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Children's Folklore
The scraps of lore which children learn from each other are at once more real, more immediately serviceable, and more vastly entertaining to them than anything which they learn from grown-ups. To a child it can be a 'known fact' that the Lord's Prayer said backwards raises the devil, that a small knife-wound between the thumb and forefinger gives a person lock-jaw, that a hair from the head placed on the palm will split the master's cane. It can be a useful piece of knowledge that the reply to 'A pinch and a punch for the first of the month' is 'A pinch and a kick for being so quick'. And a verse a child hears the others saying,
Mister Fatty Belly, how is your wife?
Very ill, very ill, up all night,
Can't eat a bit of fish
Nor a bit of liquorice.
O-U-T spells out and out you must go
With a jolly good clout upon your ear hole spout,
may seem the most exciting piece of poetry in the language.
Such a verse, recited by 8-year-olds in Birmingham, can be as traditional and as well known to children as a nursery rhyme; yet no one would mistake it for one of Mother Goose's compositions. It is not merely that there is a difference in cadence and subject-matter, the manner of its transmission is different. While a nursery rhyme passes from a mother or other adult to the small child on her knee, the school rhyme circulates simply from child to child, usually outside the home, and beyond the influence of the family circle. By its nature a nursery rhyme is a jingle preserved and propagated not by children but by adults, and in this sense it is an "adult" rhyme. It is a rhyme which is adult approved. The schoolchild's verses are not intended for adult ears. In fact part of their fun is the thought, usually correct, that adults know nothing about them. Grownups have outgrown the schoolchild's lore. If made aware of it they tend to deride it; and they actively seek to suppress its livelier manifestations. Certainly they do nothing to encourage it. And the folklorist and anthropologist can, without travelling a mile from his door, examine a thriving unself-conscious culture (the word 'culture' is used here deliberately) which is as unnoticed by the sophisticated world, and quite as little affected by it, as is the culture of some dwindling aboriginal tribe living out its helpless existence in the hinterland of a native reserve. Perhaps, indeed, the subject is worthy of a more formidable study than is accorded it here. As Douglas Newton has pointed out: 'The world-wide fraternity of children is the greatest of savage tribes, and the only one which shows no sign of dying out.'
CONTINUITY
No matter how uncouth schoolchildren may outwardly appear, they remain tradition's warmest friends. Like the savage, they are respecters, even venerators, of custom; and in their self-contained community their basic lore and language seems scarcely to alter from generation to generation. Boys continue to crack jokes that Swift collected from his friends in Queen Anne's time; they play tricks which lads used to play on each other in the heyday of Beau Brummel; they ask riddles which were posed when Henry VIII was a boy. Young girls continue to perform a magic feat (levitation) of which Pepys heard tell ('One of the strangest things I ever heard'); they hoard bus tickets and milk-bottle tops in distant memory of a love-lorn girl held to ransom by a tyrannical father; they learn to cure warts (and are successful in curing them) after the manner which Francis Bacon learnt when he was young. They call after the tearful the same jeer Charles Lamb recollected; they cry 'Halves!' for something found as Stuart children were accustomed to do; and they rebuke one of their number who seeks back a gift with a couplet used in Shakespeare's day. They attempt, too, to learn their fortune from snails, nuts, and apple parings divinations which the poet Gay described nearly two and a half centuries ago; they span wrists to know if someone loves them in the way that Southey used at school to tell if a boy was a bastard; and when they confide to each other that the Lord's Prayer said backwards will make Lucifer appear, they are perpetuating a story which was gossip in Elizabethan times.1
The same continuity obtains in their games and play songs. When the Birmingham 8-year-olds chant about 'Mister Fatty Belly' they are perpetuating a verse with a lineage going back to schooldays under the Regency, for P. H. Gosse (the father of Sir Edmund) recorded that when he was at school, 1818-23: 'One boy meeting another would address him with these queries; the other giving the replies:
Doctor! Doctor! how's your wife?
Very bad, upon my life.
Can she eat a bit of pie?
