? If we look at it carefully, the playing child is unsettling the ‘centre of the universe’ that is the attendant adult; the adult feels out of control; the adult imposes some (let’s call it) ‘boundary’ in order to regain the feeling that ‘fairness’ to him or her has been restored.

Is it right to impose a boundary on a playing child just because the adult feels unsettled?

This word ‘boundary’ has troubled me for a long time: it’s the idea of trying to fix someone else into our way of things that bothers me. You can read here and agree or disagree with whatever’s said, but I can’t make you do things ‘my way’ if we don’t see eye to eye. I write this blog to open a window onto the things I’ve experienced and continue to experience. I can be opinionated or subtle, but you choose your own way.

Do children need adults’ boundaries? Perhaps I’m asking the wrong question. If we are to use the ‘boundary’ word, what boundaries do children need? I’ve had these conversations many times. Often, top of the replies list is ‘boundaries for their own safety’; or ‘for learning how to get by in the world’; or ‘to respect others’.

Regarding safety, there are many times when children can work things out for themselves, though there are many other times when they’re just blind to what’s going on around them. Tagging along with Gack (you have to read back in the archives here too!), who’s three, as he peddles along down the gradual slope on his bike with stabilisers but no brakes, he stops at each road, like we talk about. We come to the crossroads next to the bus stop. ‘Anything coming?’ I ask. ‘Nope,’ he says without looking, attempting to push out into the road. ‘Yeh right,’ I say. ‘You haven’t even looked.’ He can hear a wood pigeon on a roof from fifty yards, and he can see an ant on a black surface from six feet away, but he doesn’t see or hear the bus walloping around the corner towards us.

I’m more comfortable with the word ‘guidance’ here. Maybe it’s just a word, but it feels more positive than ‘boundary’ and ‘control’. Am I controlling this road safety scenario?

At the park, Gack talks loudly about the man who’s just come in to the ‘outdoor fitness area’ (they rip up the children’s play area to slot in a series of gym devices which hardly get used, but that again is another story). Gack likes to come in here, I guess, because it’s a smooth surface to ride his bike on. He uses the equipment in unusual ways too. The man comes in and Gack talks about him as if he, the adult, can’t hear: ‘Why is that man here? What’s he doing now?’ The man soon leaves and we go on flicking elastic bands around. I have no intention of imposing a ‘boundary’ on Gack so he can ‘learn how to treat others’, ‘respect them’, or generally just not unsettle them. There’s no ‘guidance’ I can, or want, to offer here either.

In the garden, another day, Gack’s cousin (who’s two) pokes around the pond, which is a deep green ooze. He can’t get in easily, though I wouldn’t put it past him to try. He bides his time before playing in other ways: an ornamental duck is dropped into the murk. Later, he finds another duck and I know what he’s going to do only at about the time he gets just far enough ahead of me not to be able to reach him. He runs across the patio, duck by the neck. Plop. He watches it sink. I stand there and just consider the fact that what has been done has been done. The duck is already sunk.

What would be the point of imposing a ‘no’ or any other rebuke? The duck has already been dunked. There are other ornaments that might like to go for a swim. What do you do when you have such trouble with the concept of ‘control because the adult doesn’t like the action’? It’s time to put money where the mouth is: I try to make play of the situation. I don’t know if I get it right, though no more ducks are harmed in the course of the afternoon. What would be the problem if they were though?

So, what ‘boundaries’ do children ‘need’? It’s been my contention for quite a while now that it’s not children who need boundaries, but adults. Adults need ways of balancing their own systems, comfort levels, sense of being central; children need other things. If a ‘play need’ is essentially gaining access to some play opportunity that their environment (including the human environment) doesn’t provide them, then maybe children’s other needs are a result of other deficiencies. So, for example, maybe they have a need (as opposed to a preference) for guidance in road awareness, sometimes (because of a current deficiency in understanding about the impact of buses, say); maybe they have a need for initial ‘assistance’ in tools use in their play; maybe they have a need for adult understanding. Maybe these aren’t children’s needs at all . . .

There’s a difference between what a child needs and what an adult wants of them. In the latter, it’s the adult who’s at the centre of things and it’s the adult who then becomes settled because of the ‘boundary setting’. If we’re imposing ‘boundaries’, instead of attempting to understand what and how the child is playing, are we really thinking of the child at all?
 
