Floor Games
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(H)erbert (G)eorge Wells >> Floor Games
EText by Alan Murray - North Carolina
FLOOR GAMES
by (H)erbert (G)eorge Wells
Contents
I. The Toys To Have
II. The Game Of The Wonderful Islands
III. Of The Building Of Cities
IV. Funiculars, Marble Towers, Castles And War Games,
But Very LIttle Of War Games
Section I
THE TOYS TO HAVE
The jolliest indoor games for boys and girls demand a floor, and the
home that has no floor upon which games may be played falls so far short
of happiness. It must be a floor covered with linoleum or cork carpet,
so that toy soldiers and such-like will stand up upon it, and of a color
and surface that will take and show chalk marks; the common green-
colored cork carpet without a pattern is the best of all. It must be no
highway to other rooms, and well lit and airy. Occasionally, alas! it
must be scrubbed--and then a truce to Floor Games. Upon such a floor may
be made an infinitude of imaginative games, not only keeping boys and
girls happy for days together, but building up a framework of spacious
and inspiring ideas in them for after life. The men of tomorrow will
gain new strength from nursery floors. I am going to tell of some of
these games and what is most needed to play them; I have tried them all
and a score of others like them with my sons, and all of the games here
illustrated have been set out by us. I am going to tell of them here
because I think what we have done will interest other fathers and
mothers, and perhaps be of use to them (and to uncles and such-like
tributary sub-species of humanity) in buying presents for their own and
other people's children.
Now, the toys we play with time after time, and in a thousand
permutations and combinations, belong to four main groups. We have (1)
SOLDIERS, and with these I class sailors, railway porters, civilians,
and the lower animals generally, such as I will presently describe in
greater detail; (2) BRICKS; (3) BOARDS and PLANKS; and (4) a lot of
CLOCKWORK RAILWAY ROLLING-STOCK AND RAILS. Also there are certain minor
objects--tin ships, Easter eggs, and the like--of which I shall make
incidental mention, that like the kiwi and the duck-billed platypus
refuse to be classified.
These we arrange and rearrange in various ways upon our floor, making a
world of them. In doing so we have found out all sorts of pleasant
facts, and also many undesirable possibilities; and very probably our
experience will help a reader here and there to the former and save him
from the latter. For instance, our planks and boards, and what one can
do with them, have been a great discovery. Lots of boys and girls seem
to be quite without planks and boards at all, and there is no regular
trade in them. The toyshops, we found, did not keep anything of the kind
we wanted, and our boards, which we had to get made by a carpenter, are
the basis of half the games we play. The planks and boards we have are
of various sizes. We began with three of two yards by one; they were
made with cross pieces like small doors; but these we found
unnecessarily large, and we would not get them now after our present
experience. The best thickness, we think, is an inch for the larger
sizes and three-quarters and a half inch for the smaller; and the best
sizes are a yard square, thirty inches square, two feet, and eighteen
inches square--one or two of each, and a greater number of smaller ones,
18 x 9, 9 x 9, and 9 x 4-1/2. With the larger ones we make islands and
archipelagos on our floor while the floor is a sea, or we make a large
island or a couple on the Venice pattern, or we pile the smaller on the
larger to make hills when the floor is a level plain, or they roof in
railway stations or serve as bridges, in such manner as I will presently
illustrate. And these boards of ours pass into our next most important
possession, which is our box of bricks.
(But I was nearly forgetting to tell this, that all the thicker and
larger of these boards have holes bored through them. At about every
four inches is a hole, a little larger than an ordinary gimlet hole.
These holes have their uses, as I will tell later, but now let me get on
to the box of bricks.)
This, again, wasn't a toy-shop acquisition. It came to us by gift from
two generous friends, unhappily growing up and very tall at that; and
they had it from parents who were one of several families who shared in
the benefit of a Good Uncle. I know nothing certainly of this man except
that he was a Radford of Plymouth. I have never learned nor cared to
learn of his commoner occupations, but certainly he was one of those
shining and distinguished uncles that tower up at times above the common
levels of humanity. At times, when we consider our derived and
undeserved share of his inheritance and count the joys it gives us, we
have projected half in jest and half in earnest the putting together of
a little exemplary book upon the subject of such exceptional men:
Celebrated Uncles, it should be called; and it should stir up all who
read it to some striving at least towards the glories of the avuncular
crown. What this great benefactor did was to engage a deserving
unemployed carpenter through an entire winter making big boxes of wooden
bricks for the almost innumerable nephews and nieces with which an
appreciative circle of brothers and sisters had blessed him. There are
whole bricks 4-1/2 inches x 2-1/4 x 1-1/8; and there are quarters--
called by those previous owners (who have now ascended to, we hope but
scarcely believe, a happier life near the ceiling) "piggys." You note
how these sizes fit into the sizes of the boards, and of each size--we
have never counted them, but we must have hundreds. We can pave a dozen
square yards of floor with them.
