Some of the words girls chant while juggling two balls against a wall have instructions
built into them—‘Oliver Twist’ for instance:
Oliver Twist
Can you do this? [clap]
If so, do so [clap]
First your knee [touch knee]
Next your toe [touch toe]
Then under you go [lift leg over ball]The actions named must be performed; then the rhyme is repeated and the hands
clapped before the knee, and so on, is touched; then all actions are performed
‘Standstills’ without lifting a foot; then ‘Dancing Dollies’, doing a kind of dance; lastly,
‘Faraways’, when the player stands further away from the wall and the ball is allowed to
bounce once before the action.
Another regulatory rhyme is Plainsie, clapsie,/Round the world to backsie,/ Highsie
toosh, lowsie toosh,/Touch the ground and under. But most of the ball-bouncing
rhymes have the same character as the rest of children’s oral literature; everyday life
and fantasy are inextricably mixed, and the whole is suffused by an air of defiant gaiety.
They chant Mademoiselle she went to the well, Robin Hood and his merry men,/Went to
school at half past ten, Winnie the witch fell in a ditch,/ Found a penny and thought
she was rich, and many other rhymes, some of which are borrowed from the disciplines
of skipping and counting-out.
If the totality of children’s experience of oral literature is to be covered, mention must
be made of the dialogues which precede some of the side-to-side catching games, and of
the strange, archaic-seeming scenarios of the acting games. In ‘Sheep, sheep, come
home’, for instance, a game also traditional in German-speaking countries and in Italy, a
player in the role of shepherd calls ‘Sheep, sheep, come home’ and the sheep reply ‘We
are afraid’. ‘What of?’ says the shepherd. ‘The wolf,’ say the sheep. The shepherd deludes
them, saying ‘The wolf has gone to Devonshire, Won’t be back for seven year, Sheep,
sheep come home’. The sheep run towards the shepherd and the wolf springs out and
tries to catch one of them, who becomes the next wolf.
The acting game of ‘Fox and chickens’ is possibly the weirdest of this weird genre. The
actors are the fox, the mother hen, and the chickens, who form up in single file behind
the hen, holding on to each other. They march up to the fox, who is crouching on the
ground, and chant:
Chickany, chickany, crany crow,
I went to the well to wash my toe,
When I came back a chicken was dead.Then the hen asks ‘What are you doing, old fox?’ and he replies in a gruff voice, ‘Picking
up sticks.’ ‘What for?’ ‘To make a fire.’ ‘What do you want a fire for?’ ‘To cook a chicken.’
‘Where will you get it?’ ‘Out of your flock.’ As the fox says this he springs up and tries to
seize the last chicken in the line. When he catches her, he takes her back to his den,
184 TYPES AND GENRES