A Board Childhood
I clearly remember my maternal Grandfather’s old draughts set featuring significantly among my childhood playthings. I can see the rectangular wooden box with the sliding lid. It contained shiny wooden black and cream discs with carved concentric circles. The folding board had seen better days. The red cloth cover was somewhat frayed and the spine had just about survived several generations of use. It must have been Mom who taught us kids the basic moves (she had played countless games with her own grandmother) and then she did what most parents did in the 1960’s and 1970’s; she left us to our own devices. We fine honed our skills, triumphing over our wins and crying over our losses.
Then a chess set appeared in the house, and it was a challenge we were ready for. My brother Pat became master of ceremonies. He taught my sisters and me the basic moves and very quickly the cycle of winning and losing now evolved around the chess board and the vintage draught set was all but forgotten. We got better and better at chess and we vied with each other. It was healthy competition though, and I would like to think that our neural networks were benefiting more than our egos. Our patience may also have benefited. When you could see that check mate was imminent you would stall for as long as you could rather than concede defeat. Pat then took the professional approach and put a clock on the table.
In tandem with chess we also became addicted to Scrabble. My sister Emer was given it for her birthday and we wrecked our heads trying to make the shortest high scoring words, and basked in the sunshine of our ephemeral achievement when the dictionary was consulted to verify our effort. Homework was never high on our list of priorities, and when you look at the dull curriculum from those days you will agree that we were not wasting our time. What we were doing was developing and sharpening our cognitive toolkits for life - memory, word skills, motor skills, visual perception and critical thinking. During this grey and what seemed like a permanent economic recession, we also succumbed to Monopoly, and our amassing of property in the most salubrious Dublin suburbs would make the Celtic Tiger tycoons blush as under achievers. It was not my preferred tipple though.
The next game that gained most favoured status on our dining-room table was Risk, a game of military strategy, where you had to annex as many countries as you could; a typical Cold War game when you think about it. Our vocabularies broadened further as we learnt the language of warfare; we would miss meals to ensure that our colour ruled the board so that we would emerge victorious. But for me the crème de la crème of board games was Campaign. As with Risk, it was Pat who taught us the rules. I loved Campaign because it stretched my brain to breaking point. More sophisticated than Risk, it also involved higher order decision-making and even diplomacy. As with Risk though, the bottom line was dominating the world; but now you were doing it with the panache of 007, the cunning of Blofeld and the military brilliance of Genghis Khan.
As kids do, we grew into teenagers, and just as young adulthood beckoned we were bitten by the bug again, this time in the form of the Rubik’s Cube. I cannot begin to describe the state of high anxiety in our house as we struggled to get even two sides of uniform colour. We even have a photograph of Dad, sitting on the floor in front of the fire, with the signature cigarette hanging from his lower lip, grappling with that troublesome cube. Unfortunately he died too young, about five years later, but I am sure he will not mind me telling you that the competition became so stiff between him and my sister Maria that he engineered the cube to make it appear that he had solved it. When he triumphantly displayed it her look of surprise and disappointment was comical. It has entered family folklore.
There is no doubt about it; as we sat in our little woolly jumpers with our permanently snotty noses, our innocent activities ensured that we had the entire head space covered – what with board games and lashings of Enid Blyton books.
Copyright Berni Dwan 2014
I clearly remember my maternal Grandfather’s old draughts set featuring significantly among my childhood playthings. I can see the rectangular wooden box with the sliding lid. It contained shiny wooden black and cream discs with carved concentric circles. The folding board had seen better days. The red cloth cover was somewhat frayed and the spine had just about survived several generations of use. It must have been Mom who taught us kids the basic moves (she had played countless games with her own grandmother) and then she did what most parents did in the 1960’s and 1970’s; she left us to our own devices. We fine honed our skills, triumphing over our wins and crying over our losses.
Then a chess set appeared in the house, and it was a challenge we were ready for. My brother Pat became master of ceremonies. He taught my sisters and me the basic moves and very quickly the cycle of winning and losing now evolved around the chess board and the vintage draught set was all but forgotten. We got better and better at chess and we vied with each other. It was healthy competition though, and I would like to think that our neural networks were benefiting more than our egos. Our patience may also have benefited. When you could see that check mate was imminent you would stall for as long as you could rather than concede defeat. Pat then took the professional approach and put a clock on the table.
In tandem with chess we also became addicted to Scrabble. My sister Emer was given it for her birthday and we wrecked our heads trying to make the shortest high scoring words, and basked in the sunshine of our ephemeral achievement when the dictionary was consulted to verify our effort. Homework was never high on our list of priorities, and when you look at the dull curriculum from those days you will agree that we were not wasting our time. What we were doing was developing and sharpening our cognitive toolkits for life - memory, word skills, motor skills, visual perception and critical thinking. During this grey and what seemed like a permanent economic recession, we also succumbed to Monopoly, and our amassing of property in the most salubrious Dublin suburbs would make the Celtic Tiger tycoons blush as under achievers. It was not my preferred tipple though.
The next game that gained most favoured status on our dining-room table was Risk, a game of military strategy, where you had to annex as many countries as you could; a typical Cold War game when you think about it. Our vocabularies broadened further as we learnt the language of warfare; we would miss meals to ensure that our colour ruled the board so that we would emerge victorious. But for me the crème de la crème of board games was Campaign. As with Risk, it was Pat who taught us the rules. I loved Campaign because it stretched my brain to breaking point. More sophisticated than Risk, it also involved higher order decision-making and even diplomacy. As with Risk though, the bottom line was dominating the world; but now you were doing it with the panache of 007, the cunning of Blofeld and the military brilliance of Genghis Khan.
As kids do, we grew into teenagers, and just as young adulthood beckoned we were bitten by the bug again, this time in the form of the Rubik’s Cube. I cannot begin to describe the state of high anxiety in our house as we struggled to get even two sides of uniform colour. We even have a photograph of Dad, sitting on the floor in front of the fire, with the signature cigarette hanging from his lower lip, grappling with that troublesome cube. Unfortunately he died too young, about five years later, but I am sure he will not mind me telling you that the competition became so stiff between him and my sister Maria that he engineered the cube to make it appear that he had solved it. When he triumphantly displayed it her look of surprise and disappointment was comical. It has entered family folklore.
There is no doubt about it; as we sat in our little woolly jumpers with our permanently snotty noses, our innocent activities ensured that we had the entire head space covered – what with board games and lashings of Enid Blyton books.
Copyright Berni Dwan 2014
