Children’s Games in Street and Playground Volume 1: Chasing, Catching, Seeking by Iona and Peter Opie

Perhaps this book should come with a warning to parents: within these pages, children deliberately scare each other, ritually hurt each other, take foolish risks, promote fights, and play ten against one. Yet throughout, they consistently observe their own sense of fair play. Through the 1960s, Iona and Peter Opie did an exhaustive survey of the rough-and-tumble games that children actually play—normally out of sight, as opposed to formal sports or games supervised by parents—between roughly six and twelve years.  The result was their classic work, Children’s Games in Street and Playground. To aid a clear and lively presentation of their remarkable study, the original single book has here been divided into two volumes. Both record games played by 10,000 children from the Shetland Isles to the Channel Islands, though most come from big cities such as London, Bristol, and Glasgow.  The books include many favorites, such as “The Dreaded Lurgi”, “What’s the Time Mr. Wolf?”, “Stuck in the