 

Jam and snot, or the Montessoribots?

Still on my theme of A. S. Neill’s work, from around the 1920s, I move from thoughts on education and parenting to a more general idea of ‘connectivity between generations’. I find there are links between some of my long-held own beliefs and ideas, and what I’m discovering as I read. So, in writing, I explore this further . . .

Whilst Neill was writing for The New Era: an International Quarterly Journal for the Promotion of Reconstruction in Education, in the early 1920s (a bit of a mouthful of a magazine title, admittedly!), he went out and about visiting and reporting on various establishments. One of these places was the Montessori Department of the Brackenhill Theosophical Home School in Kent. Maria Montessori had come to England in 1919, and interest in her methods was just starting to spread. I was interested to read of Neill’s observation and opinion on his visit to this particular school:

‘I spoke not a word. In five minutes the insets and long stairs [presumably forms of ‘didactic apparatus’, as named by Montessori] were lying neglected in the middle of the floor, and the [children] were scrambling over me. I felt very guilty, for I feared that if Montessori herself were to walk in she would be indignant. I cannot explain why I affect [children] in this way. It may be that intuitively they know that I do not inspire fear or respect; it may be that they unconsciously recognise the baby in me.’

What Neill seems to have experienced here is something I’ve also known for a long time, but never been able to pin down the exact reasons for either. Countless times I’ve visited a school or playscheme or some other play provision (and I’d never met those children before), and when I do I often try to keep out of the way, and before long, almost without fail, I find a paintbrush being poked in my ear, or I’ve become co-opted into a play-fight-dance, or I’m being told life histories by five year olds, and one way or another all form of previous structure and order breaks down in the immediate area around me.

It happens when I least expect it to (though I should be used to this sort of thing by now). Even just the other day, out at the park, attendant three year old leading the way, we ended up in the fixed equipment area, on the tarmac mound, and before long we were surrounded by a small group of other younger children. Admittedly we were in the middle of a form of crazy golf play (with proper golf clubs and fluorescent yellow balls), but I wasn’t doing anything really: just rolling the balls back uphill, then sitting down in the sun on the slope. The children slowly gravitated over. I did a quick sweep round for the parents the children had brought along, but no-one showed any signs of ‘man in the playground, panic!’ so I talked when talked to by the children, listened, got the balls if need be. That part of the playground became the crazy golf place (not what ‘normally’ happens in such a fenced-off designated area for designated play). After a while, one of the girls took custody of the least favoured golf club, another girl took a golf ball under her wing, and the play just scattered to other parts of the space.

Sure, on the face of it, there’s the obvious unusual occurrence of golf clubs here, but there’s also the unusual occurrence of someone being at eye height and actually listening and talking and taking notice. I’ve always wondered if there was something more to it too though. Back to this again after a swing back around Maria Montessori.

Neill notes, with some degree of concern, that Montessori’s term ‘didactic apparatus frightens me’, and that education is ‘more than matching colours and fitting cylinders into holes’. This is not a post about education, but it is about play. I’ve always had similar reservations about Montessori children’s play. A while back I was visiting students in a Montessori nursery school (I was working in the field of pre-school at the time). I was shocked, frankly, by the robotic nature of the three year olds there who, without any adult prompting, would float over to a bland pale wooden shelf, pick up a bland pale wooden object on a tray, and come back to a table, sitting down with it. The child would neatly stack blocks from one place to another on the tray, or pour water from a jug into a cup and then back again, and repeat it over and over. Then they’d put it back on the shelf.

This was not the world of three year olds smeared in jam and snot that I knew, or some years later, the three year old playing crazy golf in the fixed equipment park, shouting at the ducks to wake them up, or walking along the High Street blowing bubbles into chocolate milkshake, laughing at the newly discovered sound, smeared in saliva, snot and sun cream!

For the sake of noting some small degree of pro-Montessori methodology, I did learn a rather neat way for younger children to put their own coats on (by putting the coats on the floor, outsides downwards, arms spread out; the child then stands at the head end, slots their arms in, bends down and flips the whole coat over and on!) That, though, is the sum total of my pro-Montessori leanings.