Yes, she can, as well as I.2
Today, sets of these responses, usually repeated for counting-out or skipping, have been collected from schoolchildren in Aberdeen, Bath, Manchester, Market Rasen, Scarborough, Spennymoor, Tunstall, and York City; and some of the versions are all but identical with the rhyme as it was known more than 130 years ago. Thus a 12-year-old Spennymoor girl reports:
'When I get home from school there is usually some little girls out of the infants school playing in the street, and their special little rhyme is:
Little fatty doctor, how's your wife?
Very well, thank you, she's alright.
Can she eat a twopenny pie?
Yes sir, yes sir, and so can I.
The older girls think that rhyme is silly for them, so they play faster games.'
APPARENT UNIFORMITY OF THE LORE
The fact that schoolchild lore continues to thrive in a natural manner amongst unselfconscious adherents, and that we have been able to watch it functioning in a number of widely separated communities, has allowed us to carry our study a step further than we thought possible at the outset; it has enabled us to obtain a picture of the state of traditional lore over the country as a whole. Thus it has shown that traditional lore exists everywhere; that as many, if not more, traditional games are known to city children as to country children; and that children with homes and backgrounds as different from each other as mining community and garden suburb share jokes, rhymes, and songs, which are basically identical.3 Conscious as we were of the economy of human invention, and the tenacity of oral tradition (the two elements without which there would be no folklore), we were not prepared for quite the identity of ritual and phraseology which has been revealed throughout the land in children's everyday witticisms, and in the newer of their self-organized amusements.
The faithfulness with which one child after another sticks to the same formulas even of the most trivial nature is remarkable. A meaningless counting-out phrase such as 'Pig snout, walk out', sometimes adapted to 'Boy Scout, walk out', or a tag for two-balls like 'Shirley Temple is a star, S-T-A-R', is apparently in use throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. If, in the vicinity of Westminster, a visitor hears for the first time children skipping to the simple chant,
Big Ben strikes one,
Big Ben strikes two,
Big Ben strikes three,
he may well suppose that the words are the just-for-the-minute invention of a particularly unimaginative local child. Yet this formula is repeated all over London, down side-streets behind the Victorian mansions of Kensington, in the bustle of Hackney, in Manor Park, and outside London in Croydon, Enfield, and Welwyn. Traveling farther afield it will be found in use at Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire, at Cwmbran in Monmouthshire, in Edinburgh, in Glasgow, and, in fact, apparently everywhere. Nor is it a passing fad of the juvenile fancy, for it will be found that Norman Douglas quotes it in London Street Games (p. 49); and the fact has to be faced that since 1916 some 30 million children have dashed through the nation's playgrounds, respecters neither of persons nor property, yet preserving the silly chant as carefully as if it was a magic incantation. Similarly 'Pig snout, walk out' is known to have been current in the Island of Bute in 1911.4 And although 'Shirley Temple is a star' cannot be so old, children have carried it to Australia and Canada and have planted it in those countries, or, perhaps, have brought it here from across the sea.
Even when it seems certain that a rhyme must be purely local, such as the song little girls skip to in Manchester,
Manchester Guardian, Evening News,
I sell Evening News,
it may be no more than a variation on an established theme. In Radcliffe, Lancashire, one girl skips while two others turn the rope chanting,
Manchester, Bolton Evening News,
I sell evening one...
In Wellington, Shropshire, the girls skip to,
Wellington Journal, Evening News,
Ever see a cat in a pair of shoes ?
In Shrewsbury,
London, Liverpool, Weekly Post,
I say number one, two, three.
In Swansea, amongst several variants,
South Wales Evening Post,
Un, dau, tri [one, two, three].
