Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Eating black bananas.
Where do you think he put the skins?
Down his best pyjamas.Their mockery includes rhymes which can be recited sotto voce to make fun of a
teacher. The most popular is one which was already known in 1797, when it appeared in
the song book Infant Amusements:
Mr—is a very good man,
He tries to teach us all he can,
Reading, writing, arithmetic,
And he doesn’t forget to use the stick.
When he does he makes us dance
Out of England into France,
Out of France into Spain,
Over the hills and back again.Schoolchildren have preserved the ancient art of riddling in its true form (to be found,
for instance, in the predominantly eighth-century riddles in the Exeter Book), in which
some creature or object is described in an intentionally obscure manner.
Characteristically, children continue to take delight in amusements once enjoyed, and
now discarded, by adults. For instance, in the mid-1950s a 13-year-old boy from
Knighton, in Radnorshire, wrote down a riddle, ‘What goes up a tree with its head
turned downwards? A nail in your boot’, which was printed in the adult-oriented Booke
of Meery Riddles, 1629: ‘What is it that goes to the water on the head? It is a horse-shoe
naile’. Another riddle in the same work, ‘What is that: goeth through the wood, and
leaveth on every bush a rag? It is snow’, was known to a 15-year-old girl in Kirkcaldy in
1952, though with the answer ‘A sheep’:
Round the rocks
And round the rocks
The ragged rascal ran,
And every bush he came to,
He left his rags and ran.Usually, however, what the present-day schoolchild means by ‘a riddle’ is really a
conundrum, whose wit depends on a pun. Many conundrums still popular today have
been found in literature of the first half of the nineteenth century, a typical example
being ‘What is the difference between a warder and a jeweller? One watches cells and
the other sells watches.’
Whereas the playground narratives of the mid-twentieth century made fun of death
and decay, children today apparently prefer to retell the explicitly sexual stories they
learn from their older brothers. On certain occasions at home, however, and especially
PLAYGROUND RHYMES AND THE ORAL TRADITION 177