We shouldn’t foster robotic children, and we shouldn’t foster children fearful of adults or what those adults might say to or about them. Why do children gravitate over to some adults? Of course, the physical level of the adult helps, as does the listening and the talking with the child, if wanted by that child (talking ‘with’, I’ve always felt, rather than ‘talking to’ and definitely rather than ‘talking at’); I have, for a long time, held the belief that children ‘see’ the play awareness of certain adults.

I observe good playworkers I sometimes work with, and some excellent parents, and other adults who are neither or both of these, and I watch the way that children seem to appreciate them, ‘see’ them, ‘know’ them, ‘get’ them. It’s this ‘gettingness’ that has fascinated me for a while.

The adult who tries too hard will soon be found out by the child; the adult who’s playful, up to a point, before adult sensibilities kick back in again, will be found out and discarded; the adult who just doesn’t ‘get’ play won’t even be tolerated. There are deeper reasons why some children ‘get’ some adults, perhaps: the possible unconventional looks and ways of the adult, as compared to the child’s forming stereotype, can be part of it; there may be attachment needs not served by other adults in the child’s life; there may be a raw but developing comprehension that a rebellious or unusual streak is the ‘play way’, and should be embraced when found in any other person; there may be other, more indefinable reasons.

I don’t know, but it’s an ongoing process of trying to find out. If I’m ‘in tune’ (and some days I’m not, for whatever reason), I can be minding my own business on the bus, concentrating on collecting golf balls, sitting talking with other adults in a play space and giving no outward signs that ‘I’m playing now’, and before long I have tongues stuck out at me; or I have children gravitating around, without words, not always with a need for the play objects themselves; or I find glue and glitter being surreptitiously spread up my arm.

Like Neill, I can’t fully explain the reasons for these sorts of things; I do know though that I hope children don’t become robots, and that they do just express themselves in their play. Why? Imagine a world full of robotic people unable to connect with one another at all.
 
 

On the education of adults about children

[A board should be set up] to enquire into the upbringing of children. We might call it the Board of Parental Control. It would bring parents before it and examine them. Parents convicted of stupidity would be ordered to hand over their children to a Play-Yard School.

A. S. Neill, A Dominie Dismissed, 1917
 
Of course, I use this quote as a deliberate provocation. I find it amusing, though there is a hint of seriousness within the tongue-in-cheek writing of the author. I’m gradually working my way through a biography of the pioneering educationalist A. S. Neill and I find myself amazed by what I’m discovering. Neill’s thinking, writing and practice when working with children (going back to the very start of the 20th century) is shot through with respect for the child. I write it this way because I’m aware of the context of the times in which he first practised.

Now, I am not a teacher of children or a parent. That’s my first disclaimer. My next is that I know some excellent parents who truly respect and recognise the freedom taken and needed by their children. My playwork experience in my current thinking is linked with my family experience, and my early years and youth work experience, amongst other things I’ve done and learned. It’s taken a good few years to get to here. I still have things to learn. I also still have some personal concerns about ideas on ‘children’s ways of being’: that is, my ideas on children, their freedom to play, their play, and adults who I might see as trying to control those children, versus the thought that is ‘who am I to tell someone else how to lead a life?’

In juggling these thoughts, I can only bring it back to this: these are my ideas, which I keep testing and refining; who else is coming along with that flow? A. S. Neill’s ideas and experiences are starting to reinforce, and maybe justify, some of my own; or rather, the ideas I have learned, tested, accepted and taken on as a way to be believed in. By extension, some of Neill’s own influences are being thrown into the mix.

In 1917, Neill met an American likemind by the name of Homer Lane. Lane is described (by Jonathan Croall, in Neill of Summerhill: the Permanent Rebel) as a former teacher and Superintendent of Playgrounds in Detroit. Lane came to England and set up what he called ‘the Little Commonwealth’: a self-governed community for so-called delinquent boys and girls, based on a farm in Dorset. Neill, apparently, was greatly impressed by what he saw there.

He later wrote that Lane was ‘the first man who simply said, we don’t know a damn thing about children, let’s observe them, and not force our personalities on them.’

In the hundred years or so since then, there’s still the dominant adult desire to force our personalities, morality, ideas and ways of being onto the children around us. In adults’ care for children, in their love and upholding of children’s ‘best interests’, those adults seem to want to develop those children in their own image. Or, at least, they seem to want to develop them in the image of ‘society’s view of ‘the child’. We are all a part of society. Why are children so often not given the opportunity to be themselves?

