The First Years 8 ; Neighbourhood Games

Slide in our Garden 

     The picture above shows the slide in our garden. Behind is the terrace house where the neighbourhood boys and girls lived. We, the kids of the 60s were most fortunate to live the era of the 60s. They were such carefree, joyous times, I recall during my Primary School days in St Andrew's I only had tuition in 1 subject, Chinese. In the Millenium age, it is practically every other household who has tuition for their children in maths, science, 2nd language over. The children of school going age from the 90s to current day (2016) have a myriad of stresses,ranging from their school homework, enrichment classes, co-curricular activities, tuition, ballet,swimming, music lessons etc. etc. from Primary 1 onwards. 

    We hardly took homework home. It was garden play, catching spiders, flying kites and then home. Nothing else mattered.  When it rained heavily, the drains were overflowing with dirty water and the Malay boys from the nearby kampung came and dumped themselves into the storm drains. We were more civilised, opting to stay indoors. 

       There was no "I am richer than you' crap or where we stayed was the district 9, 10, 11 nonsense. We kids were equally poor as I recall. I did not even understand the concept of wealth (or lack of). As long as we had our play, some food to eat, some place to sleep, our parents and friends, we were in kids heaven. No laptop PCs, smart phones, phone apps (and the scams that are now so prevalent), no IPads, no bullying by Facebook, no Facetime, no internet. 

        Those were simple times, which we can never go back to.   

Me, Liang Puck, John and Poh San 

One of the wonderful games which we played endlessly was to find fighting spiders from the garden. There were these hibiscus plants, which whenever we saw 2 leaves stuck together, would likely be the nest of a spider. So we would clasp our hands and pull the leaves and catch the spider. It would be black in colour with 2 'arms'. So we would then keep them in an empty matchbox feeding them some leaves and preparing them for 'battle'. 

Battle or Fighting day would be when my friend and i would coax our spiders to confront each other, once. that was done, the spiders would by instinct or naturally 'fight' ; their arms would be out and 'fighting'.

One spider would inevitably run away and the other spider which stood its ground would be the 'winner'.

Simple game but oh so enjoyable !!!