All in who wants to play...

All I wanted at age ten was a man from U.N.C.L.E spy pen. You know, the pen that was actually a communication device amongst other things. It was silver, it was beautiful and Napoleon Solo had one.

Illya Kuryakin had one to, but I was a Solo fan. My cousin Ian was a Kuryakin follower. He had all the U.N.C.L.E gear, the gun, the spy-scope, the game – he didn’t have a spy pen though. He used to bribe me to play the Man from U.N.C.L.E game – it was okay, but I only played it so that I could pretend to be Napoleon Solo… and get to hold the U.N.C.L.E gun - that was the deal.

I was always Solo and he was always Kuryakin. We each had an assignment which involved finding a THRUSH agent and taking him back to headquarters, into the dry cleaning shop then down the hidden lift to Mr Waverly. Whoever got there first was the winner. It was a complicated game, with complicated rules about rolling the dice, and you could get ‘stolen’ if your opponent landed on you. I thought it was boring. No, it was boring.

I got to play with the Man from U.N.C.L.E gun though.

At school Ian and I used to play U.N.C.L.E at playtime. All the other boys would be playing fifty-fifty or off-ground tig, and there we would be pretending to have spy pens, with Ian being all Russian. I remember the long circling lines of boys, shoulder to shoulder, arm over arm as they called for others to join in their game – long lines of calling boys ‘All in who wants to play fifty-fifty’ they would sing. And there would be Ian and I circling, arm over arm calling others to join us in a game of U.N.C.L.E. Hardly anyone ever did, so we played alone – Ian - Kuryakin, and I - Solo.

I never did get a spy pen. I tried to make one out of a broken car aerial and some bits from an old transistor radio once. I thought it looked just like the real thing but when I showed it to Ian he just fell about laughing.

I threw it away after that and stopped playing U.N.C.L.E, instead I started playing fifty-fifty with the other boys leaving Ian to play U.N.C.L.E on his own.

Ianski died last year after a longski illness - the one with the shortski name. He always did have a lousy Russian accent.

U.N.C.L.E