On the passing of Bob Hughes, playworker

In November last year, the playwork world lost another of its guiding lights. Bob Hughes died and I was honestly shocked when I heard the news, though I knew he’d been diagnosed with an illness that would, ultimately, end his life. I’ve been wondering what it is I could write (because I want to, because I must) to mark and honour his passing, these past few months since. It isn’t that there’s nothing that can be written about Bob: on the contrary, there’s so much, but what and how to write that, and how to do justice to the man? Some of us in playwork have talked online. How do we present an authentic and true reflection, how do we show the proper respect? It’s not that Bob was high and mighty (again, quite the opposite), and he wasn’t a ‘mate’, but he could easily have been this because he seemed to have time for everybody.

What shall follow won’t be constructed, well planned-out, though it is considered. It shall be a stream of consciousness because play’s like that. Bob thought and wrote about play and made many, many of us think. Not everything he wrote should be taken as ‘gospel’ (though I’m reminded here how some in the sector have jokingly, though with due reverence, referred to him as ‘St. Bob’ in times gone by!), but plenty of people seem to treat his words as incorrigible truth. I’ve heard it told that Bob lamented sometimes that his writing wasn’t taken issue with as much as he would have liked. That is a measure of the man. Another, with regards to my personal interactions with him, was his humility. Here was a man who had seen it, done it, written the book on it; yet, he would readily admit when he didn’t understand something, or when he thought his writing didn’t make sense.

He invited me to write a chapter for a book he and Fraser Brown were editing and there was no way I was going to turn that offer down. I had ideas on what to write and talked them through with Bob. He delved deeper with me on the subject of ‘myth’, which is part of where I was heading at one point. I subsequently decided I was barking up the wrong tree on that one, shelving some of that thinking process, not because Bob had taken umbrage with it at all but because I realised just how much sense he made and how much my ideas didn’t! That said, he also mentioned how I’d used a particular word in my writing which he’d never come across before (a word that I’d taken for granted that most people would know; I kept the word in). Some of my writing ended up as a bit of a jumble and I naively thought how the editor (Bob, for my work) would sort that out. Instead, Bob accepted everything I wrote. This isn’t a tale of thinking Bob slack: this is a tale of Bob trusting other writers. At the same time, he was writing a chapter of his own for the same publication and he sent me an early draft, asking me to tell him what made sense and what didn’t, so I told him what I thought. He thanked me for it.

When it’s too late to be able to take action because someone has left us, isn’t it always the way that we think we should like to have done something more or again with them? I should like to have talked more with Bob about his previous writing, of which there was plenty, but in particular (and in the spirit of honest feedback): Bob, why is the second part of Play Types: Speculations and Possibilities a bit of an exercise in taking it all a little further than it really needed to be?; Can we talk about a line that’s troubled me for a long time in Evolutionary Playwork where you write about small children (under fives) in violent interactions and how they should be ‘literally picked up and separated by, say, ten metres’?; I’ve got stacks of anecdotal ‘evidence’ to suggest I can comfortably contest the received wisdom, Bob, about ‘minimal interaction’-type thinking, and here’s a starting point to argue the toss over, if you’ll humour me (from First Claim), where you write, around the subject of adulteration, how ‘it is essential that any direct playful engagement [with children] . . . is kept to a minimum and even then it should be justifiable.’

That all said, as I’ve just flipped through some of Bob’s books to find these aspects above, seeing again all those dog-eared post-it notes stuck between the pages with my writing scrawled on them, there’s so much more of his writing and thinking that has influenced me than I appreciated. It’s stuck in the deeper regions of the brain, appropriately enough, given how he wrote and stimulated plenty on the subject of play and the brain. Here’s something that I’ve had with me for quite a while (from Evolutionary Playwork: ‘ . . . the biggest problem with the ‘zone of proximal development’ approach [Vygotsky: and others’ use of the term ‘scaffolding’] is that adult help will introduce ‘short-cuts’ . . .’ My notes simply state: ‘neurological short-cuts’. I think of this often when I’m tempted to (or actually do) find the end of the cellotape roll for a child who can’t or won’t do it for themselves.

