Fun and Games

Here's a photo of me pretending to be an Indian sitting at the front of our house at Jalan Wijaya. With Christmas just over, it got me thinking about the toys and games that we had at the time. I've mentioned all the tin toys, cars, planes and robots before but there were also many board games. I think that nearly every house we went to had Monopoly and Mouse Trap. I remember Monopoly in particular because it seemed to go on forever. Another reason I remember it is because I recall my brother playing a game with someone else on the estate, I can't remember who, and the game just went on and on! In the end, in frustration, the other kid got the board and threw the whole lot up in the air! It went everywhere including down the storm drain. We never did find all the bits!

Someone recently mentioned to me how all the Naval wives would meet up for a Beetle Drive. Now, this is a game I haven't heard of for a long time but if you were in Singapore and Malaya in the 1960s, you've quite possibly played it because it was very popular at the time. Beetle Drive was a game where you added parts onto a plastic beetle but I can't quite remember the details of how it was played. A quick look around the internet shows that the game is still available though I suspect that most people nowadays wouldn't have a clue what it was.

We also played Scrabble and a lot of card games. Alan and me had our

own Green Hornet playing cards. I can't remember the games that we knew at the time but 'Snap!' was very popular.

When we weren't playing games, we were building dens, climbing trees, riding our bikes or doing a tightrope walk across the local drainpipe.To the computer generation, this probably all sounds mundane but we had great fun at the time and it seems like a lot of this fun of childhood has been lost over the years.