A long time ago I happened to see a small group of children playing hopscotch in a Ukrainian village. I couldn’t understand what they were saying to one another, or what name they gave their game (which in Italy is usually called campana, or “bell,” and also settimana and mondo), but to all appearances the rules they followed were the same as ours. The game consisted of scratching a pattern of rectangles in the ground and then jumping through them in a varied succession of styles: with eyes closed and without stepping on the lines; with eyes open but hopping on just one foot and picking up a pebble from the rectangles; balancing another pebble on one’s head, on the back of one’s hand, on a foot, and so on; those who commit a foul lose their turn to another player, and the one who is able to complete the entire program in the shortest period of time is the winner.
Back then, the pattern of rectangles was the same in Ukraine and in Italy; it has since been slightly modified here. It would be interesting to find out whether it has likewise changed in Ukraine, and I’d guess that it has, because the universe of children’s games is connected by mysterious channels.
An English married couple devoted themselves with philological diligence to the study of these channels, and they lavished on the work the invaluable combination of rigor and imagination that distinguishes British culture. Iona and Peter Opie spent the decade from 1959 to 1969 interviewing more than ten thousand children. They asked the children only to describe the rules of their spontaneous games, the ones in which grown-ups had never interfered, and which required no equipment, not even a stick or a ball: “all you needed was players.”
Aside from these interviews, they also consulted a vast amount of documentary material, drawing on research undertaken in distant countries, as well as ancient and recent literary testimony. What emerged was a book full of surprises, Children’s Games in Street and Playground (Oxford University Press, 1969), which is supposed to be followed by another volume about games that require a ball, or marbles, or any other such items.
Like any good book, this one answers certain questions, but it poses more questions than it answers, and these are by far more intriguing. The games described here, although they have been observed throughout Europe and outside of it as well, are familiar to any Italian who has or had children, or has contact with children, or even just has memories of his or her own childhood. With different names of course, but with strangely similar rituals, we find in their many variants both the “chasing games” and the “hiding games,” the “olly olly oxen free” calls, the “cops and robbers games,” and, up to this point, there’s nothing that strange about it. These games are rational: they reproduce the situations and excitement of hunting and ambush, and it’s likely that their roots lie deep in our heritage as hunting, social, quarrelsome mammals. Even puppies and kittens, though they belong to species that have been domesticated for millennia, reproduce in their games the rituals of hunting and fighting.
What is instead difficult to understand is why games or abstract ceremonies, apparently devoid of utilitarian meaning, should be found in roughly identical forms in countries distant from one another. One example is the well-known game of “four corners,” which is not rational. There is no reason that the four players who occupy the corners should not remain indefinitely where they are, so that the child who has the disagreeable role of being “it” remains “it” equally indefinitely. And yet, for centuries now (the game is documented as early as 1600), and in many places around the world, the ritual is unvaried, as if, rather than a game, it were a religious ceremony.
The same can be said of the charming but (to an adult) irritating game that in Italy is called regina reginella (queen little queen). For those who may not remember it, the reginella (little queen) stands at one end of the field, and facing her (or him), lined up and at a distance of ten or twenty meters, are all the other players. Each of them, in turn, asks the queen how many steps he must take to reach “her castle,” and the queen replies in the most capricious manner imaginable, but in accordance with a traditional vocabulary, that he must take four giant steps, for instance, or six lion steps, or five ant steps, or even ten crayfish steps; in the latter case, the player-victim must walk backward.
As you can see, the game couldn’t be more unfair; it is basically an abstemious children’s version of the passatella, a drinking game dating back to ancient Rome. The one who wins, by reaching the castle, is invariably and exclusively the child whom the queen has chosen to favor; having in his or her turn become queen, that child will repay the favor to the first queen, in keeping with an unpleasant piece of Mafia etiquette. There is no space left for the personal initiative, intelligence, strength, or skill of the players; in spite of this, the game is common in many countries and with only a few variants (few, but singular: in the British Isles the Opies have recorded, among others, caterpillar step, banana-peel step, and watering-can step; the last consists of spitting as far as possible and stopping where the spit lands).
In virtually all “capturing” games a sanctuary is established (designated by a variety of names: where I grew up it was called il tocco) where the one being chased is safe from capture; particularly popular is the variant that is known in Italy as rialzo but forty years ago was known as portinària, and which in France is le chat perché and in England off-ground-he: parenthetically, “he” or “it” is the player who in Italy we say is “sotto,” literally “under.” In this version, immunity from capture is acquired by climbing onto any surface that extends higher than ground level. Rialzo—or “rise”—is well-known around the world.
