From BBC website ^Elastics or French Skipping
This was a real girls game that left you with scuffed knees and sorted the men from the boys (so to speak). You needed precision jumping skills and supreme concentration to excel at this game, and those who achieved the highest levels had serious respect in the playground.
To play you needed a really long piece of knicker elastic - the kind that's about 5mm wide - or, more likely, several pieces that you'd scrounged from your mum's sewing basket all tied together to make a big loop of elastic. A good size for playing with three people would be about three metres.
To play properly, you'd need a minimum of three players, but at a pinch you could play with 2 and a bin (or in extreme desperation one person and two stools). All players but one would stand inside the loop so they were stretching it relatively taught around their collective ankles.
The remaining player would then perform a series of jumping moves to ensure that after each manoeuvre their feet would be in specified positions in relation to the gaps of elastic between each player. They went in the following order:
Both feet under the elastic
Both feet on top of the elastic
One on top, one under
One on top, one under, swap feet before moving to the next stretch of elastic (known as 'swapsies')
After a round of all the jump types above had been completed successfully, the height of the elastic would be raised (obviously increasing the difficulty of the jumps) to 'kneesies', then 'thighsies' before 'waistsies' and then the real challenge, which was 'chestsies'.
If the current player failed to execute the correct jump their turn was over and play would pass to one of the people inside the circle of elastic, who would then try to outdo the previous player. There was no winner as such (especially as playtime was often over before everyone had a turn), but the best players had major kudos in school.
We sometimes bought a bag of rubber bands and looped them, one onto the next to make the size of band you were talking of.
I remember kneesies and chestsies - and I also recall spending hours practising it at home, using chair legs to support the band. I'm trying to recall whether we had some kind of skipping songs or chants which went with this - but I think my memory is fading....
If your memory is failing, the following schoolyard chants should help:
England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales
Inside, outside, inside, on!
At which point you would have to jump and land with both feet exactly on the elastic. There was also:
Banana Splits, Banana Splits, Ibble, Obble, Chocolate Bobble, Banana Splits.
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