I’ve had conversations like these many times before. I was teaching adults once and was shocked to be confronted by a learner whose views took on increasingly agitated and spiteful tones. He accused me of trying to preach ‘liberal, hippy 1970s views’ which were out of tune with how society was or should be. I tried to protest. I said that I didn’t make this stuff up myself, that I was teaching here from the playwork literature. He wouldn’t have it. It knocked me sideways somewhat. I still think about that a few years on. Are some individuals just so ingrained in ‘the way things ought to be’ that children become secondary to it all?

In 1916, Neill wrote (whilst still in a more traditional teaching position): ‘I feel that I am merely pouring water into a sieve. I almost feel that to meddle with education is to begin at the wrong end. I may have an ideal, but I cannot carry it out because I am up against all the forces of society.’ I sometimes feel the same way with regards to playwork practice.

His biographer, Croall, goes on to write: ‘In particular, he found that he was having to come into conflict with parents who still believed in the traditional way of training and punishing a child.’ Neill is quoted as reporting: ‘Many a night I feel disheartened. I feel that I am on the side of the bairns.’

This reminds me of a job I once had in which I was required to undergo a yearly review with the manager of the setting. I worked with children there and I think I was regarded as a bit of an oddity, but tolerated. The manager (who I had a lot of time for, and who is now sadly not with us), would always conclude the meeting with the idea that I was more comfortable in the presence and in the service of the children. It was a backhanded compliment and a way of suggesting I ought to try harder with my colleagues. Her heart was in the right place though! I was, and always have been and always will be, like Neill, on the side of the bairns (that is, the children).

I’m not a teacher of children, and I don’t know if I ever could be (I sometimes imagine what that classroom might look and feel like!), but I have my reservations about some teachers I’ve seen at work: are they truly on the side of the bairns? Like my earlier disclaimer about not being a parent and knowing some good parents, I have also (truly) met some excellent teachers in my time. However, I wonder what teaching might look like if thinking such as Homer Lane’s were to be the norm. Croall writes:

Lane argued forcibly that the traditional form of education based on fear should be abolished. Teachers must stand down from their position of authority, and let children resolve their own difficulties in an atmosphere of encouragement and freedom. ‘Freedom cannot be given,’ he stated. ‘It is taken by the children . . .’

Of course, the fear that was evident in early twentieth century UK classrooms (physical punishment and all) is not seen today. However, I would argue (from my own observation and discussions with some children) that the fear-factor of authority does sometimes play a part. What does this do, potentially, to the children? Authority, taught Homer Lane, is the fundamental problem of society. Liberal, hippy 1970s views? Liberal, hippy pre-1920s views?

When all is said and done, we adults should be taking a good long hard look at ourselves. In balancing up ‘these are my ideas and understanding from experience and reading’ versus ‘who am I to tell others how to be?’, I err on the side of the former here. We adults (whether we’re parents, non-parents, teachers, any of us who know or could have influence over children), are part of our society — as indeed are those children, let’s not forget. If we cannot, or will not, respect the child and the children around us for who they are, then we are the ones who ought really to undergo some education, not the children.

‘Adults’, writes Croall of Homer Lane, ‘should both trust and revere the nature of children.’
 
 

Disorder as the natural tendency

Sometimes my writing for this blog comes about by way of thinking on recent media interest around children or their play, and then dropping into that thinking other ideas . . . this week I drop ‘entropy’ into the mix.

Entropy, according to a recent BBC News Science and Environment report, can be explained in terms of ‘the Universe tends, in general, to a more disordered state’.

What’s doing the rounds at the moment is Conservative MP Liz Truss and her condemnation of nurseries (whose children, she says, are ‘running around with no sense of purpose’). This playworker doesn’t think of the ideas of ‘manners’ and ‘discipline’, as Ms Truss seems to think; this playworker thinks of the ideas of ‘disorder’ and ‘entropy’ when he thinks about ‘running around with no sense of purpose’.

That the Universe itself can be seen as something that is inevitably marching headlong into a state of ultimate disorder is reassuring, in a way. The BBC report also adds a side-note (linked to the laws of thermodynamics) that ‘everything, everywhere, is at least a little bit disordered’. Everything heads that way.

