I was intrigued to read of the arrival of wallball (‘Any wall, any ball, any time’: first UK ‘wallball’ court opens in London, 8 April) as it triggered memories of my time in the 1970s as a teacher in a Lambeth primary school. The school, a classic three-storey building of the GLC model, was surrounded by playgrounds with high brick walls. At every break the most popular game among the boys was a form of fives – a game I had played at my own secondary school.
The boys used a tennis ball, could hit after one bounce or on the volley and had to clear a line chalked on the wall about a metre from the ground. Played by big teams – four, five, six-a-side or more – it was hugely popular during my eight years at the school. No chapel wall as at Rugby or Eton, but the same impulse to invent a game with a wall and a ball. Plus ça change.
Chris Roome
Staplehurst, Kent
• No-contact wallball? Not in the version we, as children (circa 1967) played at primary school. Friends and I mashed up wallball with elements of the other playground favourite (bulldog) and invented a no-holds-barred, 200-a-side version.
The game involved one person hurling a tennis ball against the wall. As it bounced back into the playground, phase two came into play – “the scrum”, a seething mass of children seeking to grab the ball. The winner, the person who had managed to get hold of it, had to raise it aloft and was granted the privilege of hurling it back against the wall.
From an adult perspective, it may have appeared to have been little more than a free-for-all brawl; from a seven-year-old perspective, it was a game created by children for children with its own democratically designed, implemented and enforced rules and practice code (grappling, shoving, elbowing, dragging down allowed, but no punching).
Mark Newbury
Farndale, Yorkshire
• In Chapeltown, Leeds, when I were a lad in the 1940s, we used to hit a tennis ball with our hands against the gable wall at the end of the terrace, and after 10 minutes were usually chased away by the occupants because of the thump resonating throughout their house.
Martin Appleson
London