In the same book, Bob also writes about his IMEE ‘protocol for reflective practice’, namely: thinking about what one’s Intuition, Memory from personal childhood, Experience as a playworker, and Evidence from the literature tell us in various playwork situations. I can’t say just how many times I’ve put this thinking into operation. Another of his models is his ‘Playwork Approaches’, also in this book, whereby he details a ‘cylindrical scale’ of interaction between playworker and child and I’ve been every one of these on this scale, though I know now where I settle most.

Bob wrote so much of interest to a playworker that I’m minded to read everything I have all over again. There’s bound to be more that can be gleaned now that I’m a little longer in the tooth than the first few times around the reading block, and the thing is, Bob talked the talk, but he also walked the walk when I was still a child myself, in nylon 1970s trousers!

I could write all day and evening, though I have to stop (or pause) somewhere, but it would be remiss of me not to mention, again, how he once told me (regarding his play types writing) how he wished he ‘hadn’t written the bloody things’; I’d like to note again how I once found myself, by chance, literally sat at the feet of Bob as he sat in a comfy chair at a conference and, grown adult and experienced playworker as I was, this was fine (though I’ll prostrate myself for no-one, sorry Bob, unless I’m cued in a play frame!); I’d like to relate, again, the story of how Bob came to visit us at the adventure playground in London, just to observe the goings-on of play, and I remember well how there was a water balloon fight going on and a child ran into the hall dripping and leaking his ammunition and I’m afraid I rather lost my cool with him, only to find Bob stood behind me: I was embarrassed and apologised profusely to him (Bob, not the child), but he just shrugged, saying, ‘It’s no problem, fella.’

Lastly then, for now at least, I’ve just come across another nod-worthy line in Evolutionary Playwork: ‘A recent [2012, 2nd Ed.] UK Central Government Strategic Document stated that from now on (because they were making funds available) children will be expected to treat one another with respect when they play. This is as biologically idiotic as it is politically attractive.’ This is my respect for you, because I want to give it.
 
 
References:

Hughes, B. (2001), The first claim. Play Wales: Cardiff.

Hughes, B. (2006), Play types speculations and possibilities. The London Centre for Playwork Education and Training: London.

Hughes, B. (2012), Evolutionary playwork. 2nd Ed. Abingdon: Routledge.
 
 

Moments of being alive: of the kings and queens of the grounds of play

Once upon a time, not so very long ago (just last week, in fact), I was cycling home in the pouring rain and I stopped on the path nearby a boy of about 12 or 13, both of us at the traffic lights. A little farther up the path were a couple more boys of about the same age, waiting at the next set of lights. The road was flooded from the deluge and the boys, all in full school uniform, were clearly keen not to cross the road but to experience the great splashes of water that might come up from the car tyres as they passed, drenching them further still. They were having a great time.

There’s something about the rain for some children. I’ve known plenty (as maybe many of us have) who just like to stand out in it, no coats on, arms out, heads tipped back, letting the water fall onto their faces: the whole feel of it, the sensory stimulation, is all and everything in the moment. The late and still much missed Dr Stuart Lester had the view that ‘playful moments temporarily enliven the practicalities of everyday life, vibrant moments where life is a little more and there is greater satisfaction in being alive’ (attributed 2019). In the foreword of Play for a Change (Lester and Russell, 2008), Adrian Voce writes that play is ‘evidently simply how children enjoy being alive in the world now.’ In my own words: ‘Play just is.’

At the start of summer, I was invited to do a little playworking in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, London, with the very excellent Penny Wilson and Assemble Play. Penny has bags and bags full of organza fabric, which she and the other playworkers hang around to create a colour forest that flows in the breeze, and the children run in and out of it, let the thin layers flow over their skins, over their heads, rolling and sitting and hiding. Similarly the flow of fabric and air created by a parachute wing, attached around a tree and pulled on a rope by an adult, creates moment upon moment upon moment of in the moment appeal. Nothing else seems to matter in the play.