And our own correspondents, and correspondents to the Manchester Guardian (23 and 28 April 1955), recall skipping to versions of this chant in north-west England as far back as the nineties.5
SPEED OF ORAL TRANSMISSION
Since, through our collaborators, it has been possible to keep an eye on several widely separated places simultaneously, we have, on occasion, been afforded glimpses of oral transmission in actual operation. The speed with which a newly made-up rhyme can travel the length and breadth of the country by the schoolchild grapevine seems to be little short of miraculous. Some idea of the efficiency of oral transmission can be obtained by following verses which are topical, or which are parodies of newly published songs, and can consequently be dated, although for test purposes it is, unfortunately, best to study specimens which are of a scurrilous or indelicate nature for with these there is, in general, less likelihood of dissemination by means other than word-of-mouth.
A notorious instance of the transmission of scurrilous verses occurred in 1936 at the time of the Abdication. The word-of-mouth rhymes which then gained currency were of a kind which could not possibly, at that time, have been printed, broadcast, or even repeated in the music halls. One verse, in particular, made up one can only wonder by whom,
Hark the Herald Angels sing,
Mrs. Simpson's pinched our king,
was on juvenile lips not only in London, but as far away as Chichester in the south, and Liverpool and Oldham in the north. News that there was a constitutional crisis did not become public property until around 25 November of that year, and the king abdicated on 10 December. Yet at a school Christmas party in Swansea given before the end of term, Christmas 1936, when the tune played happened to be 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing', a mistress found herself having to restrain her small children from singing this lyric, known to all of them, which cannot have been composed much more than three weeks previously. Many an advertising executive with a six-figure budget at his disposal might envy such crowd penetration. Similarly, the ultra juvenile verse,
Temptation, temptation, temptation,
Dick Barton went down to the station,
Blondie was there
All naked and bare,
Temptation, temptation, temptation,
wherever it may have originated, was reported to us in quick succession as rife among children in Kirkcaldy in January 1952, as known to children in Swansea in January 1952, and it reached children in Alton in February 1952. These three places are up to 400 miles apart; yet an instance of even more distant transmission can be cited. At the beginning of 1956 'The Ballad of Davy Crockett' was launched on the radio. It was especially intended to appeal to children, and quickly reached the top of the adult hit parade. But the official words of the ballad, beginning,
Born on a mountain top in Tennessee,
Greenest state in the Land of the Free,
were very small beer compared with the word-of-mouth stanzas which rapidly won approval in juvenile society. One composition, beginning 'The Yellow Rose of Texas', was collected in Perth in April 1956, in Alton, Battersea, Great Bookham, Reading, and Scarborough in July 1956, in Kent in August 1956, and in Swansea in September 1956. Another parody sung by schoolgirls in Swansea in September 1956, appeared to have local associations:
Born on a table top in Joe's Café,
Dirtiest place in the U.S.A.
Polished off his father when he was only three,
Polished off his mother with D.D.T.
Davy, Davy Crockett,
King of the Wild Frontier.
The teacher who sent this verse remarked that Joe's Café was a popular Swansea establishment near the beach. Subsequently, however, we had news of the verse being current in Brentwood, Hornchurch, Reading, Upminster, and Woolwich, all naming 'Joe's Café'. But unknown to any of our home observers, and before the official Davy Crockett song had reached Britain, an Australian correspondent, writing 3 January 1956, had reported that the following ditty was 'sweeping the schools' Sydney:
Reared on a paddle-pop in Joe's Café,
The dirtiest dump in the U.S.A.,
Poisoned his mother with D.D.T.
And shot his father with a '303,
Davy, Davy Crockett,
The man who is no good.
It seems that the schoolchild underground also employs trans-world couriers.
WEAR AND REPAIR DURING TRANSMISSION
The previous section has shown how quickly a rhyme passes from one schoolchild to the next, and illustrates a further difference between school lore and nursery lore. In nursery lore a verse or tradition, learnt in early childhood, is not usually passed on again until the little listener has grown up, and has children of his own, or even grandchildren. The period between learning a nursery rhyme and transmitting it may be anything from twenty to seventy years. With the playground lore, however, a rhyme may be excitedly passed on within the very hour it is learnt; and, in general, it passes between children who are the same age, or nearly so, since it is uncommon for the difference in age between playmates to be more than five years. If, therefore, a playground rhyme can be shown to have been current for a hundred years, or even just for fifty, it follows that it has been retransmitted over and over again; very possibly it has passed along a chain of two or three hundred young hearers and tellers, and the wonder is that it remains alive after so much handling, let alone that it bears resemblance to the original wording.
