My childhood was spent in the city of Penza on Proletarskaya Street, where I woke up every morning from the friendly stamping of feet of workers going to the plant. And that says a lot. This plant, in theory, produced bicycles, but if it was only doing this, then our country would have long been the leading bicycle power in the world. However, I usually woke up earlier from loud screams coming from the street already from 5 o'clock in the morning. “Milk-oh-oh! Who needs milk? " - the milkmaid cried out, dragging cans of milk down the street and peddling them. “Shurum-burum, we take the old stuff! - shouted an old man who rode a cart and bought recyclable materials. "Sharpen knives, edit razors!" - the grinder shouted heart-rendingly, who, together with his grinder, appeared just at the very time when in the houses of the hostess they were preparing breakfast for their husbands. So the pounding of the workers and the quiet hum of their voices rather lulled, rather than awakened, for real.
"Maroussia is silent and sheds tears like a gusli, her soul sings!" - a show of a costume song at school 47 in the city of Penza. This is how the ability to make shields, spears and swords from "everything at hand" came in handy. A bit unhistorical, but patriotic, cheap, reliable and practical!
Our house was very old, still built in 1882, full of all sorts of antiques that I did not appreciate then, because I simply did not understand their value. However, the neighbour's children said that you were, they say, rich, because you have carpets, a TV, and a refrigerator at home, which, except for us, no one else had. However, after the 1967 reform, our income situation leveled off, so much so that many of my street comrades began to overtake me in quality of life. Which, in fact, is not surprising, because my family was incomplete. Grandfather, grandmother and mother - that's the whole family, and my father was somewhere far away, although he sent alimony regularly. My grandfather was a pensioner of republican significance, received a pension of 90 rubles, and all the neighbors were very jealous of him. In addition, he had two orders: Lenin and the Badge of Honor. But he never fought to fight. Not in the First World War, not in the Civil War, not even in the Great Patriotic War. His hernia was inguinal, and even inoperable and, in addition, flat feet, so he happily escaped the army in all cases and gradually rose to the position of head of the city department of public education, which he had to lead from 1941 to 1945! My grandmother received a pension of 28 rubles, worked a lot in the garden and traded flowers in the market. During the war years, she worked in a hospital at the railway and talked about it in such a way that, as a boy, my heart literally sank with horror, although it was, in general, about the most ordinary things for her at that time.
As for my mother, she taught at the local polytechnic institute a very strange subject called "History of the CPSU", in 1968 she defended her thesis in Moscow, became a candidate of historical sciences, and immediately left for advanced training in the city of Rostov-on-Don, where she met my adoptive father Pyotr Shpakovsky.
But that was when I was already 14 years old, and it became indecent to play "like a little" on the street. But before that, the most favorite game of both mine and all my street comrades was the game of war!
I started playing this exciting game when I was five and a half years old - in any case, the memories from that moment are very distinct. Moreover, adults were not encouraged to play this game on our Proletarskaya Street! Neighbors approached my mother and said very seriously: “We are fighting for peace, and your son runs from morning till night with a machine gun down the street…”. To which she replied: “We are fighting - this is a process, not a result! While there is no general peace - let him play!"
Usually they played one side of the street against the other, or each side on its own. There were six boys and two girls on my side. For 10 households! So the decline in the birth rate in the USSR began back then, in 1954! In the last house near the railway lived Sanka the snotty - a mischievous and disgusting kid with green snot always flowing from his nose. For snot and for being harmful, he was periodically beaten all over the street, but neither one nor the other was diminished in him. The second most harmful was Vitka-titka, who was so teased, if not always, but often. I lived in the next house, then two of Mulina's brothers - Tatars, although for some reason they did not have Tatar names at all - one Sashka, and the other Zhenya - the first elder, the second younger. Finally, the last one at the corner of Proletarskaya and Mirskaya lived was another Vitka, but they did not tease him, his father was a pilot. That is, there are six boys in total on "this side", but none of them knew exactly how many of them were on the opposite side, but clearly more than eight, so "this side" usually did not contact them.
Very rarely played Indians. They made themselves feathers - some of the chicken (some had chickens), and I of the crows, which allowed us to play "tribe for tribe".