Over the summer, I was playworking a couple of times per week in either a town or village around the New Forest area. Every week, a child of about three or four years of age would be with us and, every week, she asked for the bubbles out. We made countless green and purple shimmerings, big and small, and they were either chased down and popped or they escaped and were watched and watched and watched, up and up into the sky. Other children ran through the ever-drying stream bed because the water had completely disappeared in the seemingly endless heat, and en mass they ran out through the trees, up the low branches that came out almost horizontal at the base, up the incline, up and up, jumped down, ran around again. What else mattered here but this?

Play is, in effect, a celebration of the possible of the now, of the potential of wherever the child or children are, right in the spontaneity of the present (even, or maybe especially, if it comes loaded with a string of repetitions or ongoings from previous play): though not all play is surrounded by laughter; some play can be seen as strictly serious (maybe all play is serious in some sense?). Play, for children, is of the real world, is the real world. Play is real. Whatever play is to the observing or studious adult, this idea is a construct of their own devising. Whatever it is that adults might think, play for children is something else.

This summer saw stones thrown at the opposite stream bank and then the water was traversed on pot stilts, so as not to get the shoes wet, before those shoes were taken off and thrown across again. Children rolled down artificial hills and climbed up natural trees. They threw paper aeroplanes or sat and perused the world from inside a gold-lined ship, which was (to the undiscerning eye) a long strip of something or other wrapped around the picnic benches. Other children carried a long, long plastic chain from one place to another, and then discarded it, in the manner that logs or chunks of tree stumps will often just be transported from place to place for the sake of it.

All these places and their times, their moments, manifest in my mind as grounds of play (everywhere’s a playground possibility: take away the fences of the designated and often poorly provisioned fixed equipment enclosures and twist the words into something else to see what might transpire). Everywhere is a possible now, a potential for the being alive, even if for ‘fleeting’ moments. Yet, moments can last a lot, lot longer than we might think them to. Not only can they stack up, being repeated, being added to and shifted in the overall flow of it all, but children will often say something along the lines of ‘Do you remember that time we . . .?’ to one another, or ‘Once, over there, we did . . .’ to adults trusted with the insight, trusted because of their understanding.

These are stories of once upon a time, of moments, of being alive. They ring out everywhere and many, many of them we’re not told directly with the words: we’re told them through the observation, through the awareness that they might be there, anywhere, at any time. We ought really to give play more respect, because it is the very essence of being for the child or children in our midst. It is of the real, is the real world, it is real. In another adult construct, the children are due such respect for what they know and see and for what they are: these the kings and queens of the grounds of play (and those who know, of Assemble Play, will understand the reference here).

References:

Lester, S. (2019). As attributed on PlayGlos Facebook feed.

Lester, S. and Russell, W. (2008), Play for a change. London: Play England/National Children’s Bureau.

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The forest of children: collaboration and connectivity

I, and my words, have wintered and now it’s almost spring. What of play, now, after these months of thinking, reading, always either being in with empathy, reflecting on or observing around this most ineffable of sustenances? I recently came across an article that seemed to link with my previous recent writings embracing mutual aid, collaboration and connectivity. The article (Let’s do branch: how trees socialise and help their neighbours by Amy-Jane Beer, 2019) is, admittedly, published primarily as a paid-for product placement link in an online national newspaper; however, glazing over that, I was caught up by the analogy I found myself conjuring of a forest of children, en mass, at play.

Despite appearances, trees are social beings. For a start, they talk to each other. They’re also sensing, co-operating and collaborating . . .

Read as: Despite appearances, children are social beings. For a start, they talk to each other. They’re also sensing, co-operating and collaborating . . .

