After the article about the "war", several VO readers at once asked me to continue this topic and it is clear why: every adult is a boy at heart, and besides, he is often not played enough. I was lucky that I had a huge garden, an old house with mysterious "snags" full of old books, magazines, rusty carbines (yes there was such a thing!), Kerosene lamps of the "Matador" company in the style of Bernard Palissy and much more … And my relatives themselves seemed to me to be from “that era”. Here in the closet of the grandfathers a uniform, it turns out, he was an inspector of public schools like Lenin's father, and also … the commander of a food detachment. And here is his biography: the first time he joined the party in 1918, the second in 1940 … "Why were you kicked out of the party?" - I ask. "No," he says, "he left himself!" “My mother died, I have to bury, and they send me with a food detachment. I can’t give them! And they told me - “The revolution is in danger! I told them - the revolution will wait! And they told me - then a party card on the table! Well, I put it down, sent it to … slammed the door and left! And then? Then he buried his mother and came again. And no one even said a word to me. What was not possible for the "party", it was possible for the "non-party". And in the 40th you told it that way? And so he told! AND? Nothing - such was the time! They all understood. You can't leave your mother in the middle of the house …"
Not having played enough in childhood, we, having become adults, "get" in something else. Or … we use what we did in childhood in a new capacity! Here is a knight's castle, which I once made in my distant childhood. Dozens of years have passed, and I did it again, only this time with the guys from one of the elementary grades of school 47 in the city of Penza. Moreover, in two lessons on such a castle, 80% of the children made themselves, and many asked themselves a sweep to make one for themselves at home. This is one of these jobs. Only materials and paints are now much better than they were then!
Many did not have this, and they got it later, and in different ways. Well, after my street games "in war" began a more serious period, when it became indecent to run down the street in only shorts and shout poo-poo and our war games were transferred to the courtyards, and then ended altogether. But … I remember well that we continued to play "poo-poo" almost until the sixth grade, only we tried not to show ourselves to the adults.
And here several very memorable pictures appear before my eyes, inspired again by letters and photographs of VO readers. For example, I really wanted to have a Maxim machine gun, but at that time they were not yet released. And I made it myself somewhere in the fourth grade. From planed birch rounds and plywood, and then painted it with green fence paint. I put it on the roof of the shed and tell the boys - "I'm waiting for you in my yard with rifles." They come, and I'll shoot them from the roof just like in Chapaev - ta-ta-ta! They hid behind barrels for water (to water the garden) and in response they started firing at me! And we can't defeat each other! And then it seemed to dawn on me! I crawled away from the machine gun so that they did not see me, ran across the roof to the fence into a strange courtyard, through it there, then down the street around the house, opened the gate and again into my courtyard! And they didn’t even turn around, darlings, they were sitting there, “shooting”. I ran to them and from the "Browning" to the back of the head - bang-bang-bang - you are all killed! Oh, what happened then! "They don't play like that, it's not fair!" And I told them: "Lusa-lusa-lusa-sa, salted sausage, nose with a hump, eyes with a skull." We didn’t play this machine gun anymore, and my grandfather put it on fire that same winter. And he said to me: "People hate the superiority of the mind the most!"
There was another amusing incident. In the same fourth grade, we were "honored" to go to the May Day demonstration for the first time. For some reason, the design was chosen as follows - flags of the countries of the world. And so our teacher (you can't call it any other way!) Told our parents to sew these flags, and take the flags from the TSB as a model. Anyone except the American and the Federal Republic of Germany! Well, I decided to take the simpler … South Korean flag! This is 1966! And nobody corrected me! So I walked with him in front of the rostrum of the secretary of the OK CPSU, and he noticed, well, and called the school. Like, who was looking where … “Do you know what our relationship is with South Korea? This is a satellite country! " What am I? I wanted my grandmother to have less work!
