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. And yet, throughout, they consistently observe their own sense of fair play.
In the 1960s, Iona and Peter Opie carried out an exhaustive survey of the rough-and-tumble outdoor games that children aged six to twelve played, normally out of the sight of adults.
The result was their classic work, Children's Games in Street and Playground, which recorded games played by 10,000 children from the Shetland Isles to the Channel Isles, and particularly from the big cities such as London, Bristol and Glasgow.
This second volume focuses on games involving seeking, hunting, racing, duelling, exerting, daring, guessing, acting and pretending. More than 85 games are described in detail including the rhymes and sayings children repeat while playing them, together with the different names under which they are played. There are also brief historical notes.