In most schools there is a wholly new generation of children every six years; and when a rhyme such as 'Little fatty doctor, how's your wife?' can be shown to be more than 130 years old it, may be seen that it has passed through the keeping of not less than twenty successive generations of schoolchildren, and been exposed to the same stresses that nursery lore would meet only after 500 years of oral conveyance. This, in itself, makes schoolchild lore of peculiar value to the student of oral communication, for the behaviour and defects of oral transmission can be seen in operation during a relatively short period, much as if the phenomenon had been placed in a mechanical stresser to speed up the wear and tear.
Thus we find that variations, even apparently creative ones, occur more often by accident than by design. Usually they come about through mishearing or misunderstanding, as in the well-known hymnal misapprehension:
Can a woman's tender care
Cease towards the child she-bear?
A line in the song 'I'm a knock-kneed sparrow' quickly becomes 'I'm a cockney sparrow'. 'Calico breeches', no longer familiar to youth today, become 'comical breeches'. 'Elecampane' becomes 'elegant pain'. 'Green gravel, green gravel' becomes by association 'Greengages, greengages'. And the unmeaning 'Alligoshee, alligoshee', in the marching game, is rationalized to 'Adam and Eve went out to tea'. At one school the pledges 'Die on oath', 'Dianothe', and 'Diamond oath' were all found to be current at the same time. The common tendency to speed up a ritual or abridge a formula also produces surprising results. At a Surrey school the pledge 'Cub's honour' became, by jest, 'Cub's-on-a-car', which was presently abridged, so that the standard pledge became 'Car'. Indeed the corruptive influence of the pun on language and custom is more considerable than might be supposed. When a child, as a sign of derision, expels air through his compressed lips, the stock retort is 'We have them with custard'. The chain here is that breaking wind was, at one time, by the process of rhyming slang, known as a 'raspberry tart', hence 'raspberry'. Subsequently this became the name for the imitative noise made with the mouth; and this term is still retained, although it has disappeared as a name for the original exhalation.
Again, a fool is very generally called a 'blockhead', his head being likened to the denseness of wood. Consequently, as a joke, when somebody says 'touch wood' he is liable on occasion to touch the head of a notorious dunce, or of a child whom he wishes to make out to be a dunce, or, in self-deprecation, his own head. This joke has in fact become so commonplace that many children are already forgetting that touching the head is a joke, and state seriously: 'If you say that something nice is going to happen you must either touch wood or your head', or, without qualification, 'To avert ill-luck it is the custom to touch your head'. So it is that the time is upon us when, in a prefabricated classroom with desks and fittings manufactured entirely out of plastic and chromium, it will not be possible for children to touch wood, only their heads; and when these children grow up it may become normal with the adult population, too, to put a finger to their brow as a superstitious act of self-protection.
Thus, it may be seen, oral lore is subject to a continual process of wear and repair, for folklore, like everything else in nature, must adapt itself to new conditions if it is to survive. An old rustic prognostication about magpies, for instance, is now commonly repeated by city children (who probably would not recognize a magpie even if they saw one) when telling fortunes with bus tickets. The lyrics of certain obsolescent singing games have obtained a new lease of life by being speeded up and sung while skipping. Cigarette cards, which have become scarce, are being replaced in flicking games by milk-bottle tops, known as 'flying saucers'. The bonfires of Hallowe'en have been postponed five days to become part of the effigy burning on Guy Fawkes Night. And a ribald rhyme of sixty years ago such as 'Lottie Collins has no drawers' is now chanted in honour of a modern idol, Miss Diana Dors.