Equally international are the rituals that come before the start of any game. They generally consist of drawing lots, to designate the player or players who are “it”—that is, who are assigned the least sought-after role in any game—but only rarely is a fair choosing system employed, such as drawing lots with the short straw. Commonly used and fair, but complicated because it allows a playoff between only two players, no more, is the so-called (in Europe) Chinese morra, which I assume my readers all know; in virtually every country the three hand signs indicate rock, scissors, and paper, and the justification for the circular manner in which each sign beats the next one remains the same.
Again, parenthetically: I find no mention by the remarkably diligent Opies of a type of deciding game that I have seen played in Piedmont. The two contenders opt respectively for even and odd, but then, instead of availing themselves of the classic morra, one of them pinches the flesh on the back of his left hand; the one who calls the number of folds, even or odd, that appear in the flesh wins the round.
The Opies devoted relatively little attention to the cry of truce, or time out, used universally to ask or impose an armistice in competitive games: they limit themselves to the observation that in the British Isles the cry of “Barley!” is used, without going into the origins of this curious term. In Italy, nowadays, to the best of my knowledge, the cry is Alimorta! obvious in its meaning, and Aliviva!1 to resume play. Fifty or sixty years ago, in Piedmont (I don’t know if this was true elsewhere) the cry was “Marsa!” I would propose a query to the reader who might find this sort of small-scale anthropology alluring: marsa, in Arabic, means “port,” hence Marsala, Marsa Matruh, and other place-names; it is likely that it also means “refuge, asylum.” Might that be the origin of the cry, indicating that it therefore comes from the south of Italy? To verify this hypothesis, I would need older readers who might have played hide-and-seek in Sicily in their childhood to make an effort to remember how they called truce in those days and in their hometown. I hope they will.
Despite the array of quicker and fairer systems that we could easily imagine, and that have in fact been imagined, the most popular way on earth of picking someone to be “it” is a counting-out game, and that is where things become interesting. I would guess that everyone remembers at least one or two of the contine, or counting-out games, they used or heard others use when they were children. These are rhyming singsongs, generally with four sharp accents on each line; the Opies, taking advantage of other existing collections, have counted more than two hundred, throughout Europe and in the English-speaking nations. Some of them, the more recent ones, have been “rationalized” and have a more or less clear meaning, but it is evident that the favorites are the older ones, and these are pure abracadabra. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify a number of international categories, no more than four or five: the rhythm and, often, the rhyme remain unvaried, while the words are distorted in keeping with the spirit of the local language.
Clearly, the ritual nature of casting lots prevails over the utilitarian purpose; indeed, the meaning of the words is unimportant (how many protests the Roman Catholic Church prompted when it decided to eliminate Latin from the Mass!), but what is very important is the repetition of gestures and words that, being magical, must be perceived as “sibylline.” These then are words reduced to pure sound, which explains the challenge involved in tracing their origins.
For one of the categories mentioned above, however, the source has been identified: although the counting-out games of this category are widespread throughout the former British Empire, their origin is not English but Welsh, and it reproduces not the ancient form of spoken Welsh that is now virtually extinct but, rather, the series of ordinal numerals, probably pre-Celtic, that the herdsmen of Wales used long ago for the sole purpose of counting heads of livestock. Apparently, they used those numbers, and not the ordinary ones, to ward off evil—that is, to keep evil spirits from understanding and from stripping the herd of one or more animals, either by stealing it or causing it to fall sick. It is evident that these counting-out games owe their popularity precisely to their age-old incomprehensibility.
A similar but more modern story has been reconstructed by an Italian scholar, Matizia Maroni Lumbroso. As a little girl in Viareggio she had learned this counting-out game: “Inimíni mani mo / chissanía baistò / effiala retingò / inimíni mani mo”; many years later she learned that this was an English counting-out game (“Eeny meeny miny mo / catch a nigger by his toe / if he hollers let him go / eeny meeny miny mo”), and that it had been taught to a small group of Italian children by an elderly Englishwoman. The contina had quickly caught on, and I cannot exclude the possibility that it is still circulating today, precisely because it had no meaning to Italian ears and was therefore particularly fascinating. For that matter, even in English only the second and third lines have even an appearance of meaning. The rest is pure enchantment.
To sum up, not only are strange counting-out games used everywhere but more or less the same counting-out games are used everywhere. It would be simplistic to conclude that counting-out games and, more generally, spontaneous games are international because “children are the same the world over.” Why are they the same? Is their play the same everywhere because it springs from a biological inheritance, because it reproduces some innate need that they (and we) feel for a set of rules? Or are their games only apparently spontaneous, and do they in fact reproduce (symbolically, in caricatural form) the “games” of grown-ups? The fact remains that political frontiers are impervious to our verbal cultures, while the civilization of games and play, which is basically nonverbal, crosses them with the carefree liberty of the wind and the clouds.
1. The references are to the dead and to the living.