Book description
From conkers to marbles, from British Bulldog to tag, not forgetting
'one potato, two potato' and 'eeny, meeny, miny, mo', The
Lore of the Playground looks at the games children have
enjoyed, the rhymes they have chanted and the rituals and traditions
they have observed over the past hundred years and more.
Each generation, it emerges, has had its own favourites - hoops and
tops in the 1930s, clapping games more recently. Some pastimes, such
as skipping, have proved remarkably resilient, their complicated rules
carefully handed down from one class to the next. Many are now the
stuff of distant memory. And some traditions have proved to be
strongly regional, loved by children in one part of the country,
unknown to those elsewhere. All are brilliantly and meticulously
recorded by Steve Roud, who has drawn on interviews with hundreds of
people aged from 8 to 80 to create a fascinating picture of all our childhoods.
Steve Roud has been researching British folklore for over thirty
years and is the joint author of the
Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore
, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song. He also compiles
the
Folk Song Index
and the
Broadside Index
, two internationally known computer databases of traditional folk and
popular song. He served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society
for over fifteen years. He lives in Sussex.
