Snakes and Ladders

Those who know me personally will know that I have a memory like that of an elephant. It’s weird in this modern age where we can buy or look at every old film, old book etc ever made, to get hold of those from my early life and see that I have remembered parts and snippets very accurately. If anything, a good memory is a curse – if you say something in conversation like “Do you remember when we were camping in Beddgelert in 1967, around about the 8th of August I think, it was raining and and we were eating bacon and eggs, and you said…” and your friend looks at you very strangely.

Well. One of the very earliest memories I have is how I learned to count, and to be friends with the numbers. My parents played Snakes and Ladders with me, and I formed a distinct visual picture of the numbers 1-100, associating them with the board. The board had various colours on the 100 squares, numbers 1-10 went left to right, then 11-20 right to left, and so on. Even now, I associate those properties with the integers – when I count things, I invariably think of the direction the numbers are taking. From 41 onwards is left to right, for example. 20 is green, and 30 is red.

That Snakes and Ladders board was how I learned numbers – numbers which have been the cornerstone of my life and career, and effectively have led to my whole livelihood. I don’t know how old I was, but it was definitely in the Chelmsford Rd house, which we left in 1959 – on 11 November 1959 at 2pm, to be precise. I don’t remember all the details and colours, but there was red green and yellow on it, and there was a very big snake going from 99 back down to 26. Many a heartbreak when you landed on that 99. That snake went downwards first, and then over towards the right. There was also one big ladder, that took you from the mid 20’s up to the mid 70’s.

Well with the internet and Google I have been looking for that board. I have scanned hundreds and hundreds of images of boards, there are garish modern ones, there are lots of attempts to jazz up the game, and there are sort of full-body versions of it that you play on the carpet. You can play it on your iPad, you can play against the iPad itself and you can probably get the iPad to play against itself, so you not only don’t need a friend, you don’t need yourself either. A real-world version with real snakes – anacondas, perhaps – and real ladders comes into the idle and sadistic mind. A cartoon shows a comic version called Snakes and Snakes, for pessimists, but such a game would surely be more true to life. Eventually, after months of repeated searching, I found this one:

This struck quite a chord in my soul, but it is not quite the right board. The colours are not quite right, and the big snake goes from 98 to 28 and I was sure it should be 99 to 26. And I do not remember those stern Victorian moral precepts interfering with my game. I have, however, pursued some of them vigorously throughout my life 🙂

After months of failure I came across an American web page that referred to a vintage board “from England”, which gave me the idea of googling for more than just “snakes ladders”. “snakes ladders vintage” turned up this segment of the middle of a board, which looked a lot more like it. My heart jumped a bit.

But there is something wrong with the font used for the numbers. And the colours of my board were random, not organised in diagonals like this one. It’s just not the one. Remember, these numbers were seared into my soul at a very early age and I just know if the font is wrong.

Then, the other day, when I should have been doing something more useful, I searched on “snakes ladders vintage england” which produced the usual long, long page of hundreds of boards, and there, about 80% of the way down, it leapt off the screen and hit me, across the space of 55 years.

AND THAT IS DEFINITELY THE ONE. There goes the snake from 99 to 26; the colours are right; the font is right; ohhhh, everything is JUST RIGHT and this seminal artefact from my early childhood, possibly the first thing in my life that I can remember, hereby swims back into my ken. Frustratingly, a home-made dice is obscuring square 26, but the snake cannot extend to square 27 because another snake begins there; I still associate the number 27 as being green and in the same green block as 8 which, like 27, is a cubic number; and with green 28, which is a perfect number (equal to the sum of its factors).

Wow! And when I came down from the ceiling, there was another reward: the picture is on a very nice web page by an active lady in the North of England who takes marvellous photos of the British countryside. She bought the board second-hand, and her young children did not like playing with it. I have written to her with what is admittedly a rather bizarre request for a cordial friendship. The board is shown near the bottom of her blog page for August 2008, which of course links to many similarly delightful pages. Go to http://attic24.typepad.com/weblog/2008/08/ and I would recommend my readers to enjoy her wonderful photos and stories of family life in the British countryside.