A variable in this thinking is the amount of time things might take. Systems go from order to ultimate disorder, eventually or quickly. If we consider that ‘putting energy’ into a system can create order, we should also consider the idea that everything can be affected by something else; therefore, that ‘affecting of the system’ isn’t ordering it at all. Let’s put this into context:

I know full well, from experience of doing and from observing, that a group of children (I’ll use this as an idea of a ‘system’) can be affected both by leaving it to its own devices (hence the inevitable tendency towards disorder) and by imposing too much on it (trying to create some order, but in effect just affecting that march towards disorder in other ways). By ‘disorder’ I don’t mean to colour that word with negative connotations; though, admittedly, the word ‘order’ is more coloured in such ways.

‘Order’, in the context of this thinking, is the word used for the aimed-for state when attempting the action of control. It can also be seen as the dead, lifeless zone. What happens, at a simplistic level, whenever someone wants to impose too much control on someone else? There’s some degree of rebellion, perhaps. It might take years, or it might take a lot less time, but attempts at control are bound to affect individuals. Some people defer completely to being controlled. It’s the easy route, but it’s also the way that’s been imposed on them and they know no different. Being controlled may well result in more attempted controllers. There is a subsequent potential lack in thinking.

To think we need positions or perspectives to think from. The BBC report (which is titled ‘Entropy law linked to intelligence’) suggests the following:

The simplistic model considers a number of examples, such as a pendulum hanging from a moving cart. Simulations of the . . . entropy idea show that the pendulum ends up pointing upward — an unstable situation, but one from which the pendulum can explore a wider variety of positions.

Further simulations showed how the same idea could drive the development of tool use, social network formation, and co-operation . . .

We already know that play functions as a way of finding out, as a way of providing the player with the possibility of more options. Play is fundamentally disordered in process. If we see order as basically static, disorder is dynamic. Everything tends towards disorder and everything, everywhere, is at least a little bit disordered. In this way of thinking, not only is ‘order’ impossible but it’s also pointless trying to impose it (because it’s impossible). The only reason to try to impose it must be in attempting to control, and the only reason for this must be in attempting to create some purpose for the self.

Why do children need manners? Because that’s what society demands; because society is what I have to live in; because if I have to have manners so do others; if others haven’t got manners, and I have, and I have to live in a society that demands manners, then I should instruct others how to have manners; because now I have a purpose; because If I have no purpose, what is the point of me?

I don’t think like this personally, I hasten to add. I have other, different, traits which I won’t bore you with now!

Liz Truss, apparently, does not like children running around without a sense of purpose. Perhaps, with purpose, they would then be ‘useful members’ of society, able to aid that society in its own purpose: the instruction of others in how to act. ‘Order’ would be achieved, and with it a deficit in thinking (because what thought do we need when everything, like morality, is decided for us?), and with it a lack of potential wider variety of positions from which to think from (positions which have, in the past, driven us to explore tool use, social network formation, and co-operation) . . .

The argument could go on and on and round and round (at least this would be a dynamic situation though, one in which ideas and exchanges could flow, rather than a static acceptance: a dead state of being).

In short, and in summary, it is the huge expanse of children’s play ‘disorder’ that should be recognised in our society, of expression and creation, of trial and error and running around without purpose, rather than the aim of ‘order’ by manners and so forth. Ideas such as how to respond to others, right and wrong, and suchlike can be explored through the child’s play (as opposed to being told, and blindly following, these ways of acting by others). Over-zealous attempts at order can create unhealthy minds.

Disorder is the natural tendency.
 
 

On swearing to tell the truth

Language use — and in particular, some children’s use of certain language — tends to cause all sorts of ruffled feathers in the ‘right thinking’ sensibilities of many adults. In the doctrines stuck to by those adults (educationalists, some parents, maybe, etc.) when children are around, hearing swearing sets off instant reprimand reflexes. Yet, when the children are gone and the adults are in the company of each other, fuck . . .

If there are words that aren’t understood, I agree with the principle of a certain playwork writer who advocates the buying of a dictionary. So I want to know what certain words mean, or use to mean . . . so I go to the dictionary. In the spirit of another certain playwork writer, who advocates ‘proper deskwork’ research (i.e. those things we used to have, back in the day: books), I pulled out my two huge 1979 edition Oxford English Dictionary (OED) volumes. Now, what do these words I hear mean, or what did they once mean?