To illustrate this mutation it may be interesting to set out some recordings of a playground rhyme at different stages in its history to show how, over the course of 200 years, it has been remoulded and brought up to date. In 1725 a song about a cup-shot grenadier, probably dating from the previous century, had already, according to Henry Carey, become proverbial as a children's play-rhyme. Grenadiers, however, are no longer objects of popular derision, and, although the grenadier still survives as the disgraceful hero of the rhyme in nursery lore where change is slower,6 in the playground the rhyme has developed along more contemporary lines.
DEVELOPMENT OF A PLAYGROUND RHYME
1725
Now he acts the Grenadier,
Calling for a Pot of Beer:
Where's his Money? He's forgot:
Get him gone, a Drunken Sot. 7
1774
Who's there
A Granidier
What dye want
A Pint of Beer.
Who's there
A Granidier
What dye want
A Pint of Beer.8
1780
Who comes here?
A Grenadier.
What do you want?
A Pot of Beer.
Where is your Money?
I've forgot.
Get you gone
You drunken Sot.9
c. 1907
Eenty, teenty, tuppenny bun,
Pitching tatties doon the lum;
Who's there? John Blair.
What does he want? A bottle of beer.
Where's your money? I forgot.
Go downstairs, you drunken sot.10
c. 1910
Far are ye gaein'?
Across the gutter.
Fat for?
A pund o' butter.
Far's yer money?
In my pocket.
Far's yer pocket?
Clean forgot it!11
c. 1916
Rat a tat tat, who is that?
Only grandma's pussy-cat.
What do you want?
A pint of milk.
Where's your money?
In my pocket.
Where is your pocket?
I forgot it.
0 you silly pussy-cat.12
1939
A frog walked into a public house
And asked for a pint of beer.
Where's your money?
In my pocket.
Where's your pocket?
I forgot it.
Well, please walk out.13
1943
Rat tat tat, who is that?
Only Mrs. Pussy Cat.
What do you want?
A pint of milk.
Where's your penny?
In my pocket.
Where's your pocket?
I forgot it.
Please walk out.14
1950
Mickey Mouse
In a public house
Drinking pints of beer.
Where's your money?
In my pocket.
Where's your pocket?
I forgot it.
Please walk out.15
1952
A monkey came to my shop
I asked him what he wanted.
A loaf, sir. A loaf, sir.
Where's your money?
In my pocket.
Where's your pocket?
I ain't got it.16
1952
A pig walked into a public house
And asked for a drink of beer.
Where's your money, sir?
In my pocket, sir.
Where's your pocket, sir?
In my jacket, sir.
Where's your jacket, sir?
I forgot it, sir.
Please walk out.17
1954
I had a little beer shop
A man walked in.
I asked him what he wanted.
A bottle of gin.
Where's your money?
In my pocket.
Where's your pocket?
I forgot it.
Please walk out.18
In illustrating the variations which have occurred in this rhyme over the years (most of them due to contact with newer verses), we should repeat that to us the remarkable feature of schoolchild lore is how comparatively little it alters considering the usage it receives.
SOURCES OF THE RHYMES
The children themselves often have a touching faith in the novelty of their oral acquisitions. Of the rhyme,
House to let, apply within,
Lady turned out for drinking gin,
which we have collected from twenty-four places in the British Isles, also from South Africa, Australia, and the United States, and which was recorded as traditional in 1892 (G. F. Northall, English Folk-Rhymes, P. 306) an Alton girl remarked: 'Here's one you won't know because it's only just made up.' Of the couplet,
Mrs. Mason broke a basin
How much did it cost?