But then … how to play war, so I went out with this flag, and then in 9-10th I was the commander of the school "Zarnitsa". The Reds, of course, were commanded by our military captain, but I … doomed to defeat "enemies" under the "neutral" South Korean flag.
Well, in the courtyard under this flag we also arranged the "psychic" "from Chapaev" and just ran with him and tried to fight off at any cost! And then somehow we watched the film "We are from Kronstadt" and immediately ran to play it: the older guys against the younger ones. And I was average, and I got "every kid", but on the other hand … the South Korean flag proudly fluttered over our positions. According to the script of the film, we had to capture and drown all the Reds in the sea with stones (booze of exorbitant size!) Around their necks, but they had to escape, of course, and defeat us! It was planned that way … But … when it came to drowning, and we even found a suitable precipice, it turned out that we needed bricks and ropes to hang them up. We found the ropes to tie the prisoners, but to entangle the bricks with them is where to get so many ropes? Of course, one could say "pretend", but we were already quite adults, and … then it dawned on me again, like with a machine gun, and I ordered my kids: "Stab the red-bellied bastard with bayonets!" And they are happy to try … and stabbed! Their hands were tied!
There was no photograph of the Kon-Tiki raft. But on the other hand, there was a photograph of a raft of a zhangad, well, the same one about which is sung in the film "Generals of Sand Quarries". This, too, was done by children, but once upon a time, a long time ago, I made the same raft myself from a drawing in a magazine … "Niva"! And the funniest thing is that in the Maritime Museum in Barcelona I could see it with my own eyes, so this construction is called "no fools"!
Oh, what happened next … "The Reds won anyway!" Yes, I say, we won, but … White also got them in order. Chapaev was killed by both Shchors and Parkhomenko! And then, what are you unhappy with? You drowned anyway! Only one escaped, so there’s nothing here … I came home, I told my grandfather, and next to him on the next porch sits his sister Olga, whom I knew from family conversations that she was married to a colonel of the tsarist army, left before the war with him to Paris and there "sputtered" a whole pot of gold! This story has always surprised me very much. After all, I was told that my great-grandfather was a foreman in the locomotive workshops, that is, a worker, and the workers were oppressed under the tsar. And then I graduated from high school … married a colonel, "purred" a pot of gold …
In general, word for word, and they began to remember each other's old grievances, and it turned out that … my grandfather's sister drove across Tavria in a cart and fired at the red ones with a machine gun, and her husband threw her and sailed to Constantinople. And she said to her grandfather: "Red-bellied commissar, bastard!" And he told her: "The unfinished White Guard b …!" - and for a rake, and with a rake on her. But only she didn’t get scared of him, and opened her robe on her chest - this is a gray-haired, wrinkled old woman - and shouts: "And I put my chest out, kill me, you damned Bolshevik!" Grandfather rakes up the stairs that led to the roof … well, that was the end of it. And my grandmother told me: "That's what your stupid games have brought!" Until now, I see this scene as if it were yesterday. And I never talked about my games at home anymore.
When I was in school (1962 - 1972), they brought us a lot of interesting visual aids for lessons: a steam engine in a section, an internal combustion engine in a section, a volcano in a section, and much more. Now all this has been replaced by a computer screen, but … you probably shouldn't give up layouts either. In any case, when, remembering the past, I made this sectional model of the volcano for the school, he went there literally "with a bang!"
Studying at school, in turn, provided many interesting topics for games. They studied the Middle Ages - I immediately made a knight's castle, and to it a catapult began to bombard his houses right on the floor. There were no soldiers, let alone knights, so he blinded them for himself from plasticine. In the magazine "Modelist-Constructor", which I received since 1966, I read about the raft of Thor Heyerdahl "Kon-Tiki", and then he made it and put it on the sail, and then made another raft of a jeongad, taking as a basis a photo in " Niva ".
But this is the same rocket with an engine made of blotting paper, only now they are being replaced by toilet paper.