First though, a preamble: I come to this subject area to write on because it’s been rumbling around in the back of my mind for the best part of the week. Bits and pieces of conversations, reading of others’ writing, reflecting on the things I heard on the playground in London recently all comes to the typing fingertips.

There was a time, I admit, when I also engaged my instant reprimand reflex on hearing children saying certain things that didn’t fit the ‘moral compass’ I’d had instilled into me. It was something I’d absorbed from my colleagues at the time, and from the set-up of the places I was working in. I wasn’t advanced enough in myself to question the doctrine, so I just went along with it.

I remember back a good few years (it’s funny now I think of it from this playwork perspective) when I was in the staff toilet, washing my hands. Next door, in their own toilet room, I could hear two younger boys, about five years old, talking with each other. They were the sweetest little things, ordinarily. You can guess what’s coming! I suppose they didn’t think they could be overheard. Out came a stream of various ‘fucks’ and ‘shits’ and so forth. My instant reaction/reflex was wrong: it was a ‘I hope I didn’t hear what I just heard’ comment (albeit playful in itself).

Really, though, what does it matter? Like I say, we swear, and children swear and will continue to swear when they become adults. They’re only words. Of course, there’s no getting around the fact that we have to pay attention to the intent of those words: there’s a difference between saying: ‘Fuck off, I don’t believe you!’ and ‘Fuck off’. We’re adults and we should be able to read this stuff here without the emotional baggage; hence I write it like this.

Appreciating the intent of a set of words, there are two arguments for ignoring them that immediately spring to mind. Firstly, we all grow up in a certain culture (by which I mean our family and the environment in which we and our family live). That culture is a complex organism and our use of language is embedded within in. So we accept that we have different cultural backgrounds. Secondly, even if the intent is aggressive, we are emotional animals and emotions will out. I don’t like being told to fuck off, just as you may well not like it, but it’s how I choose to deal with it — rather than trying to make the other person not say it — that’s important and more productive.

Playworkers don’t live in a moral vacuum but we also try not to enforce our own views on the children. This is a point that many adults can’t fathom: it is, perhaps, because of that ‘reprimand reflex’, which they blindly believe in. I don’t know why.

So, to the proper deskwork research! It’s a little disappointing that the OED (or my copy of it, at least) doesn’t make reference to ‘fuck’ or any other such words that are guaranteed to offend many adults. A quick search engine quest does throw up a variety of ideas on the source of the meaning of the word; however, as with many things on the great and vast interweb, you take your chances there in believing any of it. So, to the books, which despite not giving a fuck about fuck, do give a fuck about ‘arse’, ‘bastard’, ‘piss’, ‘shit/shite’ and ‘twat’ (which I find somewhat amusing in itself!) A choice selection of cuts therefore, for your amusement, curiosity, and delectation:
 
Arse

Arse: the fundament, buttocks, posterior, or rump of an animal; heavy arse: a lazy fellow; to hang the arse: to hold back, be reluctant or tardy; arse upwards: in good luck; arsed: having an arse; arseling: backwards.

1530: What up, heavy arse, cannest thou nat aryse.
1711 Swift: Do you think I have nothing else to do but to mend and repair after your Arse? [i.e. behind you, in your rear]
1768 Ross: Then Lindy to stand up began to try; but he fell arselins back.
 
Bastard

Bastard: one begotten and born out of wedlock; a sweet kind of Spanish wine; a kind of cloth; a kind of war-vessel, a variety of galley; a large sail used in the Mediterranean when there is little wind; a particular size of paper; an impure coarse brown sugar, made from the refuse sugar of previous boilings; of abnormal shape or irregular size.

1677 Moxon: The Bastard-tooth’d file is to take out of your work the deep cuts.
1695: Covered with an Arch of Bastard Marble.
1859 Darwin: The ‘bastard-wing’ [set of three or four quill-like feathers placed at a small joint in the middle of a bird’s wing] may safely be considered as a rudimentary digit.
 
Piss

Piss: probably onomatopoeic; to discharge urine.

c. 1386 Chaucer: How Xantippa caste pisse up-on his heed.
1600: [an] intolerable stench of pisse and goates dung.
 