How utterly we despise the silly little bricks of the toyshops! They are
too small to make a decent home for even the poorest lead soldiers, even
if there were hundreds of them, and there are never enough, never nearly
enough; even if you take one at a time and lay it down and say, "This is
a house," even then there are not enough. We see rich people, rich
people out of motor cars, rich people beyond the dreams of avarice,
going into toyshops and buying these skimpy, sickly, ridiculous pseudo-
boxes of bricklets, because they do not know what to ask for, and the
toyshops are just the merciless mercenary enemies of youth and happiness
--so far, that is, as bricks are concerned. Their unfortunate under-
parented offspring mess about with these gifts, and don't make very much
of them, and put them away; and you see their consequences in after life
in the weakly-conceived villas and silly suburbs that people have built
all round big cities. Such poor under-nourished nurseries must needs
fall back upon the Encyclopedia Britannica, and even that is becoming
flexible on India paper! But our box of bricks almost satisfies. With
our box of bricks we can scheme and build, all three of us, for the best
part of the hour, and still have more bricks in the box.
So much now for the bricks. I will tell later how we use cartridge paper
and cardboard and other things to help in our and of the decorative make
of plasticine. Of course, it goes without saying that we despise those
foolish, expensive, made-up wooden and pasteboard castles that are sold
in shops--playing with them is like playing with somebody else's dead
game in a state of rigor mortis. Let me now say a little about toy
soldiers and the world to which they belong. Toy soldiers used to be
flat, small creatures in my own boyhood, in comparison with the
magnificent beings one can buy to-day. There has been an enormous
improvement in our national physique in this respect. Now they stand
nearly two inches high and look you broadly in the face, and they have
the movable arms and alert intelligence of scientifically exercised men.
You get five of them mounted or nine afoot in a box for a small price.
We three like those of British manufacture best; other makes are of
incompatible sizes, and we have a rule that saves much trouble, that all
red coats belong to G. P. W., and all other colored coats to F. R. W.,
all gifts, bequests, and accidents notwithstanding. Also we have
sailors; but, since there are no red-coated sailors, blue counts as red.
Then we have "beefeaters," (Footnote; The warders in the Tower of London
are called "beefeaters"; the origin of the term is obscure.) Indians,
Zulus, for whom there are special rules. We find we can buy lead dogs,
cats, lions, tigers, horses, camels, cattle, and elephants of a
reasonably corresponding size, and we have also several boxes of railway
porters, and some soldiers we bought in Hesse-Darmstadt that we pass off
on an unsuspecting home world as policemen. But we want civilians very
badly. We found a box of German from an exaggerated curse of militarism,
and even the grocer wears epaulettes. This might please Lord Roberts and
Mr. Leo Maxse, but it certainly does not please us. I wish, indeed, that
we could buy boxes of tradesmen: a blue butcher, a white baker with a
loaf of standard bread, a merchant or so; boxes of servants, boxes of
street traffic, smart sets, and so forth. We could do with a judge and
lawyers, or a box of vestrymen. It is true that we can buy Salvation
Army lasses and football players, but we are cold to both of these. We
have, of course, boy scouts. With such boxes of civilians we could have
much more fun than with the running, marching, swashbuckling soldiery
that pervades us. They drive us to reviews; and it is only emperors,
kings, and very silly small boys who can take an undying interest in
uniforms and reviews.
And lastly, of our railways, let me merely remark here that we have
always insisted upon one uniform gauge and everything we buy fits into
and develops our existing railway system. Nothing is more indicative of
the wambling sort of parent and a coterie of witless, worthless uncles
than a heap of railway toys of different gauges and natures in the
children's playroom. And so, having told you of the material we have,
let me now tell you of one or two games (out of the innumerable many)
that we have played. Of course, in this I have to be a little
artificial. Actual games of the kind I am illustrating here have been
played by us, many and many a time, with joy and happy invention and no
thought of publication. They have gone now, those games, into that
vaguely luminous and iridescent into which happiness have tried out
again points in world of memories all love-engendering must go. But we
our best to set them and recall the good them here.