lines which are the recollection of a counting-out formula recorded in 1883 (G. F. Jackson, Shropshire Folk-lore, p. 573), a Birmingham child vouched the newness because it was 'named after a teacher's wife'. Children are, in fact, prone to claim the authorship of a verse when they have done no more than alter a word in it, for instance substitute a familiar name for a name unknown to them; and they tend to be passionately loyal to the presumed genius of a classmate, or of a child who has just left their school, who is credited with the invention of each newly heard composition. The unromantic truth, however, is that children do not 'go on inventing games out of their heads all the time', as Norman Douglas believed; for the type of person who is a preserver is rarely also creative, and the street child is every bit as conservative as was George VI with his lifelong preference for the hymns he sang in the choir at Dartmouth. The nearest the normal child gets to creativeness is when he stumbles on a rhyme, as we have overheard: an 8-year-old, playing in some mud, suddenly chanted 'Stuck in the muck, stuck in the muck', whereupon his playmates took up the refrain, 'Stuck in the muck, stuck in the muck'. A 10-year-old added:
It's a duck, it's a duck,
Stuck in the muck, stuck in the muck,
and the group echoed this too, and went on chanting it, spasmodically, with apparent satisfaction, for above an hour, so that it seemed certain that we were in at the birth of a new oral rhyme. But when we asked them about it a week later they did not know what we were talking about. The fact is that even a nonsense verse must have some art and rhythm in it if it is to obtain a hold on a child's mind, although exactly what the quality is which gives some verses immortality is difficult to discover.
Where, then, do the rhymes come from? The origins of only a few can be traced, but these few may be indicative. The popular verse,
Sam, Sam, the dirty man,
Washed his face in a frying pan;
He combed his hair with a donkey's tail,
And scratched his belly with a big toe nail,
known throughout Britain in a multitude of versions (this one is from a 13-year-old boy in Pontefract) is a relic of a once famous song 'Old Dan Tucker' composed by the black-faced minstrel Daniel Decatur Emmett, of 'Dixie' fame, and printed in 1843. Similarly Nellie Bligh who 'shuts her eye' ('because she cannot shut her ears'), or who catches a fly and ties it to a pin, was the heroine of a mid-nineteenth-century minstrel song by Stephen Foster; while a further 'Ethiopian' legacy is the little tongue-tripping verse,
I saw Esau sawing wood,
And Esau saw I saw him;
Though Esau saw I saw him saw
Still, Esau went on sawing,
sometimes sung by children when skipping (this version from an 8-year-old Alton girl), which is descended from the lyric 'I saw Esau kissing Kate' written by Harry Hunter for the Mohawk Minstrels sometime about 1875.19 Again, the child rhyme,
Johnny Morgan played the organ,
Jimmy played the drum,
His sister played the tambourine
Till father smacked her bum,
is a perverted recollection of the chorus of John Read's music-hall song 'Johnny Morgan' published in 1877; and the little jeu d'esprit, known to children from one end of Britain to the other,
Tiddly Wink the barber
Went to shave his father,
The razor slip
And cut his lip,
Tiddly Wink the barber,
is further living testimony to Read's genius. In 1878 the original chorus of 'Tiddle-a-Wink the Barber, The Popular Comic Song, Written, Composed & Sung with Immense Success by John Read', went:
Tiddle-a-Wink, Tiddle-a-Wink, Tiddle-a-Wink the Barber,
Tiddle-a-Wink, Tiddle-a-Wink, went to shave his father
But he made a slip and cut his lip,
Which made his father roar,
The father knock'd poor Tiddle-a-Wink
Bang upon the floor.
This process of children adopting or adapting popular songs for use in their games continues, of course, in the present day. Songs such as 'The more we are together', 'Show me the way to go home', 'Horsie, horsie, don't you stop', and 'The Lambeth Walk' (now sometimes 'Lambert's Walk') have a playground existence today far removed from their dance-band origins. More recently, the American song 'Music! Music! Music!' ('Put another nickel in') written by Stephan Weiss and Bernie Baum, and published in 1950, seems assured of immortality, for both the original lyric, and juvenile extemporizations of it extolling film stars or denigrating teachers, can still frequently be heard in the playground, seven years and a whole school-generation after its original publication. It is, perhaps, only to be expected that the most memorable verses should turn out to be the work of professional humorists and song-writers.