Shit

Shit/shite/shote: excrement from the bowels, dung; to void as excrement.

c.1400 Lanfranc’s Cirurg: If he may not schite oones a day, helpe him perto . . .
1484 Caxton: The wulf shote thyres by the waye . . .
 
Twat

Twat: erroneously used by Browning under the impression that it denoted some part of a nun’s attire.

1660 Browning: They talk’t of his having a Cardinalls Hat, They’d send him as soon an Old Nuns Twat.

The last of these being, of course, my favourite of the found OED quotations! Context is as important as intent when using words, and modern usage has shifted older versions into newer versions; however, the point here is that words good enough for Darwin and Chaucer and Swift, etc., can be good enough in playful context too. What was that rhyme I used to sing in playing games with other children when I was maybe seven or eight or nine years old . . .?

Ip-dip dog shit, fucking bastard, silly git, O-U-T spells out, so out you must go. Or something like that. I didn’t know what the words meant: they just rhymed and scanned well. I just knew that the rhyme was the rhyme for finding who was out. It was no big deal.
 
 

White City stories: part 15

I’ve been at the playground again in White City, London, for the Easter holidays. I have the intention to document some moments of stories from the week. It’s been a full-on day, but I’m on the train and I need, and want, to write whilst it’s still here in my head. Moments are important.

The week has been — by and large — about paint and fires and running around, and today (Friday) was a mass den building spontaneity of action. I’m often pleasantly surprised by what children find and how they make use of that stuff. The rain came down but it didn’t deter the children. It was an opportunity to build shelters, so there was a frantic scrabbling around for stuff: ‘We need wood, big bits of wood’; and ‘We need hammers, and nails, and those things . . .’ They didn’t know the word but they needed tarpaulins.

Various children kept coming, rooting around, finding things. Before long there were two pallet dens being constructed on opposite sides of the site (one of which involved a small army of labour banging nails into the fixed equipment, banging sheets of chipboard and other wood to make the walls). They had a tarp ready for something but it never made it on. I turned my attention elsewhere for a while and saw one of the boys trying to smash a nail into the wooden beams with a sledgehammer! I suggested it was probably a bit heavy for the job.

The other den ended up as a roofed, carpeted, clean affair by the fire pit: ‘No shoes, no shoes.’ One of the boys building it marched off to the other shelter being slung up after his mate had left the construction. He was going to ‘hire’ some other, more reliable, labour he was saying. The shelter was later abandoned. It just needed to be built, it seemed. At the other side of the playground, one of the older boys, on his own, was struggling to bang a nail into a piece of upright chipboard that was slowly mulching in the rain. He asked me to hold it for him while he banged. Eventually he punched a hole in the board as it caved in and splintered. ‘What’s the hole for?’ I asked. ‘It’s just a hole’, he told me. He looked at it and shrugged. ‘My work is done here,’ he said and downed tools to go off and do something else.

Back over at the fire pit in the corner of the playground, for a few days whilst I’ve been on site, the children have had fires going. Each fire has had a different feel. Tuesday I sit at the edge of the mud area, which is bordered by a rectangle of wooden sleepers. At one point I count eight boys sat around on plastic chairs and on the wooden bench seats which have been made previously, placed there. I watch the boys as they watch the fire. I don’t say anything much, and I’m quiet for pretty much most of the fire play this day. It seems to be what’s needed. The children come and go: sometimes boisterous, sometimes just poking around. One of the boys starts talking to me, telling me how he likes fires because when he’s with his whole family back in Ireland they make a big fire out in the field. This moment I sit and think how this job, when you’ve got it right, also involves creating the possibility, somehow, for magic to happen.

The fire play on other days maybe has different qualities because other staff are there around it, not me. I watch on on these days, from a distance, thinking about how I feel about the fire from this vantage point and how different it feels when in that play frame. Friday’s fire, I’m in the play frame again. One of the younger girls shows me her way of building it: we’ve both scrunched up newspaper balls and we’ve filled the hole I dug this morning (it’s a charcoal hole now, and the earth is way down). We have no kindling, though earlier I did saw up a load of dry two-by-fours which were in the store. The younger girl piles the dry wood up in a pyramid and I hand her the matches. When it’s lit other children gravitate over.