Section II
THE GAME OF THE WONDERFUL ISLANDS
In this game the floor is the sea. Half--rather the larger half because
of some instinctive right of primogeniture--is assigned to the elder of
my two sons (he is, as it were, its Olympian), and the other half goes
to his brother. We distribute our boards about the sea in an
archipelagic manner. We then dress our islands, objecting strongly to
too close a scrutiny of our proceedings until we have done. Here, in the
illustration, is such an archipelago ready for its explorers, or rather
on the verge of exploration. There are altogether four islands, two to
the reader's right and two to the left, and the nearer ones are the more
northerly; it is as many as we could get into the camera. The northern
island to the right is most advanced in civilization, and is chiefly
temple. That temple has a flat roof, diversified by domes made of half
Easter eggs and cardboard cones. These are surmounted by decorative work
of a flamboyant character in plasticine, designed by G. P. W. An
oriental population crowds the courtyard and pours out upon the roadway.
Note the grotesque plasticine monsters who guard the portals, also by G.
P. W., who had a free hand with the architecture of this remarkable
specimen of eastern religiosity. They are nothing, you may be sure, to
the gigantic idols inside, out of the reach of the sacrilegious camera.
To the right is a tropical thatched hut. The thatched roof is really
that nice ribbed paper that comes round bottles--a priceless boon to
these games. All that comes into the house is saved for us. The owner of
the hut lounges outside the door. He is a dismounted cavalry-corps man,
and he owns one cow. His fence, I may note, belonged to a little wooden
farm we bought in Switzerland. Its human inhabitants are scattered; its
beasts follow a precarious living as wild guinea-pigs on the islands to
the south.
Your attention is particularly directed to the trees about and behind
the temple, which thicken to a forest on the further island to the
right. These trees we make of twigs taken from trees and bushes in the
garden, and stuck into holes in our boards. Formerly we lived in a house
with a little wood close by, and our forests were wonderful. Now we are
restricted to our garden, and we could get nothing for this set out but
jasmine and pear. Both have wilted a little, and are not nearly such
spirited trees as you can make out of fir trees, for instance. It is for
these woods chiefly that we have our planks perforated with little
holes. No tin trees can ever be so plausible and various and jolly as
these. With a good garden to draw upon one can make terrific sombre
woods, and then lie down and look through them at lonely horsemen or
wandering beasts.
That further island on the right is a less settled country than the
island of the temple. Camels, you note, run wild there; there is a sort
of dwarf elephant, similar to the now extinct kind of which one finds
skeletons in Malta, pigs, a red parrot, and other such creatures, of
lead and wood. The pear-trees are fine. It is those which have attracted
white settlers (I suppose they are), whose thatched huts are to be seen
both upon the beach and in-land. By the huts on the beach lie a number
of pear-tree logs; but a raid of negroid savages from the to the left is
in the only settler is the man in a adjacent island progress, and
clearly visible rifleman's uniform running inland for help. Beyond,
peeping out among the trees, are the supports he seeks.
These same negroid savages are as bold as they are ferocious. They cross
arms of the sea upon their rude canoes, made simply of a strip of
cardboard. Their own island, the one to the south-left, is a rocky
wilderness containing caves. Their chief food is the wild-goat, but in
pursuit of these creatures you will also sometimes find the brown bear,
who sits--he is small but perceptible to the careful student--in the
mouth of his cave. Here, too, you will distinguish small guinea pig-
like creatures of wood, in happier days the inhabitants of that Swiss
farm. Sunken rocks off this island are indicated by a white foam which
takes the form of letters, and you will also note a whirlpool between
the two islands to the right.
Finally comes the island nearest to the reader on the left. This also is
wild and rocky, inhabited not by negroid blacks, but by Indians, whose
tents, made by F. R. W. out of ordinary brown paper and adorned with
chalk totems of a rude and characteristic kind, pour forth their fierce
and well-armed inhabitants at the intimation of an invader. The rocks on
this island, let me remark, have great mineral wealth. Among them are to
be found not only sheets and veins of silver paper, but great nuggets of
metal, obtained by the melting down of hopelessly broken soldiers in an
iron spoon. Note, too, the peculiar and romantic shell beach of this
country. It is an island of exceptional interest to the geologist and
scientific explorer. The Indians, you observe, have domesticated one
leaden and one wooden cow.