But in order to play war, there was no better place than the Mulins' yard. There was no garden, almost nothing grew, but there was an old and very long shed with a wooden roof full of holes - a real "Titanic", an old castle or a battleship - that's who liked what and when! The first floor belonged to the adults. They kept a pig there, and at night they drove the chickens and stored food for them. But the "subterfuge", that is, the place under the roof, entirely belonged to the boys. And around this barn, they usually played in the war and played or went with the whole "Caudla" to a large clearing behind the railway, right in front of the old prison castle, still from the old tsarist time.
It is clear that no one really bought toys for us then, and from early childhood we did everything that was needed for the game ourselves. Swords were cut out of the boards from the boxes, which were sometimes "poked" near the store or near the glass warehouse. The rifles were cut out of the planks more, sawing out first with a saw, and then, cutting off the wood with a knife, and processed with sandpaper. The locks were made from old latches and it was very cool, because they looked exactly like real ones!
In addition to rifles, it was imperative to have a revolver, also cut from some suitable piece of wood. I, however, had a Browning, and I was very proud of it, because I found it in a picture in some magazine, redrawn it into a notebook "by cells" and tried to make it as accurate as possible. I didn’t regret a dime to buy a bottle of mascara and paint it black, so it looks almost like a real one, it could scare even an adult!
Then one day I saw a "real parabellum" in the Detsky Mir store. Made of black plastic! At the cost of 80 kopecks! Well, an exact copy! I still wonder how and who missed it, because all the other toy pistols in terms of copy numbers were just g … Like, in fact, all other toy weapons. For example, they bought me a PPSh submachine gun … All wooden, with a disc and … a round wooden barrel with grooves! Well, is this a PPSh? Then we bought … PPSh again! With a barrel in a metal casing, an oblique cut is a dream! And the store … is straightforward, like a Schmeiser's. Well, how to play this? Shame one! "Let's pretend it will be a Russian machine gun!" - "Let's!" We didn’t know the names, but thanks to the movie, we imagined all types of weapons very clearly!
But adults strictly forbade them to do bows and arrows. They said that you would be left without eyes and broke mercilessly! And the same was true of slingshots. That is, we did them. And they even fired from them! But that was risky. The most commonly used slingshots from Hungarian - model aircraft rubber. Such slingshots were used mainly in school. They were worn on the fingers. Two loops and that's it. And they shot them with paper brackets, which were preparing for recess in class. Moreover, measures were taken not to be left without eyes! For the guys whose fathers worked in factories, they made transparent masks from plexus. Well, I had a cardboard mask with slits for the eyes, which were first sealed with a metal mesh, and then … with two tea strainers! But this gorgeous work of children's technical thought in black color and with a skull and bones on her forehead, the "cool" one immediately confiscated from me.
Games usually took place for a reason, but were associated … with watching a movie. For example, "Chapaev", "Brave people", "Alexander Parkhomenko" and others walked then continuously, at seven o'clock almost every day, and in the morning we were already playing it. In 1962, the movie "The Three Musketeers" by Bernard Borderie was released and the fashion began to play three musketeers and sling on swords from flexible walnut rods. Again, I was lucky, like no one else: a ladle ladle broke in the house (the handle broke off), but they did not repair it, and I begged the fragments for myself. I made an excellent guard from the cup of the ladle, from the handle I bent the bow, and from the trim of the thick wire - "antennae" of the cross with balls at the ends of dried bread crumb! I painted all this with bronze paint for the grave fences, and the blade itself was again smeared with black ink and "silver", and received an excellent sword of "Toledo steel" - a classic "Spanish bowl", which became the envy of all the boys from our street. For those, nailing some tin handle to the handle as a bow was already considered a great success, but here it is such beauty, as if from a picture from a book and everything in addition was done with their own hands, which among the boys of that time was perhaps most appreciated !
