An old pack of cards, an elder branch

In Labros there was no toy shop, and even if there had been, nobody could afford to buy toys. So they made them. Fernando Gutiérrez described it in summer 2009 in Labros, the village magazine: for centuries, he wrote, toys had been much the same in every village, with variations depending on what each place provided. He recorded how some toys from his childhood were made and played with.

Estornija

Two sticks were needed. The long one, around sixty centimetres, was the marro; in Clares it is called marrut. The short one, around twenty, was the pita or estornija, sharpened at both ends. Elsewhere it is called chueca.

The pita was laid on the ground and struck at one tip with the marro. It jumped into the air and, before it fell, had to be given a strong whack to send it as far as possible. Whoever hit it furthest won.

Cartetas

The raw material was an old pack of cards. A card cut in half lengthways made a cartetón. Cut into four pieces, it provided enough for two cartetas.

Each player threw their piece towards a line or the far wall. Whoever landed closest collected everyone’s pieces, threw them against the wall and called face or back: those landing as called were theirs to keep. The next closest player threw the remaining pieces and kept their successful calls, and so on until none remained in play.

In Checa, at the other end of the Señorío, Isidro García remembered playing gua and cartetas as a child, always in the street. The same name for the same game.

The trabuco or chingueta

It had a barrel, a handle and pellets, like a pistol. The barrel came from an elder tree, called sauquera: a straight piece of branch was cut, around five centimetres thick and twenty long. If a pocketknife was not enough, a saw was borrowed. The pith then had to be removed however possible, sometimes with a red-hot iron.

The handle was made from a plum-tree branch slightly thicker than the barrel’s opening. Part was pared down so it would enter to within a centimetre of the far end.

The pellets, at least two, were made from chewed hemp, formed into balls the size of the tube, around a centimetre across. The hemp came from tío Gregorio’s threshing floor when he spread out the harvest. One pellet was pushed to the far end, then a second inserted; pushing the second with the handle compressed the air and shot the first out.

In Checa, the village vocabulary published by Aguaspeña in 1998 calls elder sahuquillo, “the legendary tree of Checa’s children”, because its branches were used to make tow-firing popguns.

The chingueta was similar, but the elder’s node was left at one end with a hole through it. It was filled with water or mud, and the handle fired chinguetazos. Fernando noted that, if you were a boy, girls made the preferred targets.

What playing taught

Making each toy required knowing which tree had a soft centre, which wood could withstand a blow and when hemp would be on the threshing floor. Games taught children to look at the woods and the home for things they could use, just as they learned to use plants and the materials of mountain life.

Not all children had the same time to play. Isidro became a shepherd at nine, and Paulino, in Alustante, at ten. Fernando titled his article “(I)”, intending to continue describing other toys.