This is how the game would be set out. Then we build ships and explore
these islands, but in these pictures the ships are represented as
already arriving. The ships are built out of our wooden bricks on flat
keels made of two wooden pieces of 9 x 4-1/2; inches, which are very
convenient to push about over the floor. Captain G. P. W. is steaming
into the bay between the eastern and western islands. He carries heavy
guns, his ship bristles with an extremely aggressive soldiery, who
appear to be blazing away for the mere love of the thing. (I suspect him
of Imperialist intentions.) Captain F. R. W. is apparently at anchor
between his northern and southern islands. His ship is of a slightly
more pacific type. I note on his deck a lady and a gentleman (of German
origin) with a bag, two of our all too rare civilians. No doubt the bag
contains samples and a small conversation dictionary in the negroid
dialects. (I think F. R. W. may turn out to be a Liberal.) Perhaps he
will sail on and rescue the raided huts, perhaps he will land and build
a jetty, and begin mining among the rocks to fill his hold with silver.
Perhaps the natives will kill and eat the gentleman with the bag. All
that is for Captain F. R. W. to decide.
You see how the game goes on. We land and alter things, and build and
rearrange, and hoist paper flags on pins, and subjugate populations, and
confer all the blessings of civilization upon these lands. We keep them
going for days. And at last, as we begin to tire of them, comes the
scrubbing brush, and we must burn our trees and dismantle our islands,
and put our soldiers in the little nests of drawers, and stand the
island boards up against the wall, and put everything away. Then
perhaps, after a few days, we begin upon some other such game, just as
we feel disposed. But it is never quite the same game, never. Another
time it may be wildernesses for example, and the boards are hills, and
never a drop of water is to be found except for the lakes and rivers we
may mark out in chalk. But after one example others are easy, and next I
will tell you of our way of making towns.
Section III
OF THE BUILDING OF CITIES
WE always build twin cities, like London and Westminster, or Buda-Pesth,
because two of us always want, both of them, to be mayors and municipal
councils, and it makes for local freedom and happiness to arrange it so;
but when steam railways or street railways are involved we have our
rails in common, and we have an excellent law that rails must be laid
down and switches kept open in such a manner that anyone feeling so
disposed may send a through train from their own station back to their
own station again without needless negotiation or the personal invasion
of anybody else's administrative area. It is an undesirable thing to
have other people bulging over one's houses, standing in one's open
spaces, and, in extreme cases, knocking down and even treading on one's
citizens. It leads at times to explanations that are afterwards
regretted.
We always have twin cities, or at the utmost stage of coalescence a city
with two wards, Red End and Blue End; we mark the boundaries very
carefully, and our citizens have so much local patriotism (Mr.
Chesterton will learn with pleasure) that they stray but rarely over
that thin little streak of white that bounds their municipal allegiance.
Sometimes we have an election for mayor; it is like a census but very
abusive, and Red always wins. Only citizens with two legs and at least
one arm and capable of standing up may vote, and voters may poll on
horseback; boy scouts and women and children do not vote, though there
is a vigorous agitation to remove these disabilities. Zulus and foreign-
looking persons, such as East Indian cavalry and American Indians, are
also disfranchised. So are riderless horses and camels; but the elephant
has never attempted to vote on any occasion, and does not seem to desire
the privilege. It influences public opinion quite sufficiently as it is
by nodding its head.
We have set out and I have photographed one of our cities to illustrate
more clearly the amusement of the game. Red End is to the reader's
right, and includes most of the hill on which the town stands, a shady
zoological garden, the town hall, a railway tunnel through the hill, a
museum (away in the extreme right-hand corner), a church, a rifle range,
and a shop. Blue End has the railway station, four or five shops,
several homes, a hotel, and a farm-house, close to the railway station.
The boundary drawn by me as overlord (who also made the hills and
tunnels and appointed the trees to grow) runs irregularly between the
two shops nearest the cathedral, over the shoulder in front of the town
hall, and between the farm and the rifle range.
The nature of the hills I have already explained, and this time we have
had no lakes or ornamental water. These are very easily made out of a
piece of glass--the glass lid of a box for example--laid upon silver
paper. Such water becomes very readily populated by those celluloid
seals and swans and ducks that are now so common. Paper fish appear
below the surface and may be peered at by the curious. But on this
occasion we have nothing of the kind, nor have we made use of a green-
colored tablecloth we sometimes use to drape our hills. Of course, a
large part of the fun of this game lies in the witty incorporation of
all sorts of extraneous objects. But the incorporation must be witty, or
you may soon convert the whole thing into an incoherent muddle of half-
good ideas.
