The Devil In The Dishes

There is something mysterious about children's games. Oh, not the ones with official rules laid out by the PE teacher, but the ones children create for themselves. Whether it be large groups on the playground or the smaller varieties carried out by just a few, they seem to emerge suddenly, fully fledged, from some shared consciousness.

Listening to my youngest describe his school recess brings this to mind. Some days  he and his friends play The Secret of the Apartment, in which spies try to plant a vial of rainbow gas in the space under the monkey bars.  Other days it's Lighthouse War, in which the teams launch imaginary cat bombs into enemy territory.

Rainbow gas? Cat bombs? Who comes up with this stuff? The kids shrug their shoulders. Who knows? It just happens.

As well I know. In my day we played Dead Drop, or Alien Abduction, or - for a whole 3 weeks in third grade - a nameless game in which the girls gathered keys for no discernable reason. It's not as if anyone told us to do so. It just happened.

Not long ago, I saw some kids building a flower-decorated stone circle out of playground rocks. It looked like some ancient magic they were making. Perhaps it's an impulse as old as humanity itself. As I said, mysterious.

Interestingly, some of these games have a macabre element as well. Fox and chickens, hide and seek, red light green light (called grandmother's footsteps in the UK ) can be pretty scary. Grandmother's footsteps was of course used to great effect as the inspiration for the weeping angels of Doctor Who fame. and a similar game called toca la pared turns up, most alarmingly, in The Orphanage.

Even our preferred version of hide and seek was extra grim. We called it "murder in the dark."

One of my favorite childhood books, The Thing at the Foot of the Bed, had a chapter called Ghost Games, and even though this was separate from the How To See Ghosts chapter, my cousins and I tended to mix them up and play them all with a ritualistic solemnity.

The game that intrigued me most was called The Devil in the Dishes. There's a chant that goes with it. The children, having been sent on an errand, hear a creepy sound and run home to mother, one at a time.

"The devil's in the dishes, chap, chap chapping"

The mother dismisses this with
"It's just your father's nightshirt, flap, flap flapping."

This continues until the mother finally comes out with the children to chase the devil.

This game appears to have originated in 19th century Ireland, which might have been long ago, but read enough "scariest thing that ever happened to you as a kid" tales on Reddit and you'll begin to see the pattern is familiar in the present day.

The adults might insist there is nothing out there, but there was, and the kids knew it all along. And the most haunting question is always, "why didn't they believe me?"

There are things the kids know that adults no longer understand.

Perhaps it's this that gives the mysterious quality to children's games. They are full of secret knowledge, intuitive knowledge of the world and how it works. As adults, having internalized the rules and regulations and how things are supposed to be, we forget. We lose touch, in many ways, with these age-old connections.

It might be something to think about, the next time you pass the playground.


The game at the top of the post is one my youngest invented, with an old gameboard, some ghost figurines and a bunch of foreign coins. The rules are malleable and arcane, but being it's ghosts, what else did you expect?

edit - here is a brilliant thread on Reddit about made up children's games..

Strawberry Moon

After our walk, we watched the solstice moon rise over the trees. Then we all played freeze tag on the lawn.

The Game Of Signs

It's hard to remember now who taught me to play the game of signs. It may have been my sister, who - being annoyed with my childish pleas for attention - told me to go outside and look until I found something. Then again, my cousins would also play this game when they'd run out of other things to do. Since we'd all had the sort of parents who tended to give us withering looks and tell us to entertain ourselves whenever we complained of boredom, it may have emerged out of sheer necessity. 

At any rate, being much younger than my siblings and there being no other kids in the neighborhood to play with, the game of signs became the solitary child's treasure hunt.

It's easy. First find an object. Any old object will do, as long as it catches your attention. Take this leaf, for example:

Which way is is pointing? Well, go that way. Keep on going until you find something.

Ah, here's a renegade marigold, growing out of place. How many petals does it have? There's five, so walk five paces (or five feet, whatever works). In this case, to the shrubbery, where a butterfly flits among the blossoms.

Following the butterfly (he was too quick to photograph, so you'll just have to trust me on this) leads us to a couple of twigs shaped  sort of like a "t"...

What begins with the letter t? Tree, of course, so we must head over to the biggest tree in the garden and see what we find.

A feather, hiding in a crevice. Feathers mean birds, and the place to look for birds is a birdhouse.

In the grass beneath the birdhouse tree, there's a lost penny. Maybe that's our treasure? Or perhaps not. If it's heads, we stop. If it's tails, we'll go on.

Tails. So we must continue, but a nearby rock helpfully points out the direction...

 where we find a heap of colored glass baubles. That fits my definition of treasure. Score!

Though when my five year-old plays this, his usual definition of treasure is bugs. Well, to each his own. You can find all sorts of things, when you play the game of signs.

What this is, really,  is just some imagination and playing close attention to things, and when you pay attention, you are bound to find something.

 It's one of life's little miracles.