"At last he was happily got down without any accident, and then he began to beat Mr Guppy with a hoop-stick in quite a frantic manner."

when I was very small, and horses and carriages still more common than automobiles, many boys got discarded wooden wheel rims, and kept them rolling and guided them around corners with a hoop stick. Maybe I could find an illustration of one.

Why wouldn't you just use any old stick to keep a hoop going?

There's a remarkable scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, which my freshmen are reading now, in which Scout rides inside a tire down the street, over the curb, and up into Boo Radley's yard. I cannot imagine how this could have been fun even when I was small because I would have worried so much about scraping whatever parts of my body were outside the edges of the tire. Did you ever roll about in a tire, wwh?

Dunno about rolling around inside a tyre, but in my youth (in Bombay) the street boys had very sophisticated hoop sticks, bent into a tight crook at the end so that they could hook it around the hoop and lift it off the ground if necessary. I was not able to do these things: "my parents kept me from children who were rough" (identify the poet/poem).

cheer

the sunshine warrior

I'd forgotten about that stunt until you mentioned it. No, I would not have dared risk my badly needed glasses. Even with a big truck tire, it took a brave though small kid to get in one and trust a bigger kid to roll it.

"my parents kept me from children who were rough" (identify the poet/poem).


Stephen Spender

Rough

My parents kept me from children who were rough
Who threw words like stones and who torn clothes.
Their thighs showed through rags.. They ran in the street
And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.

If feared more than tigers th.eit: musdes like iron
Their jerkirig hands and their knees tight on my arms.
I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys
Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.

They were lithe, they sprang out behind hedges
Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud
While I looked the other way, pretending to smile.
I longed to forgive them, but they never smiled.

Well done. I didn't think anyone would actually take me up on it and find the poem. We had to do it in school and that amazing first line has stayed with me ever since.

Thanks for that. An opportunity to re-read a good poem, and a much more subtle piece of versification than I remembered.

cheer

the sunshine warrior