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whose last link is cut with the world beyond their invested walls.
Hopscotch, Hoops, Hobbly-’Onkers
    If Alfie envied our toys, it was true also that we were jealous of the rougher and less sophisticated games in which he and the rest of the Double Alley youngsters took part: marbles, tops, tipcat, hopscotch, hoops and ’obbly-’onkers. The latter, also called Conkers, belonged, of course, to the autumn, when the bright glossy horse-chestnuts littered the ground beneath the grave churchyard trees. The other games were also seasonal, though it is not easy to understand why. Tops and hopscotch belonged to the winter, hoops to the early spring, marbles to high summer, and tipcat, as far as I can remember, to summer holidays. There was a strict convention governing these matters: a boy would as soon bowl a hoop in January as a man would ride in Rotten Row in a frock coat and top hat; yet in March, when the hoop season came in, not a single ragged guttersnipe would be seen without one. They were home-made, of course, as were the ingenious whip-tops which when lashed smartly would fly twenty yards through the air and continue to spin when they came to earth, and which were sometimes slotted so that they hummed like little aeroplanes. As for hopscotch, all that was needed was a piece of chalk; while tipcat demanded merely apeg sharpened at both ends and a stout stick with which to slog it. Only marbles could not be manufactured in Double Alley; you had to buy them, twenty-four for a penny, at any of the little nondescript shops which sold everything from babies’ comforters to butterfly-nets. The big glass ones, streaked with tricolour whorls of red, white and blue, cost much more—sometimes as much as a halfpenny each. These were the sovereigns in the guttersnipe currency; and when one rolled down the muddy gutter and fell with a plop through the grating into the drain it was a tragedy indeed.
    Marbles had a strange, an ancient, and a poetic terminology which Alfie knew and paraded, but which to us was a mystery only half understood; we never truly mastered it. Other games, even more obscure, had wonderful rhymes associated with them, snatches of song, outlandish catches, and curious fragments of mumbo-jumbo which ran like this:
    â€œEgdom, pegdom, penny-a-legdom,
Popped the lorum gee.
    Eggs, butter, cheese, bread,
    Stick, stock, stone dead,
Out goes she.”
    That sounded like poetry to us, half-heard through the window; it sounds like a sort of poetry to me still.
Pistol, Bardolph and Nym
    It must have been about this time that we made the acquaintance of three good-for-nothings whose present disrepute—for they were notorious cadgers, scroungers, poachers and petty thieves —was somewhat mitigated by their past history of great deeds done in distant battles. What battles and where we never knew: Pistol frequently talked airily of Zulus and Afghans, Bardolph was accustomed to use fearful oaths which he said came from the Sudanese, and it was pretty well established that Nym at the ageof seventeen had played some minor part in the relief of Lady-Smith. However, the Army had discovered before long that the three of them were more trouble than they were worth; so they had returned to Elmbury and to the dark disastrous alleys in which they had been spawned. We would watch them loafing and leering at the Double Alley entrance, chasing the wenches, begging from passers-by, and more than once we would see them borne away to the police-station for some offence of drunkenness or brawling.
    Seen through the window, they were to us figures of high romance; we communicated with them by signs, and sometimes to the dismay of Old Nanny held conversation with them in the street. It was Bardolph who taught me how to make my first catapult, and Pistol, I think, from whom I picked up a lot of weird expressive phrases which shocked my parents.
    At the age of thirty-five or so, they were