When our son was small we invested in a National Trust annual family pass  - it enabled us, at a time when funds were very modest, to take him regularly to Bodiam Castle, Scotney Castle, and Bateman’s (Rudyard Kipling’s House), all (almost) on our doorstep.  These days I’m the owner of an English Heritage pass, which means wherever I go I keep a weather-eye open for that nice brown castellated square sign!

Last week on a work trip I found myself early for an appointment in Adwick le Street, South Yorkshire, and observing lunchtime was nigh, in the happy position of spying one such serendipitous find: Brodsworth Hall - just three miles from my destination. I had a quick bit of snap (delicious leek tart and salad) in its tea rooms, then whizzed off round the house.

This is one of those properties which have not been refurbished and refurnished with items from elsewhere, but left largely as it was when its last owner, Sylvia Grant-Dalton, died there in 1988. In some ways it reminded me of Erddig, which I visited as a child, with its peeling wallpaper, and, in some areas like the kitchen, a charming unreconstructed mix of old and new. Brodsworth Hall, a grand Victorian family house, was built by Charles Thellusson, and the same family lived there for over 120 years. An earlier house, built in the 17th  century,  had been demolished and the site moved from beside the nearby church of St Michael and All Angels.

One of the guides told me that the Thellussons had come from French Huguenot ancestry, making their fortune in the 18th century originally, from banking, among other things, and sugar plantations in Montserrat. Might the Jamaican mahogany doors on the ground floor, recycled from the old house, have come from another plantation? I wonder how many great English country houses owe their grandeur to wealth partly gained from slave-owning?

It amuses me when people speak reverently of ‘old families’ (like for example the Brudenells, who are said to have been established as aristocrats before the Norman Conquest). Aren’t we all from old families, even if our ancestors haven’t lived in the same house for hundreds of years?

I didn’t have time to see the wonderful formal gardens at Brodsworth, but I was powerless to resist the room full of second-hand books for sale in aid of English Heritage’s work. I was delighted to find two good’uns:

Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays (particularly welcome as I was so disappointed with the National Theatre’s recent version of Everyman, re-modelled by Carol Ann Duffy, and am keen to read the original), and The Wreck of the Abergavenny - The Wordsworths and Catastrophe by my kinswoman Alethea Hayter*. Sadly I never had the pleasure of meeting her, though her brother Sir William Hayter was my godfather, so I’m very much looking forward to reading it.
 
Amazing what you can find when you’ve got your eyes open!

​*
Obituary of Alethea Hayter 
Click on Family photo under Childhood on this page - Alethea and William Hayter are 2nd and 3rd from the left in the back row

My son is an artist and an art teacher, and one of his favourite artists is Pieter Brueghel  the Elder. We both love the painting entitled Children’s Games, and much enjoy identifying the different activities.

When I worked at a large girls’ school which boasted an excellent library, I was known by the librarians for checking out the weighty tomes which, more often than not, no pupil or indeed teacher had ever borrowed. One such book was the acclaimed study by Iona & Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, which took me weeks to plough through, but not without reward!  One of the things that interested me was their conclusion that the learning of  games in the main by-passes adults: it is mostly children who communicate and pass them on to other children.

When I was a girl, it was fashionable to hold seances, and I remember the time I set up a circle of letters round a glass in my older sister’s bedroom (most of the family were out), and I and two cousins began to summon the spirits. As the glass started to move we rose as one and fled screaming from the room! Later in life I met a 1960s alumna of above school who recalled the time when a seance had been organised in one of the dormitories.

“Is there anybody there?” was asked.

At this, the glass began to move, and after affirming that there was, spelt out the word F-I-R-E. Seconds later, the school fire-bell went off, and it transpired that at that moment a fire had been discovered in the Domestic Science block, formerly the great house’s stables. Needless to say, the girls were terrified, and the story spread round the school rapidly. The Bishop of Dover was summoned by the Headmistress and spoke at Assembly the following Sunday on the evils of tampering with the dark arts of the Ungodly.

Reading Pepys’ Diary last night, I was delighted to come across a mention of a lunch-time game we played at Tunbridge Wells Grammar School in the late 1960s/early 1970s, which was clearly being played by children at least 400 years earlier. I recall six of us standing around another girl, who lay on a table in the empty art room. We went round the circle, ceremoniously uttering in turn the words:

“She looks pale.” This was followed, one line at a time, and each reciting by rote, by the following:

“She is pale.”

“She looks ill.”

“She is ill.”

“She looks dead.”

“She is dead.”

And with this, we each slipped one forefinger under the prone girl and, together, lifted her several feet in the air with seemingly no effort at all, as if she was weightless.  We had no idea how it worked, but it did work, and it afforded us great satisfaction!

So when I came across Pepys’ entry for 31 July 1665, I called out to my husband: “Listen to this!” (he had also, I knew, played the game at school):

This evening with Mr Brisband speaking of inchantments and spells, I telling him some of my Charmes, he told me this of his own knowledge at Bourdeaux in France. The words these:

Voicy un Corps mort
Royde comme un Baston
Froid comme Marbre
Leger comme un Esprit
Levons te au nom de Jesus Christ.

He saw four little Girles, very young ones, all kneeling, each of them upon one knee; and one begin the first line, whispering in the care of the next, and the second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and she to the first. Then the first begun the second line, and so round quite through. And putting each one finger only to a boy that lay flat upon his back on the ground, as if he was dead. At the end of the words they did with their four fingers raise this boy as high as they could reach. And he being there and wondering at it (as also being afeared to see it - for they would have had him to have bore a part in saying the words in the room of one of the little girls, that was so young that they could hardly make her learn to repeat the words), did, for fear there might be some sleight used in it by the boy, or that the boy might be light, called the cook of the house, as Sir G. Carteret’s Cooke, who is very big, and they did raise him in just the same manner.
 
Fascinating, eh? Love to hear from any of you with your experiences and stories about children’s games - comments welcome!