With the beginning of the study of chemistry, an interest arose in … rockets, which we made at school in the "Young Chemist" circle by April 12, and after a festive evening we launched them in the schoolyard. But to mix coal, saltpeter and sulfur, and to press all this, seemed to me too troublesome business. Therefore, I got into the habit of impregnating blotters from notebooks with a strong solution of berthollet's salt and winding them in this form on a knitting needle. When the cylinder dried out, a finished rocket engine was obtained. It only remained to be inserted into the rocket's paper case. From a young age, I have preserved a truck in the barn, a large, iron one and … it took half an hour to remove the body from it and install the guides. Everything is just like in the magazine "Young Technician", which I also subscribed to. Well, they have 8 missiles and … "Fire missiles!" Again, no one saw this in our large garden, and the game was just addictive!
Then, already in adulthood, when I was broadcasting TV programs for children on TV in Kuibyshev (Samara), I also made a pneumatic installation for launching models of rockets and then wrote about it in my book "For those who like to craft". Moreover, with the help of this installation, you can arrange an interesting game "Air Combat".
But, perhaps, the most interesting "game" already in the 10th grade was … "battle of ships". In a labor lesson, we went through turning, and the devil pulled me to carve the barrel of an old tool, and then also drill a barrel bore in it. Then I asked the labor teacher to help me drill the ignition hole, and he helped! The end result is an excellent steel cannon that fired balls from ball bearings! But what to shoot? In the 10th grade, shooting at soldiers is no longer serious, and I came up with the idea of making two battleship ships out of … plasticine! One is 50 cm long, and the other is as much as 75! It took several boxes of plasticine mixed in one color, but I got two floating ships at once. Yes, yes, these ships could sail, although they had towers, wheelhouses, superstructures, and masts! And everything is made of plasticine for the purpose of the unity of the material. The barrels of the guns and the masts are matches rolled in plasticine. Inside the hull they were divided into compartments (otherwise the hull would not have been rigid!), Had a longitudinal bulkhead, and their buoyancy was so great that almost a pound of shot had to be poured into each one as ballast.
One of my comrades got the ship "Queen Elizabeth", and I got "King George V", we went to the river, tied them by strings to pegs, and began to shoot balls from ball bearings from the shore at them, since the peas left only scratches on them. It immediately became clear that it would be very difficult to sink our ships! It was required to get into them at the level of the waterline for water to flow into the hole, and this was very difficult. It made no sense to get above, as well as to shoot at the towers and pipes. Below - our shells ricocheted against the water. But somehow we managed to make a hole in our battleships. My donkey's nose, and my opponent got a roll on board and … that's it! They decidedly did not want to sink, and we ran out of shells. We had to use "torpedoes" - sharpened pencils, with which we began to shoot from the same cannons, placed along the water's edge. But even the torpedo holes did not become fatal, although the Queen Elizabeth sank into the water right up to the front tower. Then it was decided to fill one of the ships with gunpowder and blow it up, immortalizing it in the photo. It turned out very beautifully, and only after that the ship sank.
As a child, I did not have tin soldiers, for which I grieved terribly, only a dozen blue (horror!) And plastic ones. But then, "catching up", I acquired a whole collection of them, and exactly one hundred models of tanks in a scale of 1:35. Here is one of the dioramas of that distant era of the 90s: "He shouldn't have traveled alone!" A British SAS member (on a camel) and a reconnaissance group on a Bren Carrier armored personnel carrier trapped a German courier on a Kübelvagen in the Libyan Desert, and of course they were killed.
Well, the rest of the battleship was kept in my pantry until … 1974, when I wrote my first article about these models in the "Modelist-Constructor" magazine. They found the material interesting, but due to the poor quality of the photos, they were not published. True, then I wrote about plasticine ships in my first book in 1987, "From everything at hand." Well, my very first printed material in this magazine came out only in 1980. And he, too, was touching the homemade toy. But that was a completely different story.
