Don’t try this one at home ……………

 This is one of those warnings which extends beyond the home to everywhere and involves an old coin, some brick dust and a hankey.

The penny that escaped the playground, 2023

With the passage of the years, I can’t remember when we used brick dust and a handkerchief to breath life into an old penny.

But it will be around 1959 or 1960 and I would be nine rising ten, and for a while it was all the rage in the playground of Edmund Waller School in New Cross.

At the time it seemed almost like magic.  You rubbed the clothe against the brickwork and then transferred the dust onto the coin and rubbed vigorously and after a while the dirt of decades began to vanish, and the penny took on a bright new appearance.

Preferably the penny couldn’t be too old or the detail on the coin would not benefit from the exercise.

Of course, today I am not surprised that the continued application of an abrasive would do the business.

The downside was that the surface of the penny became pitted, and worse still the practice left dents in the brick work which in some places resembled the craters of the moon.

And over sixty years later I wonder what staff and students make of these circular depressions in the bricks, but I suppose weathering will have probably left our handiwork less obvious.

And Edward VII remained safe, 2023

Why we stopped is a mystery.  There may have been a dictate from on high about damaging the walls of the school, or more likely we just got bored with something which didn’t do much for your hands or the penny, and led to difficult conversations with mother about the state of the hankies.

The disappearance of the old pennies followed by their copper  decimal equivalents will have pretty much killed off the practice, and now as we edge ever closer to a coinless existence few ten year olds will ever feel the need to stand in the playground with a handkerchief and some brick dust.

Cleaning your pennies will have faded into the past along with heaps of old playground games, children’s songs.

One of which I remember pitched a large number of American television stars  of Westerns into a rhyming story using their names set against a series of adventures.  It was in its way a kid’s version of of that 1959 song “Delaware” by Irving Gordan and made popular by Perry Commo which referenced 15 US States in the form of puns, "like Della wear, new jersey, Calla 'phone ya, how ar' ya, Missus sip, mini-soda, Ora gone, I'll ask 'er, taxes, Wiscon sin, new brass key, Arkan saw, Tenne see, Flora die and misery".*

I have tried remembering the kids version but it has long since been lost from my memory, although if I am honest I was rubbish remembering all the connections back then.

Great Britain Flag no. 26, 1956, Flags of the World

I guess it might well have started life as a skipping song and just transferred from one playground activity to another.

One of which will have been flicking cards, where you put two picture cards against a wall and flicked other ones  towards the two propped up.  

The winner was the first to knock a card down and the prize were the cards already on the floor.  

Originally it would have been cigarette or fag cards which by the 1950s had become the picture cards from boxes of tea bags.

But the favoured cards because they were so much bigger were those from a series called Flags of the World,

Italy, no. 80, 1956, Flags of the World

They came with a disgusting bit of bubble gum, and carried the flags of nations as they were in the mid 1950s and had useful information on the back including each country's currency, population, capital city and a translation of the word hello.

Often the bubble gum had gone hard and brittle, and the cards for ever afterward smelt of perfumed bubble gum.

Such were the things we did in the playground.

Location; in a playground

Picture; 1909 Edward VII penny from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the flag of the Great Britain, no.26 and Italy, no.80, 1956, courtesy of Flags of the World, Dean's Cards,  http://www.deanscards.com/c/716/1956-Topps-Flags-of-the-World

*Delaware, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_(song)

**Flags of the World, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Flags%20of%20the%20World