Two little girls sit on the ground in a Żejtun alleyway and, with a look of concentration on their faces, flick marbles into a small depression in the road.
An old lady watches them, reminiscing about her childhood days when she played the same game, called żibeġ, with her friends.
This is one of the scenes captured in the 2013 Bank of Valletta calendar that focuses on past childhoods.
The calendar turns back time to those days when children played with simple toys, like marbles, dolls and wooden carts – a huge contrast to today’s ‘digital childhood’.
This is the third calendar in the BOV series that captures times past.
The bank, working in collaboration with JP Advertising, commissioned historian Guido Lanfranco to provide details of the toys.
“Some of the toys came from private collections or from people who had been treasuring them since their childhood. The toys were very simple – pieces of rope, wooden slats, stones and beads – but there is a lot more to toys than just the item itself. For example, hopscotch represents the nine months of pregnancy,” Mr Lanfranco explained.
“In spite of the simplicity of the toys, we could not find everything we needed and had to improvise in some cases. For example, children used to blow bubbles through a length of macaroni but you don’t get long pasta tubes, so we used rolled up copybooks,” he added.
Photographer Joe P. Smith staged the photos in locations that could easily have come out of post-war Malta: unspoiled alleys in village cores and open air fields, all of which captured the times when children could play outdoors without the fear of traffic and without the distractions of computers.
“For me, the look on the face of the elderly people we used for the photos say so much about the memories they had of those times,” Mr Smith said.
For details about the calendar and to watch a video about its making visit BOV’s YouTube channel, accessible via www.bov.com or the BOV Club Facebook page.
Past amusements
• Żibeġ – Various games could be played, where children would compete for beads dealt out by every player. The most common involved making a shallow depression in the ground into which beads were flicked. Sometimes the beads’ colours had different values.
• Boċċi – Before the advent of glass marbles, children made do with hazelnuts. Pre-war Codd-Stopper ginger bottles had a plain glass marble as a stopper and children often broke bottles to get it out.
• Passju – The rough diagram with nine, numbered compartments scratched on the ground represented the nine months of pregnancy, with the ninth-month section drawn with a bulge. Girls cast a stone from the starting point, hop towards it, to trip it on to the next number. Completing the set results in ‘having a baby’.
• Żugraga – To spin a wooden top, children wound a string several times around it and learned to throw it sharply while holding on to the end of the string. This made the top spin for a short while.
• Bombos – This popular game could be played in several styles but all involved a boy at the front, well bent forward, while the other vaults over him, using his hands, in leap frog fashion.
• Xixu – A small length of wood was placed on a rigid edge on the ground and with a stick or rod was hit sharply on one end to make it fly as high as possible into the air.