Before long they’ve all found long poles, which they wrap one end of with masking tape to make fire brands, or Olympic torches, as they call them. The other day we put some rosemary clumps on the fire — rosemary, I think! — found from the bush nearby. The smoke wafted up with a lush full smell and the children couldn’t get enough of it. I have to suggest they don’t rip up the whole bush and burn it because they start to hack off whole branches!

Today, before long, I see some of the children have taped sprigs of the stuff to the ends of their poles and they dangle it in the fire. They keep lifting the poles up high or at eye level and I find myself concentrating really hard on seven, eight, nine hot pole ends; the intentions on the faces of the children; the children who are ducking down briefly; the clothing of the children as they move towards the pit (to their credit though, they do mostly stay well clear), etc. I think of the children’s play, their clothes, their hair, and mine, and skins, and the slippery sleepers wet from last night’s rain, and the growing antagonistic mood of one of the older boys. It gets a little edgy. I ask Rich for an extra pair of eyes. In a moment, as it happens, Rich manages to start a conversation with the older boy about his tadpoles (he, the boy, and others, had gone out of the playground yesterday and come back with tubfuls of the eggs, ‘liberated’, shall we say, from a well-known news corporation’s grounds nearby!)

Rich and the boy go off to do whatever needs doing in the large planting tub by the door, which has become flooded, and thus — apparently — needed tadpoles. The rest of the children continue to poke the fire with their fire brand poles/torches and they load on more and more cardboard, as they did the other day, blowing oxygen into the embers with other cardboard sheets (or ‘winding it’, as they say). ‘Why not put more wood on?’ I ask. ‘Because cardboard burns faster,’ I’m told. Instant gratification culture!

Earlier, when it was raining: we had a load of powder paint mixed in trays and it was used by the children to smear onto, and to paint, wooden boards propped up against plastic chairs. The paint stuck for a while then slowly drained off, leaving multi-coloured smears on the paving slabs. It was transitory art. There was clay out on the bench in the downpour. It was an inspired move, I felt: the rain soaked the clay as the children moulded and squelched it into shapes.

There’s a buzz on the playground. Later, now, I think how the playworker is just in the dead smack middle of everything that is and could be happening, but just floating by sort of dead smack in it. One of the boys comes up to me, in passing, and takes my hands, saying: ‘Let’s dance. I’ll show you how to waltz.’ So we waltz for thirty seconds or so, and he wanders off someplace else!

At the clay, one of the girls’ hands are thick with the stuff. I go fetch her a bucket of warm soapy water and I tell her then that I recognise her from last summer, when I saw her last. She says she recognises me too, though she can’t remember my name. She tells me a little later how I had my hair dyed red back then. We see each other in passing throughout the session. I tell her she has splatters of paint on her face, so she shrugs. Later, near the end, she ambles across my line of ambling. She tells me she can’t remember my name, so I tell her and she spells it out. She has a piece of chalk in her hand. ‘I’m writing a list of VIPs on the wood over there,’ she says. She tells me she has all the playworkers on it already, and just has an out-loud conversation with herself about who else might go up there.

The end of the session gets somewhat hectic. It’s the last day of the Easter holidays and maybe the children are feeling it, or feeling the imminent prospect of school again next week. I don’t know. It’s a speculation. There are over thirty children on site and they’ve all been playing a chase-catch game with each other. I feel in the middle of something special: though I’m just tidying, not playing. When the game dissolves, one of the boys teases one of the girls by kicking a ball at her. She’s not happy and there’s a different form of chase-catch now going on. The playground becomes a swill of sensibilities, mixed emotions, allegiances and protections, shifting patterns of children seemingly wanting to do whatever they need to do to not have all this melt away. It’s how I read it.

We stay on site for longer than usual. Personally, I don’t know whether it’s best for us to stay till all the fractious activity fizzles out or just to lock up and let them get on with it. In the end it simmers down and we lock up. Another school holiday on the playground is over.

It’s been raining, it’s been edgy, it’s had its ups and downs but still the children come: it’s what’s needed because the children come — they keep their fingers on the door-buzzer five minutes before the gates are due to open and as we’re finishing up our lunches; we go around the corner to the gate and they’re pressing their faces to the holes in the fencing and poking their fingers through it, telling us to hurry up, get the keys, telling us things like how we owe them time at the end because we’re so many minutes late in opening up.

The playground is full of moments happening, having happened, and possible moments to come.