WITHOUT great expectations, perhaps we should one day invite euphemisms for becoming pregnant. "Falling wrong" is much the Gadfly favourite - unique to the North-East perhaps? - though today's column begins with the pudding club.

We'd reprised last week the once familiar song about the bloody great puddin' that came floating through the air, wondered not only who wrote the tune but whether there were any more verses.

Vincent Smith LRAM - music professional, former regimental band leader, long-time conductor of Shildon Salvation Army band - confirms that the tune may be pseudo Sousa, even that it's second cousin may be Nellie the Elephant, berates the poor column because he can't now get it out of his head.

From Shadforth, near Durham, Bill Wood recalls a slightly racier version sung in his mid-1930s childhood:

"All of a sudden

A great big black puddin'

Came flying through the air.

Swift as an arrow

And fat as a marrow

And covered all over with hair.

If you know any ladies

Who want any babies,

Then bring them here to me;

Today's the day

We give 'em away

With half a pound of tea."

"I knew that the song was rather naughty," Bill recalls, "but in my boyish innocence, and for quite a long time after that, I firmly believed that the travelling tea-man sometimes delivered rather more than tea."

On the same subject, a characteristically generous letter - "you make a unique contribution to the cultural life of the North-East" - from the Rev Harry Lee in Consett.

"The pudding song is in the same league as the famous words to Colonel Bogey," he writes, "though consciousness of the dignity of my Order restrains me from quoting it."

Harry, 70-year-old former Vicar of Holy Trinity, Darlington, and of Brompton, Northallerton, has been teaching the Pudding Song, slightly expurgated, to his grandchildren.

He regrets, however, that we omitted the opening flourish - "Hundred and One, Never been done, Queen of all the fairies."

As also befits the dignity of his Order, the reverend gentleman has absolutely no idea what it means.

APPARENTLY unconnected with any of those great chieftains of the pudding race, a letter - and a slim volume gloriously entitled Here We Sit Like Charlie Cattermole - has arrived from Howard Baker in Cambridgeshire.

He was born in Billingham in 1936, educated at Stockton Grammar School and Cambridge University, lived until recently in Scarborough. "I was the chap who sent you the words of the Donnelly's sausage commercial on Radio Eirann, apparently sung by no less a personality than Val Doonican."

Ah yes, that Howard Baker.

His novel (Blue Moon Books, £4.99) is set in Billingham around VE Day, features eight-year-old Paul Cartwright who has had one of his poems broadcast on Children's Hour - "it takes most of Billingham all their time to write a note to the milkman," Paul observes - and is rich in the lore and the language of a 1940s childhood.

There are lassie lads and boys who collect frog spawn, a Protestant school and a Catholic school - "I didn't know what the difference was between Catholic and Protestant, I just knew that we hit each other" - and men who travelled in ladies' underwear.

It was still the age of innocence, when Mary Had a Little Lamb (and Also Had a Bear) was deemed almost shamefully risque and - here it is immortalised on page 75 - another song was treasure troved by naughty boys everywhere:

All of a sudden, a bloody great puddin'..."

REGRESSING down Apostrophe Avenue, last week's column suggested a wrong note in Durham University Music Society's poster for a "Concert with two piano's." Colin Briggs in Newcastle and Peter Sotheran in Redcar leap to conduct the musicians' defence.

"Piano", they suggest, is merely short for "pianoforte" - in which case the apostrophe would correctly indicate that part of the word has been omitted.

Mr Sotheran also attempts to ensnare us in a debate about the 'cello, but round here there are enough strings attached as it is.

AT least Harry Page in Murton thought the University Music Society a good spot, and also "vividly" recalls a stumer of his own. In the 1950s, the body responsible for the eleven-plus examination produced an English paper headed: "Marks will be deducted for faulty spelling and grammer."

STILL amid the Groves of Academe, where dwelt the ancient Greeks, Marjorie Nicholson from Stanley, Crook, sends from her "college magazine" examples of how a single changed letter can alter foreign words and phrases:

Respondee s'il vous plaid - Honk if you're Scottish.

In fragrante delicto - I love that perfume you're wearing.

Monage a trois - I am three years old.

Haste cuisine - Fast French food.

Plus ca change - my Visa has run out.

Achtuna! - Look at that fish.

Others welcomed, of course.

THOUGH the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Euphemisms claims that the taboo of pregnancy has left "a rich legacy of doubletalk", its offerings are generally disappointing.

"Disappointing" may also be considered euphemistic.

An "interesting condition" is listed, one or two variations on spouts and buns and the highly sanitised "eating for two".

Whilst "fallen woman" appears biblical, there is nothing of falling wrong. Does it only happen on sackless Saturday nights in the North-East, and how else may such mistakes be disguised? (Usual terms and conditions apply.)

Published: 21/11/01