The broken slabs on the patio and steps at Spencer House have now been repaired. The builder left strict instructions about which ones we can walk on for the next twenty-fours hours.
"Like playing Hopscotch" we said.
In My Day
In 1955, as has been previously blogged, Daddy took us on our near-disastrous caravan journey to North Wales. As the car had broken its silencer on a slate quarry railway line, we couldn't go on any trips anywhere until it was repaired. We were parked up in the tiny village of Talysarn, in the heart of Snowdonia.
That first morning we children peeked out the of the caravan to find that a bunch of local children were peeking at us. In 1955 Snowdonia wasn't so developed for tourism and these children must have been surprised by the sight of a caravan with its ancient car.
We stepped out to greet them and discovered, a little to our consternation, that they spoke foreign. They did also speak some English, but continued to speak Welsh amongst themselves which I, for one, found rather intimidating.
But they were children and we played together as the week progressed. And they taught us their version of Hopscotch. They used slate (there was plenty of that lying around) to mark out the pavement thus:You threw another piece of slate onto the diagram and had to hop and jump to pick it up, moving up the pattern. Where there was only one square you had to stand on one leg; where there were two you could use both legs. This made the final three fiendishly hard for seven-year old me. although Chris quickly mastered the game, as he mastered everything. The Welsh kids were all experts.
We took this version home with us, marking the back garden paths with chalk and practising over and over again.
It was only much later that I discovered that there are other, easier forms of Hopscotch, but we clung tenaciously to our version, pouring scorn on all others.
I'm less confident about my abilities to hop these days, but have managed to traverse the steps so far without incident.
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