A load of old nonsense

It is to be another fool's errand, a column for those whom Mr Denis Healey once called silly Billies, a celebration of nonsense and stuff and quite possibly of stuff and nonsense.

Even the letter addressed simply to the Daft Doggerel Department was routed swiftly up here, though quite possibly it would have found its own way regardless.

David Armstrong started the mad hare away by recalling in last week's column the nonsense rhymes of his Kelloe - which must not be confused with callow - youth:

One fine day in the middle of the night

Two dead men get up to fight....

Since then the letters and e-mails have resembled the barmy army on post parade, myriad variations on the council committee which met to discuss what colour to whitewash the town hall. Several are welcome newcomers to the great company of Gadherents, all sense and nonsensibility every one.

THE most popular rhymes, including the one sent to the Daft Doggerel Department, concern Christmas Day in the workhouse. Ken Muers in Houghton-le-Spring offers a version of his own:

'Twas Christmas Day in the workhouse,

The snow was raining fast,

And a barefoot boy with clogs on

Stood sitting in the grass....

Sheila Weighell, in Morton-on-Swale near Northallerton, recalls a more moveable feast - a rhyme she was taught in schooldays, and by her brothers (inevitably).

'Twas a fine September morning

In October last July,

The sun lay thick upon the ground

The snow shone in the sky.

The flowers were sweetly singing,

The birds were in full bloom,

As I went down to the cellar

To wash the upstairs room...

And so, absurdly, it goes on, the subliminal to the ridiculous.

BERT Draycott, who begs to correct last week's assertion that a keeker was a colliery overman - he was a surface foreman, and Fishburn lads should know - remembers the same barefoot boy with clogs on, pussyfooting about their playground just before the war:

He went straight round a crooked corner

To see a dead donkey die,

Took out his pen knife and shot it,

And it kicked him one right in the eye.

"I think it should be done with a Tommy Cooper accent," adds Bert, "but you can please yourself about that."

Bert offers prose and convolutions, too - "This bloke walked into a pub in a wheelchair with a wooden cardboard box under his arm" his saga begins - though he is but a bairn in these matters compared with Mr W Davison from Durham who casts his mind back to 1920, "when I'd be about nine years old".

In those days, he remembers, they were able to rhyme off a long string of schoolyard nonsense. His mother had even been taught it formally - "an exercise to remember dissociated words".

"The maid was in the garden, cutting a cabbage to make a rabbit pie, when a big she bear popped her head through the window..."

You get the improbable idea.

TOM Purvis has e-mailed a learned parody of Lewis Carroll, though his attachments appear to have been uncoupled.

Brian Jennison in Middlesbrough recalls the nonsense taught him by his father - "such utter rubbish that both my children can still recite it today."

"Last night at six o'clock in the morning, an empty house full of furniture set on fire. A man who wasn't there came running downstairs with his father's clogs on, fell over an empty bucket of cold water and scalded himself. He was taken to hospital where he was informed that he was in the very best of health but wasn't expected to live..."

Ah yes, says Brian unashamedly, I still laugh at that one today...

JOHN Dryden, another oftcumden hereabouts, queries the suggestion in last week's column that use of the word "kite" to mean "belly" was an example of North-East dialect.

John, now in Darlington, has a recording by Harry Champion - "doyen of Cockney music hall singers" - of Boiled Beef and Carrots:

Don't live like vegetarians on the food they give to parrots,

From dawn 'til night, blow out your kite on boiled beef and carrots...

With no suggestion that it is a dialect term, the Oxford English Dictionary acknowledges the word but reckons it's now obsolete. Not in John Dryden's house, it's not.

PROUD son of a Muswell Hill emigre - which explains other allegiances, too - the column has an affection for Cockney rhyming slang, remembered whenever the dog rings.

John Dryden, who also points out that Muswell Hill was the ancestral home of Ray and Dave Davis of The Kinks, reckons the most improbable example he heard was in a south London benefit office - the applicant explaining to officialdom why he'd lost his previous job.

"Well, I got caught with me Germans in the buffalo..."

Germans = German bands = hands; buffalo = Buffalo Bill = till. More favourite examples of rhyming slang much welcomed.

THERE is much else. Margaret Bell from Sedgefield, now in her 90s, rings to point out that they aren't "paste" eggs but "pace" eggs - from "pasche", the Greek for Easter - a point underlined by Owen Willoughby, a mere 80-odd, from Trimdon.

"My mother used to be always correcting people about that," he says. "I'd have thought Mike Amos would have known better."

Pete Winstanley, who sent the nonsense at the top of the column, also offers a treatise on the difference between Diggers, who were radical 17th Century Puritans, and howkers, who weren't.

Harry Bunting, born and raised in Middlesbrough but 30 years in Darlington, wonders why his daughter had no idea what he was talking about when he announced that he was hoying his gorker out.

It's because in Darlington, core subject, a gorker is a gowk.

Published: 27/02/02