TIPPERARY MUSINGS: Are ya coming out to play?

You would be at home down the Watery Mall annoying your mother, who was trying to make the dinner, and (if you were lucky enough) sitting chewing gobstoppers or sucking liquorice sticks bought in Molly McKenna’s shop at the corner of Fianna Road and Derheen.

Or maybe idly pucking a rubber ball against a wall with the hurley in the yard or sucking goosegogs (gooseberries) from the garden or blades of grass or crab apples, sloes, plums or blackberries.

Or wondering whether you might go out with your butty to Lady’s Well fishing for eels or to go paddling in the water so big boys might teach you how to swim or go out with the gang to play cowboys and Indians in Butler’s Island, a little tree and vegetation- packed island on the Suir down the Watery Mall where you could give free rein to your imagination all the long, long bee -droning, frog croaking ,butterfly flitting, sweaty, thirsty, summer day and be anybody you wanted to be from a cowboy to a spaceman.

And in the middle of all this reverie the loud, urgent knock would come onthe door, and you, breathlessly and in anticipation of great wonders happening, rushed to answer it (colliding with your mother baking the apple or gooseberry tart on your way out) in case it was your best pal.

“Are ya comin’ out? ”

Just where that mysterious place ‘out’ was never public knowledge at first.

And when you came home, bloodied, mucky, wet and sweaty, tired and hungry, bee or wasp stung, and your ever- patient mother asked you what in the name of God and His Blessed Mother, between us and all harm, had YOU been up to and tell me this minute, the answer was quite simply and always the same 'Out'. The main thing about going out was to team up with the butty and hold a chin-wag or Council of War together or with a few of the gang down Fianna Road or the Derheen or Sliabh na mBan Road.

But, basically, you just hit off with your sidekick, who too had been at home reading comics in his hobby-house(made from sticks and twine and planks of timber)or studying his welts from thistles or cuts in the leg from wallops of rusty iron- banded hurleys or even making chains out of daisies (which was pretty much a girlish thing, anyway) or cutting out photos from the newspapers of sports stars or film stars and pasting them onto good clean school copy books to make an album, or making paper boats or aeroplanes out of old newspapers.

And so when you went out, you had the choice of millions of games of the imagination and some you bought in the shops. And so when you went out you had the choice of millions of games of the imagination and some you bought in the shops.

And the girls would play games like Queenie , Queenie, Who Has The Ball, whereby one girl would throw the ball over her shoulder or head and one of the others would catch it and keep it hidden behind her back. Then the thrower would try to guess who had the ball, singing, “Queenie, Queenie, who has the ball?”

If she guessed correctly she held onto the ball for another ‘go’at throwing the ball. And if she guessed wrong then she had to let the girl she named take over.

Girls and boys also played various versions of marbles, skipping ropes, hula hoops, roller skates, beds, ball games, hide and go seek, chase and tip, ice skating or sliding on the slide that stretched from one end of Fianna Road to the other with not a car in sight in those days and we threw water on the roads on frosty nights to make it like glass; played pennies against the kerb to see who could get a penny nearest to the path kerb (Assuming of course, that we had a penny or even a half-penny to play with in the first place).

In September, we picked the blackberries after school and brought them home so mother could make blackberry jam or pie. And in Autumn, we would play conkers. We would bore holes with a nail in conkers we used to get from the great tree near Josie Fitzgerald’s sweet shop opposite the New Cinema in Sliabh na mBan Road.

Then we would run a piece of string through the hole and tie a knot to keep it intact. Then we went about the Watery Mall smashing conkers goodo.

A would -be conkers champion would leave his conkers up the chimney of an open fire in the hearth to harden them with the heat. Or in the oven- if his folks had a range. Or just hold the conker up on a string over an open fire to roast it. You really got a good solid one that way.

It was great training for the day when some of us would join the Boy Scouts and forge more happy memories with the 17th Tipperary Troop CBSI, as it was then known.

Some of us had relatives or friends out the country where we loved to save the hay or rather hitch rides on the back of the hay car or hide behind the hay cocks and fight battles around them like they were the Rocky Mountains and we were cowboys and Indians.