Childhood Games

It was interesting in class last night to talk about the games that we remembered from our childhood.
Here we were, a class full of diverse people, diverse ages, cultures and geographical origin. Yet there were many games that we all recalled, although some of the names were very different. Among the chase and tag games, conkers, marbles, french skipping, hopscotch and Mr Wolfe were some more interesting nuggets - Pelvering was the most unusual, from someone who grew up in Somerset.
We then looked at using childhood games as a memory device and using them as a metaphor.
As a child I loved to play chess and was a big supporter of the school chess group. It drew me to use it as a metaphor. I hope you like it.

Pawn
Mary felt like a Pawn, easily lost in the shuffling game of life. Her whole life, she had been moved around, subject to the whim of other people. It started as a child when her father would decide that the current job he was employed at wasn't working and that the solution was to relocate the whole family to a different area and begin a 'new life' with a different job.
How many new lives had she had, Mary wondered? There was the Cornish life where her father had been a fisherman, time as a bricklayer's daughter in Birmingham, then further north to Nottingham where her father had done something else, she couldn't remember what now.
Mary could trace her families progression diagonally up the country, zig, zagging from one dead end opportunity to the next, like the Bishop peddling his empty rhetoric of religion, each meaningless and unsatisfying.
After her father it had been her husband, leaping into her life like a Knight on its charger to rescue her. They'd met, fallen in love and married even before her father had moved to yet another job. They'd leaped away from him to a different life, or so it was promised. But it hadn't worked out that way, her Knight was always having to leap our of the way of imminent danger, usually bought on himself by another crazy get rich quick scheme.
All the while Mary had plodded slowly on, managing to avoid being captured and beaten by circumstances.
When her husband leap at his final tangent (this time to rescue another damsel in distress) she'd stayed the course. Finally Mary realised she'd reached the other side of the board. She was a Queen in her own right. No longer subject to the whims and vagaries of other players in her life, no longer a Pawn pushed around by everyone else, insignificant and easily lost.
Now she was in control of her own life. Gliding majestically along, serene and complete.