Boys and girls come out to play,
The moon doth shine as bright as day.
Leave your supper and leave your sleep,
And join your playfellows in the street.
This mysterious image of streets filled with play is amplified by Zechariah VIII: 5-“And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the street thereof.” Children can be found clustering in certain areas for play, among them Exmouth Market, the Commercial Road, south and east of the Elephant and Castle, along the Goswell Road, and of course the scores of small parks and recreation grounds which echo across the capital. Certain areas seem to draw them towards games, as if the presence of the children will soften them and render them inhabitable. Children, for example, always congregated east of Aldgate Pump.
In 1931 Norman Douglas published a scholarly volume entitled London Street Games, perhaps in order to preserve the memory of a world which he sensed to be in some kind of transition. But it is also a vivid memorial to the inventiveness and energy of London children, and an implicit testimony to the streets which harboured and protected their play. There were girls’ games such as “Mother I’m Over the Water” or “Turning Mother’s Wringer” and skipping-rope games such as “Nebuchadnezzer” and “Over the Moon.” Their voices rose to the tapping of their feet upon the pavement.
Charlie Chaplin, meek and mild,
Stole a sixpence from a child,
When the child began to cry,
Charlie Chaplin said goodbye.
The texture of the city itself can create opportunities for play. Marbles were rolled in the gutters, and the paving stones were marked with chalk for a hopping game. Children made use of walls, against which “fag-cards” were flicked in games such as “Nearest the Wall Takes” or “Nearest the Wall Spins Up.” It was remarked that these games “make the boys uncommonly nimble with their hands, and this must help them later on, if they go in for certain trades like watch-making.” Then there were the “touch” games, one entitled “London.” The game of “Follow My Leader” was popular in the streets of London, particularly in the suburbs: it included crossing the road at precarious moments, following the route of railway lines, or knocking upon street-doors. And there was an evening game called “Nicho Midnight” or “Flash Your Light”; as one Cockney boy put it, “You have to play in the dark because torches are no good in the daytime.” Street games can be played in the darkness of London because “sport is sweetest when there be no spectators.” That is why old tunnels, disused railways lines, dilapidated parks and small cemeteries have become the site of games. It is as if the children are hiding themselves from London. From that secluded vantage, the boisterous may jeer or throw missiles at passing adults, or shout insults such as “I’ll punch your teeth in!” An instinctive savagery and aggression often seem to be at work in the city air.
Some of the most poignant memorials of children date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Carvings of charity children, for example, are still to be seen in Holborn and Westminster. There were statuettes of schoolchildren by St. Mary, Rotherhithe, where a “Free School for eight sons of poor seamen” was established in 1613. Two children of Coade stone were placed outside St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, with badges numbered “25” and “31.” Those belonging to St. Bride’s School were three feet six inches in height, which is a token of the average size of the London child. There are children in Hatton Garden and Caxton Street and Vintner’s Place; some of them wear the costume dating back almost three hundred years, with blue coat and yellow stockings (apparently worn to ward off rats), and are a perpetual reminder of an otherwise forgotten aspect of London childhood. They can be associated with all the other stone or wooden representations of children within the city. The “fat boy” in Giltspur Street, the pannies boy in the Bread Market near St. Paul’s, the boys playing a game of marbles above a doorway on Laurence Pountney Hill, the child brandishing a telephone in Temple Place, all are images of the child living within the city but now, as it were, taken out of time. In that sense they embody the eternal nature of childhood itself.
Yet the city of time could still degrade them. A late sixteenth-century writer noted that “manye lytle prettie children, boyes and gyrles, doe wander up and downe in the stretes, loyter in Powles, and lye under hedges and stalles in the nights.” In the spring of 1661 Pepys records that “In several places I asked women whether they would sell me their children; that they denied me all, but said they would give me one to keep for them if I would.” Samuel Curwen, another seventeenth-century diarist, was walking down Holborn when he noticed a crowd of people around a coach filled with children. They were aged between six and seven, “young sinners who were accustomed to go about in the evenings stealing, filching and purloining whatever they could lay their little dirty claws on, and were going to be consigned into the hands of justice.” Most of such children had been abandoned by their masters, or by their parents, to fall upon the mercy of the streets. Benjamin and Grace Collier, as reported in the County Records of the late seventeenth century, “privately made away with their goods and run away, leaving their children destitute.” Sara Rainbow served in an alehouse in Long Alley, Little Moorfields, for nine years “with very much hardship and of late a month’s causeless imprisonment in Bridewell, and other great cruelties, which she could not endure.” In 1676 she ran away, together with her two brothers; one boy sold himself for five shillings to a clipper bound for Barbados, while the other was never seen again.
There are pictures of such children selling, or begging, or stealing, upon the streets, “almost naked and in the last degree miserable, eaten up with Vermin, and in such nasty Rags, that one could not distinguish by their Clothes what Sex they were of.” Contemporary illustrations verify this unhappy condition. One image of a street child shows him wearing the ragged clothing of an adult with a tattered greatcoat and pitifully torn breeches; his hat and shoes are much too large, and by his side he carries a tin bowl to be used both for drinking and for cooking. He seems to be of no age and of every age, the acquisition of cast-off adult clothing serving to emphasise this ambiguous status. These wandering children are as old, and as young, as the city itself.
The records of parish children in the eighteenth century are filled with images which provoke sorrowful contemplation. Foundling children were often named after the part of London where they were taken up; the registers of Covent Garden parish are replete with names such as Peter Piazza, Mary Piazza and Paul Piazza. The phrase for those dropped or abandoned was “children laid in the streets,” which itself is sufficiently evocative. The parish officers were given ten pounds for each child brought into their care, on which occasion there was a feast known as “saddling the spit”; it was assumed “that the child’s life would not be long, and therefore the money might be spent on jollification.” Once more it is the pagan nature of these urban rituals which requires emphasis. A general opinion prevailed “that a parish child’s life is worth no more than eight or nine months purchase,” and it seems likely that their deaths were hastened by unnatural means. A parliamentary report of 1716 revealed that “a great many poor infants and exposed bastard children are inhumanly suffered to die by the barbarity of nurses.” In one Westminster parish, only one child survived out of five hundred “laid in the streets.”