and the whole scene is gone through again and again until all the chickens have been
caught. The game has been known under many names, through many centuries—it
seems to be referred to a number of times as far back as the Middle Ages—and in many
countries of the world. In the older versions the sinister crouching figure, who is
sometimes a hawk or wolf, and is sometimes sharpening a knife, raises a dark,
mythological shadow.
Oral traditions are subject to change, and children’s rhymes are no exception. Words
take the place of other words, usually through misunderstandings, as when the old
Scottish singing game I lost my lad and I care nae became I lost my lad in the cairnie
and then Rosa love a canary. Shifts in taste and contemporaneity account for other
changes. Thus in ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’ the line Sing cuckolds all on a row
became, more politely, And pretty maids all in a row; and a 1956 parody of ‘The yellow
rose of Texas’ was found, when collected as a ball-bounce chant in 1975, to have shed
its dramatis personae—the Yellow Rose herself and Davy Crockett—in favour of Batman
and Robin, and Cinderella.
Often the change in the lore is caused by a change in use. Take the old courting game
All the boys in our town, for instance, in which, during the nineteenth century, each
turn at choosing from the ring was prefaced by as many as twenty-four lines of song.
Revived as a skipping game, the chant was necessarily shortened and became only eight
brisk lines. Songs have a tendency to split or coalesce in an almost biological manner.
An example is the clapping sequence Under the bram bushes, under the sea, which was
originally a students’ song formed from two popular songs, ‘Harry Harndin’s A cannibal
king’, 1895, and Cole and Johnson’s ‘Under the bamboo tree’, 1902. The central verse of
this amalgamation developed into the clapping verse, ‘bamboo tree’ became ‘bram
bushes’, and ‘When we are married happy we will be’ proliferated into a variety of forms
of which this Leeds, 1973, version is typical: True love for you, my darling,/True love for
me;/And when we are married,/We’ll raise a family,/With a boy for you,/and a girl for
me,/ I tiddley om pom, pom pom (which itself carries echoes of Vincent Youmans’ song
‘Tea for two’, 1924). The custodians of oral lore have a careless and carefree way with
their inheritance.
ReferencesGomme, A.B. (1894, 1898) Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2 vols, London:
David Nutt.
Opie, I and Opie, P. (1955) The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——(1959) The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Further ReadingDouglas, N. (1916) London Street Games, London: St Catherine Press.
Newell, W.W. (1883) Games and Songs of American Children, New York: Harper Brothers.
Opie, I. and Opie, P. (1951) The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
——(1969) Children’s Games in Street and Playground, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
PLAYGROUND RHYMES AND THE ORAL TRADITION 185