Well, we know that children interact, for sure, but do we know how it is they communicate, in all their various, glorious, subtle, complex, overlaid and interlaced formations? They can manifest their many complexities to one another (and to and between them and any playworking-minded adults) in such astute and beautiful, brave and careful intricacies. There are many who can’t, or won’t, see such things because maybe their focusings are fraught or frayed

. . . the phenomenon known as ‘crown shyness’, in which similarly-sized trees of the same species appear to be respecting each other’s space was recognised almost a century ago. Sometimes, instead of interlacing and jostling for light, the branches of immediate neighbours stop short of one another, leaving a polite gap.

Children move: they always seem to be moving, physically, but even when this isn’t so perceptible, they’re still moving, emotionally, psychologically, socially. Children are choreography in action. It’s easy to see when they’re playing ‘tag’, say, spinning towards and away from one another, but we might also consider how there is an emotional, psychological, social choreography in action too. It isn’t the ‘polite gap’ of physical trees or children that I wish to pay attention to here: it is the honour of ‘being a fellow child’ that I see, despite the occasional disagreement. There are small courtesies and allowances paid to one another, which are replete with knowing and feeling what it is in being ‘child’.

If trees can be shy at their branch-tips, more recent research shows they are anything but at their roots. In a forest, the hair-like tips of individual root systems not only overlap, but can interconnect, sometimes directly via natural grafts, but also extensively via networks of underground fungal threads, or mycorrhizae. Through these connections, trees can share water, sugars and other nutrients, and pass chemical and electrical messages to one another.

This is the nub of things. The forest of children is an interconnected affair, below the surface of what the many adults think they see or hear or know. It never ceases to amaze how the smallest particle or packet of information can fizz around the underground, along the root system and its off-shoots, to surface again elsewhere or elsewhen, maybe whole or maybe slightly modified but always passed without adult discernment. Children inhabit a culture, an extensive rhizomatic array, way beneath and beyond the forgotten comprehension of many adults of the local system above the ground.

Canadian biologist Suzanne Simard . . . describes the largest individual trees in a forest as hubs or ‘mother trees’. Mothers have the deepest, most extensive roots, and are able to supplement smaller trees with water and nutrients, allowing saplings to thrive even in heavy shade.

I have seen this mother phenomenon in action, but never really realised it as something akin to the trees until thinking recently. One child, girl or boy, of any age, quietly, humbly sustains those around them, sacrificing something, ignoring something, giving something and walking away. They get on with their own play. We of the playworking-minded adults think we have the monopoly on such actions, and sometimes we do act in these ‘mother tree’ ways, but when we see a child, quietly, come to give an upset other the doll she was playing with, say, walking away then without a word or gesture (or another, sat quietly stroking the hair of her friend in front of her, for reasons we can only guess the depths of), we can realise otherwise.

Scientists have known for more than 40 years that if a tree is attacked by a leaf-eating animal, it releases ethylene gas. On detecting the ethylene, nearby trees prepare to repel boarders — boosting production of chemicals that make their leaves unpalatable, even toxic.

It isn’t beyond the realms of possibility (what do we adults really know?) to suggest that a locale of the forest of children can act in similar ways. An attack on one is a warning to the others, and the others can then seem just as toxic to the attacker looking for more to feed on. I have seen small groups closing ranks. The question remains, though: what, or who, here constitutes the toxic agent?

A sobering aspect of recent revelations is that many of these newly recognised ‘behaviours’ are limited to natural growth. In plantations, there are no mother trees, and there is very little connectivity. This is partly because of the way young trees are transplanted and partly because when they are thinned to prevent competition, what little underground connectivity neighbours have established is severed. Seen in this light, modern forestry practices begin to seem almost monstrous: plantations are not communities but crowds of mute, factory-farmed individuals, felled before they have ever really lived.

This paragraph, to me, is very poignant. I shall leave you to draw your own conclusions of minutiae and wholenesses on it.

For this playworking-minded writer, it suffices to say that we can affect a positivity of nurture, in all manner of circumstances and to some degree, but it’s better if the nature of connectivity isn’t stripped away or trammelled on to start with.
 
