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Hide and seek in the dark is, I suppose, hardly played at all now. It would be an eminently patriotic game from Mr. Shinwell's point of view, but in all other 'respects it is obsolescent. The few parents who still live in big houses, or in corners of them, can hardly afford to encourage a pastime which leaves so much devastation in its wake —devastation which they will have to put to rights ; and most people live in flats or small houses where there simply isn't room for the game. I shall watch with melancholy concern the ill-effects which, as a consequence, are bound to manifest themselves upon the rising generation. Man, almost alone of the animals, is born with a fear of the dark, and to overcome this handicap he needs some com- bination of education and experience. This requirement was admir- ably met by hide and seek in the dark. It was a frightening game, but the fear was shared by all the players and was soon submerged by excitement. Playing it, you learnt that darkness, an enemy to the clumsy and the over-anxious, was an ally of the cool and the sure-footed. It developed the beginnings of an instinctive technique which stood its possessors in good stead during the war, whether they were taking out a night-patrol or merely coming home in the black-out. Soon it will be a rare thing for an English child, with street-lighting to guide him home from school in the winter, to have any experience of darkness outside his own nursery, and every- one will grow up with an ancient, inborne fear lurking unexorcised in his system. Except that it will make for less poaching, I think
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