REGIONAL VARIATION
If the uniformity of schoolchild lore, to which we have so far been witness, was the whole story, it would of course only be necessary to study one locality to know what goes on in every locality; and no matter how comprehensive and virile the lore was found to be, if it was the same everywhere, it would confirm the apprehensions of those who suppose that standardized education, mass entertainment, and national periodical literature have already subverted local traditions and characteristics. Happily our tale is not yet complete. Two distinct streams of oral lore flow into the unending river of schoolchild chant and chatter, and these two streams are as different from each other as slang and dialect. The slangy superficial lore of comic songs, jokes, catch phrases, fashionable adjectives, slick nicknames, and crazes, in short that noise which is usually the first that is encountered in playground and street, spreads everywhere but, generally speaking, is transitory. The dialectal lore flows more quietly but deeper; it is the language of the children's darker doings: playing truant, giving warning, sneaking, swearing, snivelling, tormenting, and fighting. It belongs to all time, but is limited in locality. It is so timeworn indeed that it cannot be dated, and words of which Shakespeare would have known the meaning, as 'cog', 'lag', and 'miching', are, in their particular districts, still common parlance; while the language which children use to regulate their relationships with each other, such as their terms for claiming, securing precedence, and making a truce, vary from one part of the country to another, and can in some instances be shown to have belonged to their present localities not merely for the past two or three generations, but for centuries.
Conflicting as are the characteristics of these two types of lore, the one rapidly spreading from place to place and having a brief existence, the other having a prolonged existence but rarely spreading, it is not impossible to see how they subsist together. When a child newly arrives in a district, any slang expression he knows, any jokes or tricks, or any new skipping or 'dipping' rhymes he brings with him, are eagerly listened to, and if found amusing, are added to the local repertoire, and may eventually supplant similar pieces of lore already known. But the local children, while willing to enlarge their store of jokes and rhymes, will not consciously brook any alteration to what they already know. The new child must learn, and very quickly does so, the 'legislative' language of his new playmates. He must learn the local names for the playground games, and the expressions used while playing them. Unless he does this, he will not merely be thought peculiar, he will not be understood. A child who moves from Lincoln and cries 'Screams' for mercy in Leicester will find that he receives no sympathy, since the accepted truce term in Leicester is 'Croggies'. Similarly a 12-year-old Spennymoor girl who says,
'When the rope is turning away from the nobby-ender it is lupey-dyke. When the nobby-ender is out he takes the laggy-ender's place and the laggyender takes the foggy-ender's place so that the foggy-ender becomes the nobbyender', will be thought out of her mind if she says this in the hearing of a Spitalfields girl, although both children in fact adhere to this practice while skipping, and both may skip to the same rhymes.
This regional variation in the children's dialectal lore has been as unexpected as the slavish uniformity of their slang lore; and when the children's customs and superstitious practices are examined, in particular their calendar customs, the regional differences are remarkable. While some children roll eggs at Easter, or nettle the legs of classmates on the twenty-ninth of May, or leave little gifts on people's doorsteps on St. Valentine's Day, or act under the delusion that they are above the law on the night of 4 November, other children, sometimes living only the other side of a hill, will have no knowledge of these activities. It is not perhaps of much consequence that in different parts of England children have different ritual ways of disposing of their milk teeth, that there are more than sixty names for the illegal pursuit of knocking at doors and running away, that in some places walking under a ladder can be lucky and seeing a black cat can be unlucky, and that some children make fools on the first of May with more zeal than on the first of April; but the children's loyalty to local customs and forms of speech is at least evidence that the young in Britain do not take as their authority only what they hear and see on the wireless and television and at the cinema.
1. Witches were supposed to say their prayers backwards, with awful effect, as is noted in Robert Greene's A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, 1592, sig. D3, and this method of raising the devil is also mentioned by Defoe in his System of Magick, 1727, pp. 259-60. References to schoolboys' possession of the secret occur in Notes and Queries, 1st ser., vol. iv, 1851, p. 53, and 3rd ser., vol. iv, 1863, p. 492; and we knew it ourselves in our schooldays, but never dared test it. For accounts of boys who did, see William Henderson, Folk Lore of the Northern Counties, 1866, p. 19, and The Listener, 3 January 1957, p. 10. A 13-year-old Tredegar, Monmouthshire, girl tells us it is believed there that if one runs round the church three times the devil will appear.
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