 

Symbiotic homeostatic disequilibrium in playworking interaction (link to paper)

At the risk of confusing the poor search-bots, this post is — part — a duplication of a separate recently published page on this site, being from a file of my online papers as it is. I post the abstract and link here as a means of maximising initial exposure to the writing. First the preamble, however.

In May this year, I attended a gathering of play and playwork people in Cambridge (PlayEd 2018). Discussions and further communications around that time and subsequently, with Gordon Sturrock, resulted in the co-authored paper linked to below. This paper is a synthesis of some aspects of one of Gordon’s prompter conference papers, written communications from the same via ensuing small collective and personal correspondence, and my own reading research, experiential input and writing. As such, the resulting paper is a fusion, a process in keeping with the content.

It is fully anticipated that there will be disagreement with some of that content from within the playwork ‘bubble’; however, there will — I trust — be those who connect with it. Either way, the intention is to open up the discussion on what those of us who call ourselves playworkers do, and how we are.

You can read the paper via the PDF link at the bottom of this post, or you can access all of the text and link content below via the Play Connectivity tab in the header above (or here: Play Connectivity) — that should confuse the search-bots plenty but it does give you plenty of easy access choices!
 
 
Abstract

Playwork’s key claim is its unique manner of working for and with children. It currently suffers, however, from a lack of consensus regarding the benefits of its application. This paper challenges the dilution of playwork practice in acknowledging the art, grace and wisdom in connectivity of playworking. Drawing primarily on Antonio Damasio’s neurobiological analysis, the homeostatic disequilibrium operation at the core of body/neural intra-action is detected as reflected in the interaction of organisms.

In consideration of some key concepts of social ecology – consociation, mutual aid, co-operativity rather than competition, rhizomatic rather than hierarchical structures – and the neurobiological study on individuals’ feelings, emotive responses, affect and culture, this paper discusses the evolving phenomenon of the playworking adult and child at play in terms of a symbiotic being and becoming.
 
 
An auditing of symbiotic homeostatic disequilibrium in operation is currently being developed.

Please click below to open a PDF copy of this paper. Please feel free to share, without alteration, and credit appropriately if citing from it. Discussion is embraced and encouraged. Thank you.
 
Symbiotic Homeostatic Disequilibrium in Playworking Interaction (Oct 2018)
 
 

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Away in the play and the still of the wild woods

It’s late at night, late at least for these younger children, wrapped in blankets or wrapped into parents, at a small fire, in a small clearing in the woods, nowhere near concrete or traffic or towns or cities, somewhere deep in the middle of Kent. I’m drawn over to this side of the camp by the soft sounds of someone playing the guitar. I sit down on the grass by the pyramid frame that’s standing above the low flames. It’s warm here and there are half a dozen children gathered around, listening quietly to the low music. Rachael, the camp band’s singer, passes me the guitar: play something, she says, whilst she attends to the children’s needs (hot chocolate or marshmallows? It’s already drifting in space and memory, a week on). I can only play a few chords. It’s OK, I’m told by Jim, the barman of the barn-bar, the ukulele player, you play more than me! I play very low because I’m really not that good, and I stop because one of the girls wants to sing a song. She says she’s making it up as she goes along: she sings as she looks into the flames, repeating repeating the refrain.

Here we are again. I have been to this small place for five years in my returns now, every May. There are familiar faces and new families. There are maybe thirty or forty children, I suppose, or it feels like it, mostly younger, though a handful are older. It doesn’t take long for the new to fall into the pace and feel of here. This year, because I’m working on my own, I set up the gazebo at the end of the clearing, just ahead of the dirt mounds which, later, I hear some children talking about: look, the playground’s still here. There is a rope swing and a tyre swing; there is a plank of wood, which some children manufacture as a standing see-saw, and some lean it experimentally against the old caravan, later, as I see from a distance, using it as a means to reach the rope; there is the shallow dirt basin where other years’ play took place; a punch bag hangs nearby — I can hear the rhythmic whacking of sticks hitting it, even a hundred yards or so away at my tent, on the edges of the clearing corner where Bec and Dru and Amy have set up a woodcrafting place, where Dru whittles spoons and strews the ground with shavings from other workings, where the wool is woven, where the little dogs wander, and through which the children navigate, en route for their own camp in the deep green luminosity of the woods just beyond.