We also played "white and red" all the time, because in addition to "Chapaev" in those 60s, films about "red devils" were also shown: "Red devils", "Savur-grave", "The crime of Princess Shirvan", " Punishment of Princess Shirvan "and" Illan-Dilly ". These films were shot in such a way that after them the hand itself reached for a saber from a board or a rifle with a bolt bolt and wanted to run somewhere headlong, cut into the nettles, and shout "A-ah!" with all my might! But there was also the movie "Aelita" based on the novel of the same name by Alexei Tolstoy! And what were the costumes of the Martian soldiers and guns - to fall and not get up!
Therefore, there was nothing to be surprised that we then glued the helmets of the Martian soldiers to ourselves from cardboard, and ran around the yards in only shorts, threw rotten apples and tomatoes from the garden and loudly yelled incomprehensible words: “Anta! Dressed! Ut-ta-a !!! " - before stuttering, frightening old street women, who treated our games with great prejudice, since we ran "naked". Usually the game was like this: to run along the street and in the yards with wooden rifles and shoot at each other - “Bang! Bang! You are killed! I - ah-ah - wounded!"
The prisoners were treated harshly. "Say the password!" - to which one had to proudly answer: "The king was sitting on the pot!" After that, the prisoner was usually taken to the barn and locked up there, or tied up for real and laid in the grass there, usually they poured out the slop and water from the wash! So they somehow caught me, and put me in the grass, but the neighbor didn't look (and why should I look ?!) and poured a whole bucket of slops on me. I jumped up, scared her half to death, and to say "chur-tra - no game" out of excitement forgot, for which I received for trying to escape with a grenade on the "kumpol", that is, on the head. And grenades that day, by agreement, were paper bags with street dust, which in the morning the wipers swept into heaps on the pavement, and … as soon as this bag burst from the blow, I was sprinkled with dust from head to toe!
I came home all in such a state that in order to wash me it took not one, but two whole troughs of water. It's good that at least the column was next to us! And so it happened more than once or twice: bags of dust, rotten apples, tomatoes, clods of dry earth from the dug-up garden - everything, everything was grenades, which we threw just furiously. But for some reason, slingshots were not popular in our street …
We also had match-shooters …
However, the then Penza boys also had more serious weapons: the so-called "arson" or "ignite" - homemade pistols with pipes instead of barrels, into which match heads were stuffed and, again, with the help of matches, they set fire through the ignition hole located behind. Such a pistol fired quite for real, and if it was, moreover, filled with gunpowder, then … one could only sympathize with the one who had such a "fire" bursting in his hands!
Knightly games were not very popular with us, but still we played it. After all, there were films "Alexander Nevsky", "Iolanta", "Banner of the Blacksmith" (1961, Tajikfilm - based on "Shah-name") and the Bulgarian "Kaloyan". And then I liked "Kaloyan" more than "Nevsky", because it was colored. And then there were the gorgeous films of 1952 "Odyssey's Wanderings" and 1958 "The exploits of Hercules", where there were excellent armor, maned helmets and Dipylon shields!
Several times I made armor for myself from cardboard and paper for all these films, and then my grandmother knitted me a "real" chain mail and a cloak with red lining. But in this suit, I just somehow showed up for the New Year. It was unthinkable to play like that with the boys in the summer. This meant "to stand out", but in Soviet times it was impossible to stand out, you had to be like everyone else. But all these “developments were very useful to me after decades. The magazine "Levsha" published a whole series of my articles on how to make children's armor and weapons for games from scrap materials. And … many then took advantage of this, and I myself took advantage of it when my granddaughter went to school and her class had to participate in the school costume song contest!
But for playing on the street, I still had a simpler “right” - a plywood shield with an eight-pointed Maltese cross (oh, how I was “watered” for this by one neighbor - “and also from a communist family”); an ax, a sword, and another shield - from the back of a catering chair. Then I did not know that the shields were of this shape and I was a little shy of him. But on the other hand, he deflected any blows perfectly.
And here's what's surprising. Then I did not even think that I would write articles and books about knights, but I was drawn to them with all my heart, just like rifles and all other weapons, and besides, I really loved to do all this myself … Then in the novel I read Ivan Efremov's "Hour of the Bull" that children have the ability to guess their future. And I have a lot of examples that this is how it is. But more about that, some other time.
