Ah, childhood games.

Today, Bess talks about a shipwreck game she used to play on her bed.

Well, my brother and I played something a bit similar, except it involved a spaceship (we called it Bed Ship, we were perhaps eight and three at the time). The game involved mostly pretending one of the beds in the house was a spaceship, sitting on it and "flying" it through the cosmos, to rescue our stuffed animals and rag dolls, who were either lost on uninhabited planets after their own space ships crashed, or rescuing them from evil alien captors.

It sounds silly to think of it now, and a lot of the game probably involved us arguing about what the aliens on the planet looked like and the best way to either dispatch them or to sneak in to effect the rescues, but it still makes me smile.

I also used to play (by myself) "Orphanage," where I was the kindly lady who ran an orphanage, and the childlike dolls and the stuffed animals who looked childlike enough were the orphans who had been left there - either on my doorstep as infants, or left abandoned after their parents died spectacularly, or were left as a result of their father fighting in India and their mother being too sick or too mad to care for them (I read a lot of British children's literature from the Victorian and Edwardian eras, I am sure you can tell). I would dress them up in the "morning" (oh, all my dolls and stuffed animals had full wardrobes, or at least could share with one who did), line them up for "breakfast," after which was "school" and sometimes even "walks in the park". At the end of the day was "supper" followed by putting them in their bedclothes and putting them to bed.

I will not tell you how old I was when I last played that game, I will just say that it seems embarrassingly old to me now.

And why, I wonder, that in so many of my 'creative' games there was the specter of horrific death or imprisionment or war (oh, another game was Hiding-like-Anne-Frank) lurking behind the scenes? Was I, even as a child, a bit of a drama queen? Or is that a normal childhood thing, a way of slaying the monsters that frighten you by making such things part of a game, and so, less able to hurt you?