At nights the candles down the track are lit. I stand at the edge of the clearing, beyond the barn, looking down and down the narrow, shallow slope towards where the lake is in the dark, and the black is always the very blackest down there through the trees, and the small smudges of those candle lights, in two ragged receding roughly parallel lines, always catch my attention. Places like these, sights and the feel of all and suchlike can, and has, made its way into other writings of flow and fiction. Sometime, somewhere along the way of the weekend, I remember a conversation in passing, with a father, who told me how he watched the space station going over with his child. In the night, one night, I emerge from the trees, from under the rickety old metal-roofed shack that creaks with the wood of the trunks, from where I have been talking and eating with a friend re-met, and the sky is strobing intermittently. I wonder if my eyes need to readjust, but it’s far-off lightning sparking the dark. The rain comes, just as I close my tent zip up, but I don’t hear the storm that passes over.

I forget the order of things. It doesn’t matter at all. I’m at the fire bowl in the woodcrafts corner of the clearing, one night, and from where I’m sitting, just looking out, drinking beer, being still, I can see the barn and there are twists of light around the wood struts of the shelter in front of this. Rachael is singing and the guitar and ukulele are in accompaniment and I just catch the flickerings of a child there and she’s dancing. She’s using the light strings, playing with the interactions, twisting her hands and arms around, turning around and around and down and up. The night is for play as well as the day.

Last year, in the early mornings as we camped along a track in a van a little way out from the clearing, we were often greeted, on stretched extraction or coffee making, by a young boy, maybe five, who would bring us sticks as presents. Oh, thanks, I would say, a stick. I’d sweep my hand across the vista of the forest: we were looking for one of these (or words such as these). He trailed us in our settings-up and takings-down. This year, I see him and I say hello and I call him by my remembrance of his name. I remember you, do you remember me? He looks at me, briefly, matter-of-factly, turning down his lips and shrugging his shoulders: No. I’m not aggrieved! I’m amused: ego has no place here.

Later, in the baking sun-trap down by the lake, I sit amongst the tall daisies with him and his younger brother, in a small clearing of our own devising. I have bubbles here, because I said I would, and a box of bits and bobs, because the children seemed to like this the day before, on a larger scale, and some clay, because one girl said she’d like this. It is a little odd, really, because the whole lake is lined with clay, but I take the darker stuff down anyway. The boys want to know what might happen if this clay I’ve brought gets wet. The oldest says it in a squeaky, experimental, half-hopeful kind of way. Go get some water, I say to him, pointing to the lake: there’s loads down there. He comes back with the biscuit tin I’ve given him half-filled. In goes the clay and we squeeze it between our fingers so that it squirts out of all the in-betweens.

Plenty of children seem to like the clay, the previous day, getting good and messy on the tarpaulin beneath the gazebo. The sun creeps across the ground, under the canvas roof, and wordlessly, like a sun dial, we all slowly shift and edge along and around with it, keeping in the shade as the day goes on. There are experiments of bubbles in the afternoon, when plenty of families have gone elsewhere on-site, woodcrafting, forest-schooling, and so on. I judge it an opportune time. There are a handful of children and parents still around. I have several containers full of this year’s batch of home-made bubble mix, and I have bubble-wands made from elastic and bamboo. There is a small gathering, a small to and fro, of younger children dipping and lifting and blowing softly or too suddenly, waving and flapping, holding the sticks to the breeze, floating and popping bubbles, or chasing them, just chasing them, as children are often wont to do. I look up, sometime (the bright idea of putting the tubs and containers into a larger plastic crate, in case of spillages, having dawned on me), and there with bubble-wands in hand, experimenting, are just three fathers: three dads, me, and a supply of bubble mixture.

