ABSTRACT
When I came to London as a boy of nine, I was baffled by some of the games English children played. Cricket was a total mystery but, at least, it didn’t seem dangerous. Far more threatening was a game called Double or Quits. The fat boy who lived in the flat above ours insisted I play this game with him. New to this country, I didn’t dare refuse because I wanted to be accepted. I didn’t dare admit either that I never understood the rules as FatBoy wielded them. The way we played the game I could never quit and never win. Often, at the end of an hour’s playing, I was seething with frustration while FatBoy grinned in ecstasy. I never discovered how to play Double or Quits and so, in the end, I avoided meeting him. I mention this experience at the start of this book because psychologists who write about play tend to lapse into a kind of romantic smugness. Playing is wonderful, fun, golden, innocent. Play is how we learn to handle the world and our social roles in it; play teaches and heals. The way some psychologists write, you would imagine that what the children in Golding’s macabre Lord of the Flies needed was a good dose of play therapy. Then, they would have acted out their fantasies instead of, well, acting out their fantasies.