I have taken two photographs, one to the right and one to the left of
this agreeable place. I may perhaps adopt a kind of guide-book style in
reviewing its principal features: I begin at the railway station. I have
made a rather nearer and larger photograph of the railway station, which
presents a diversified and entertaining scene to the incoming visitor.
Porters (out of a box of porters) career here and there with the trucks
and light baggage. Quite a number of our all-too-rare civilians parade
the platform: two gentlemen, a lady, and a small but evil-looking child
are particularly noticeable; and there is a wooden sailor with jointed
legs, in a state of intoxication as reprehensible as it is nowadays
happily rare. Two virtuous dogs regard his abandon with quiet scorn. The
seat on which he sprawls is a broken piece of some toy whose nature I
have long forgotten, the station clock is a similar fragment, and so is
the metallic pillar which bears the name of the station. So many toys,
we find, only become serviceable with a little smashing. There is an
allegory in this--as Hawthorne used to write in his diary.
("What is he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river?")
The fences at the ends of the platforms are pieces of wood belonging to
the game of Matador--that splendid and very educational construction
game, hailing, I believe, from Hungary. There is also, I regret to say,
a blatant advertisement of Jab's "Hair Color," showing the hair. (In the
photograph the hair does not come out very plainly.) This is by G. P.
W., who seems marked out by destiny to be the advertisement-writer of
the next generation. He spends much of his scanty leisure inventing and
drawing advertisements of imaginary commodities. Oblivious to many
happy, beautiful, and noble things in life, he goes about studying and
imitating the literature of the billboards. He and his brother write
newspapers almost entirely devoted to these annoying appeals. You will
note, too, the placard at the mouth of the railway tunnel urging the
existence of Jinks' Soap upon the passing traveller. The oblong object
on the placard represents, no doubt, a cake of this offensive and
aggressive commodity. The zoological garden flaunts a placard, "Zoo, two
cents pay," and the grocer's picture of a cabbage with "Get Them" is not
to be ignored. F. R. W. is more like the London County Council in this
respect, and prefers bare walls.
"Returning from the station," as the guide-books say, and "giving one
more glance" at the passengers who are waiting for the privilege of
going round the circle in open cars and returning in a prostrated
condition to the station again, and "observing" what admirable platforms
are made by our 9 x 4-1/2 pieces, we pass out to the left into the
village street. A motor omnibus (a one-horse hospital cart in less
progressive days) stands waiting for passengers; and, on our way to the
Cherry Tree Inn, we remark two nurses, one in charge of a child with a
plasticine head. The landlord of the inn is a small grotesque figure of
plaster; his sign is fastened on by a pin. No doubt the refreshment
supplied here has an enviable reputation, to judge by the alacrity with
which a number of riflemen move to-wards the door. The inn, by the by,
like the station and some private houses, is roofed with stiff paper.
These stiff-paper roofs are one of our great inventions. We get After
the game is over, we put these roofs inside one another and stick them
into the bookshelves. The roof one folds and puts away will live to roof
another day.
Proceeding on our way past the Cherry Tree, and resisting cosy
invitation of its portals, we come to the shopping quarter of the town.
The stock in windows is made by hand out of plasticine. We note the meat
and hams of "Mr. Woddy," the cabbages and carrots of "Tod & Brothers,"
the general activities of the "Jokil Co." shopmen. It is de rigueur with
our shop assistants that they should wear white helmets. In the street,
boy scouts go to and fro, a wagon clatters by; most of the adult
population is about its business, and a red-coated band plays along the
roadway. Contrast this animated scene with the mysteries of sea and
forest, rock and whirlpool, in our previous game. Further on is the big
church or cathedral. It is built in an extremely debased Gothic style;
it reminds us most of a church we once surveyed during a brief visit to
Rotterdam on our way up the Rhine. A solitary boy scout, mindful of the
views of Lord Haldane, enters its high portal. Passing the cathedral, we
continue to the museum. This museum is no empty boast; it contains
mineral specimens, shells--such great shells as were found on the
beaches of our previous game--the Titanic skulls of extinct rabbits and
cats, and other such wonders. The slender curious may lie down on the
floor and peep in at the windows.