In the shade of one hot day, under the gazebo, some younger girls are carefully trying to thread beads onto what will be necklaces or bracelets for themselves or for their fathers, who are sat there with them. I’m nearby and I feel a need to say something genuine, though I hear myself as I say it and it comes out oddly: I say to one of the dads there how good I see it to be that he, and the others around, can interact with their children in this way of play. I do mean it, though I hope it doesn’t come across so patronising as I hear it. It is good because you don’t always see it.

Some children come back time and again to the gazebo, to the dirt ‘playground’, to the bubbles. Some children are more content roaming in the woods, and these are the children just seen in passing, in and out, in between. As I sit in the shade with the clay and the paper and the beads, the feathers and the fabric, and the suchlike all spread out and around, a younger girl of maybe four, and early on without having really had a proper conversation yet with me at all, leans in, telling me her genuine consideration of me, though in words, and without regard for adult sensibilities, in a way only a maybe four year old can. Later, a small green caterpillar labours across the tarpaulin. The other children are suddenly intrigued. The maybe four year old stands, a little wobbly, maybe she’s off-balance, landing a foot down suddenly, squashing the caterpillar flat. Maybe she didn’t mean it; maybe she did. She doesn’t shrug as she steadies herself for whatever her next play is to be, but she might as well do.

At the lake, with the clay and water boys, the slightly older of the two is taken by the sight of a fat furry caterpillar. He wants to take it up, but I’m mindful of the previous day’s episode. I try to dissuade him but he’s adamant. He knows about cocoons, he told me earlier, and I needn’t be in his way here: he picks up the caterpillar with a lolly stick and examines it, placing it down carefully on a long daisy stalk when he’s done. When he looks around again, he tells me it’s gone. Where did it go? he asks. I don’t know: perhaps its found a place out of the sun.

Out of the direct sun, but where the moss on the fallen branches on the ground is a bright and luminous green between the trees, across a ditch where the children have a bridge, they’ve declared a ‘no adult zone’. One of our number is camped by the metal-roofed shack on our side, just beyond the woodcraft corner of the clearing. He hears the conversations from the children’s side. He wants to go over, to infiltrate, to play, but we stay on our side: we respect the lay of the land. Over there, over the ditch, the children concoct plans, create their domain, they just are. I know they’re there. I sit at my tent or amongst the wood shavings of the crafters and see how the children have two routes through: they use more or less two straight lines, either directly across the branches laid down here, along through and then in between the small and large tents and into the ferns, past the shack, and towards the ditch, or the other way straight over the low bunting flags of the woodcraft camp and between the vans and on. Children’s routes often pay no heed to adults’ demarcations.

It is evening on the last day. Some families have left already; there are some spaces between tents. I lay out the parachute because we haven’t used it yet and because I think the children who are scattered variously in the clearing might find it and play something with it. I ask permission of the nearest campers because it is, effectively, in their back garden. Most of the children don’t see it at first, it being off the beaten track. Then, eventually, when a parent calls out that there’s a parachute out, a wave of children appear from out of the metaphorical woodwork. I think the play might form organically but immediately it becomes directed by an older girl, who I’ve known these past few years or so. Something curious happens on the way of the parachute play: all the games she leads the other children towards are standard, as known (albeit with variations on names, as I know them), but she adopts a very precise style of doing things. It is as if she’s copying a teacher she knows or someone similar. She adopts an air and a voice far beyond her years. At one point, she stops a game of ‘fruit salad’ mid-flow because, she says, it just isn’t going right; the apples and the pears are running when they shouldn’t be, everything’s terribly mixed up . . . I tell her that it doesn’t matter but she’s determined and adamant. I tell her that she maybe ought to be quicker because she’ll lose the younger children’s attentions, but she bats on regardless in her own style. The play happens. The younger children go with the flow. All the children are children here.

Here we are, in a small clearing in the woods, nowhere near concrete or traffic or towns or cities, somewhere deep in the middle of Kent. As has been my year-on-year realisation: it is a privilege being here.
 
 

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