Charming? but it was just a pair of kids fooling about that was all. They had put aside similar childish amusements too recently to be able to watch them now without a touch of contempt. In a little grassy bay between tall clumps of Mediterranean heather, two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing, very gravely and with all the fo-cussed attention of scientists intent on a labour of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game. “That’s a charming little group,” he said, pointing. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.” He interrupted himself.
“Strange,” mused the Director, as they turned away, “strange to think that even in Our Ford’s day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting, imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught. Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees.
Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs.
0 kommentar(er)
