She’s in, she’s in, she’s never been out,
She’s in the parlour walking about.
She comes down as white as snow,
With a baby in her arms all dressed in silk.The story of the girl of London City has, however, not been relinquished. The first verse,
with its haunting tune, has been turned into a skipping song; it functions very well, with
the skipper calling the next player into the rope at ‘May I tell you who it be?’
The main custodians of the oral literature of childhood are female. Mothers and
grandmothers purvey nursery rhymes; and it is the girls who cherish and pass on the
singing games and the multitude of rhymes used in the skipping, ball-bouncing and
clapping games. Whether this is because females have a stronger sense of tradition, or
because they have a stronger appreciation of rhyme and rhythm, is not clear. Certainly
it is generally assumed that they enjoy repetitive words and actions.
When skipping in a long rope ceased being a boys’ game and came into the possession
of girls, towards the end of the nineteenth century, it was increasingly ornamented with
rhymes which regulated the movement of the players through the rope. The rhymes may
be custom-made, like ‘All in together, girls’, which brings players into the rope, and
sends them out again, one by one; a version of this was in circulation c.1900, and it is
still a favourite today:
All in together, girls,
Never mind the weather, girls,
When it is your birthday,
Please jump in [later, ‘jump out’]
January, February, March...Or they might foretell the future, like the ever-popular,
Raspberry, strawberry, apple tart,
Tell me the name of your sweetheart,
A, B, C...which, in the 1890s, was a divination formula for use in a game of battledore and
shuttlecock. Or they might be old songs, sung once through for each skipper. The
following, in the 1870s simply a set of words for the Sultan Polka, was being used for
skipping by the 1890s (Gomme 1898:203):
Dancing Dolly had no sense,
For to fiddle [more often ‘She bought a fiddle’] for eighteen pence;
All the tunes that she could play,
Were ‘Sally get out of the donkey’s way’.PLAYGROUND RHYMES AND THE ORAL TRADITION 183