Play can sometimes take on more threatening forms. I use this word deliberately because I was going to write ‘darker forms’ but realise that that might not amount to anything clear. ‘Dark play’ has been thought about before, and it conjures up possibilities of what it could be, I suppose, but play can be threatening: it’s this that I’m thinking of when I consider the potential adult playworker response. On the playground recently there has been cause for some of us to go into what we’re tentatively terming as ‘self-sacrificial’ mode.
Play is a process of the moment, but it can also come loaded with the moments that have already been: the play that has happened on previous days, inside or outside the fence; the tensions and complications between children; the rivalries and shifting allegiances; the dynamic of children finding their place in the midst of it all. The moment that arrives can be more than just a response to another child’s ‘cussing my mum’ (a major concern, it seems, on this playground), or being caught unawares by an apparently errant or aberrant play cue, or a momentary agitation. The accumulation of moments of the playground can pile up to cause the potential for a perfect storm in itself. One child throws a water balloon at another, smacking him hard in the face, or on the bare arm, the assailant running away laughing, all for example, and there’s more here than can be fully appreciated in the split second.
Should playworkers intervene? Stopping the play is fraught with all manner of practical and theoretical difficulties. Rational conversation attempts can be (and were, in one case) responded to by this playworker being caught full in the face by a loaded bucket of water. Breathe, I told myself. It’s OK to be angry, inside, but breathe; think quickly. What should playworkers do if the rights of others to play are being impinged upon, when the integrity of the playground’s inherent ‘balance’ is threatened with collapse, when what was play could easily become what may not be so playfully-infused?
So far, we reflect, the ‘self-sacrificial’ approach has its benefits. Turning the mischievous intent or the rebellious reply of the child into ‘this is play cue action’, going through the playworker’s own anger or other emotions, and out the other side, in sudden clarity afforded by breathing, is a start; however, if filling a bucket in return of that cue becomes a protracted hunting down of the play-perpetrator around the playground, a ‘revenge’ mission, then the adult-playworker becomes bully. The only way, perhaps, to resolve the tension of mischievous/rebellious recalcitrant intent (bordering on ‘no longer play’, threat-turned-to-unbalanced playground), and not lurch into revenge, is to self-sacrifice. The play happens, and stays as play, of a kind, the players are focused, the players are not bullied, the playground’s ‘psychological security’ is maintained: the playworker accepts their position as moving target for the good of the whole.
Spending the entire session in wet clothes (especially jeans) is somewhat disagreeable, shall we say. I don’t like getting wet and I don’t want to do it. I’ve resisted it for a while: most of summer, perhaps. Sometimes the getting wet happens in the cueing of the playworker by what has happened here before (once children here get a whiff of unspoken agreement, target-practice is on): that is, sometimes the playworker isn’t giving the vibe off, in the now, that it’s OK to be flattened on the blindside by a stinging fat water balloon to the ribs, or to the lower back, or skimming off the shoulder, whizzing past the ear. React or return? That is the question.
Others, on certain days, are better at the whole delicate holding of it all than me. Even if the initial return is playfully done, there’s still the reflective recognition that this is done in light of the threat that the play can become; there’s still the potential for knowledge, reflection-in-action, that this is not about ‘win’, ‘adult bully’, ‘adult play back’ — it’s wrapped up in some holding function, or words quite like these; there’s still the possibility that the children’s play cues might become ever more insistent, harder, faster, more durable than the playworker’s capacity to keep just the right side of everything.
‘How do you get out of this?’ I asked a colleague in passing as I manfully ran away, soaked, cold, verging on being somewhat fed up and tired from moving and watching for all manner of elaborate visible and invisible ambushes. Perhaps you hide yourself away; perhaps you hold up your hands and trust that saying you’re done won’t prove as fragile and precarious a position as being ‘unarmed’ and honest in the middle of the playground actually is; perhaps you offer never to fire first, even when given gilt-edged chances to drench one of the original assailants (hoping that the fragile trust will hold).
Trust can go a long way. When I go to shake Parkour Boy’s hand, full bucket in my other hand and with no honest intention to get him or to cause him psychological concern, and I say to him I won’t get him, but instead here ‘good battle’, I trust that in that moment something happens. When I find myself backing out of an easy shot, knowing that that might come back to get me twice as wet later (if that’s possible!), I trust that here too is something forming. In the end, the ‘how to get out of this’ can be smoothed by a combination of breathing, playing it out till it needs to be done, or holding hands up when really I’m done, trusting all manner of dynamics, hiding in full view by the fire to get warm, knowing that if need be a colleague, this colleague in particular, will take on the form of accepting target.
When the dirt and water have settled, when the play peters out, having wound its way around the playground’s other hundred play frames that day, not having battered directly into them too much, we can sit and talk about the play that has happened here, the children that have needed whatever they’ve needed, the acts of necessity or of realisation of playworkers who’ve variously got parts right, or nearly right, or right enough, or any or all or none of the above.
playworkings 
Tell me something . . .