Mumblety Peg

© John K. Taber, 2000

                    We passed the School, where Children strove
                    At Recess--in the Ring--
                                        Emily Dickinson

I remember many games in my childhood, games for boys, games for girls, and some for both. I played Mumblety Peg, Buck Buck, Ring-O-Leevio. Girls played hopscotch, jacks, skip rope. Hide-and-Seek and Giant Steps both could play.

We had games for the street or the empty lot, and games for school recess, games for the field and for the woods. There were games for different ages, and for the seasons.

We played stick ball in the street. The ball was an old sock wrapped with friction tape. The bat was a sawed off broomstick. If you hit it into old lady Pizzorusso's yard, it was an automatic out, because she cursed you in Italian and wouldn't let you retrieve the ball. If you hit it over the billboard it was an automatic home run because it could not be retrieved in time. Jemality could hit so hard that the ball not only cleared the billboard, it cleared the street on the other side of the billboard, and landed in the railroad embankment. The manhole was first base. There are only home plate and two bases in stick ball.

Another great street game was Kick the Can.

At school we played Red Rover and Buck Buck. And Mumblety Peg. Because I went to a school that was almost all Italian immigrants, we played this delightful Italian counting game where to a rhythm each pair of boys threw out from one to five fingers, stamped a foot, and yelled out an Italian number from two to ten trying to guess the total. Sometimes a boy would get mixed up, throw out one finger and yell sette, which was impossible. Then everyone laughed. The fun was the rhythm and guessing right, but nobody kept score, which is why I liked it.

The girls had many skip rope chants, some for single skipping, some for Double Dutch, a team game with two ropes that emphasized rhythm and cooperation. I still remember one of the chants:

Down by the river
Down by the sea
Johnny broke a bottle
And blamed it on me.

I told Ma,
Ma told Pa,
Johnny got a spanking,
So, ha ha ha.

Girls resent the greater freedom that boys enjoy. They feel it is unfair, and their resentment is expressed in the chant.

Before my mother died, I got her to teach me the skip rope chants she remembered from Manhattan where she grew up. She never lost her New York accent her whole life. Yet it was different from a Manhattan accent today. People don't realize it, but accents change over time. Here's a Manhattan skip rope chant from about 1910.

Marianna, Marianna
Ha ha ha,
Kissed her fella
On the Broadway ca'

I told Ma,
Ma told Pa,
Marianna, Marianna
Ha ha ha.

You need a New York accent for that chant to work. I suppose many people would not know what a Broadway car was. They were the old trolley cars.

An Italian immigrant chant was

Margarit-a Margarite
Go wash your feet
The Board of Health
Is across the street.

I mentioned Mumblety Peg to a guy at work, and he remembered playing it in his boyhood, but he had it confused with another knife game, Splits. We played Splits in the field. It requires a hunting knife, so could not be played in school. However, in the country, (I also lived in the country for a short time) boys did carry hunting knives, and Splits was played in the schoolyard.

I do not see kids playing the games we played when I was a child. I do not know what happened. All these games are gone.

From time immemorial, from the dawn of man, there has always been a Childhood Republic, free of adults, where these games were passed down from child to child without adult interference. There is a painting by Brueghel of peasant boys and girls at play in the Middle Ages. And if you look carefully you will see they are playing the same games we played. No adult teaches these games to a child. They are learned, and must be learned, from other children.

Children do not play these games anymore. Even the memory of them is gone except for an occasional older person such as myself, or certain scholars who specialize in childhood games, chants, and counting out rhymes.

I live in a nice, friendly town. Not one child has ever seen Mumblety Peg. The children do not play at all except in organized team sports, sponsored by organizations and supervised by adults. If a boy pulled out a pocket knife for Mumblety Peg, he would be jumped by horrified adults. His parents would be summoned to explain his offense. Jack knives are forbidden.

I do not know what happened, what broke the chain of time of the Childhood Republic. Sometimes I wonder if maybe middle class children never played unsupervised games of their own device. Maybe only peasant children and poor city children played such games, and the lack I think I see is an illusion that means only that I am now middle class.

But I'm not sure.

The New York Times had an article "Many Schools Putting an End to Child's Play"; by Dirk Johnson; 4/7/98. To the horror and against the protest of child development experts schools are eliminating "unstructured" play. It quoted a little girl who had to play with a computer but who wanted "to sit outside in the grass and look for ladybugs." The article said that the Cleveland Avenue grammar school, brand new in Atlanta, was built without a playground. Schools have no recess so a playground is unneeded. A principal said that recess was a waste of time.

It isn't unstructured play that is being eliminated. Natural children's games are highly structured with certain things done at specific times, to the accompaniment of obligatory words which must be just so. Natural children's games have their season and place, which every boy and girl has heeded since the beginning of time. There is a season for marbles, it cannot be played just any time. No child's game can be played just any way. There are words and rituals and ceremony to be observed.

It is independent structure that is being done away with. Children are prohibited from learning the socialization and negotiation skills needed to structure their own time and their own activities in their own way. Instead, the socialization and structure is not their own, it is someone else's and it is imposed upon them.

We are raising children to function well as employees, to believe they are achieving their goals when they are only fulfulling an anonymous superior's quota, and to think they are happy when perhaps they aren't. We are going to be an organized people of helpless persons.

Friends of ours are without nearby grandparents, and besides they are not on good terms with the real grandparents. They are quite concerned to do well by their children and when they failed to get their oldest girl in the very best school in Dallas, they were crushed. But they at least got their children into another private school.

Every year, the school has Grandparents day. The school requires grandparents to attend, and our friends were at wits end to comply. So they asked us to be grandparents for the day. I work, but my wife agreed the second year they asked us. They must have been desperate.

My wife played grandmother. She says that some of the children were so young. When I was a child, few of us went to kindergarten. Nowadays, kindergarten is considered too late, and children two and three years old are in school. My wife told me that the children did nothing on their own. Every moment was organized. Some of the children test the limit, and would offer "I want to ..." to the teacher. To which the teacher replied that that was not allowed at this time. The teachers have a practiced putdown for every natural childish urge. The teachers extolled structure. No child at that school was going to look at ladybugs unless told to. Certainly not on its own.

I got the urge to sneak into the School and teach the boys to play Mumblety Peg. I know children are not supposed to learn these games from adults but these are desperate times. It was just an idle thought. I would be arrested, although it would be interesting to see what the charges would be. Corrupting innocent children? Demented Grandfather Caught in Private School with Jack Knife. Claims He Was Only Teaching Boys Mumblety Peg. It would be Huntsville for sure.

No. There is nothing I can do but remember a different time.