They don't write lyrics like that any more

It had all begun with mondegreens - misheard lyrics - then moved merrily into that familiar children's rhyme which apparently tells of "Maizy dotes and dozey dotes and little lambsy divies".

(Several readers, including Claire Coverdale in Spennymoor - "so obvious when you think about it" - have pointed out that the real words are "Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy", but Gadfly explained as much three weeks ago.)

The whole fatuous farrago sent Margaret Warner in Willington rummaging her memories cupboard until finally she discovered the words and music of Chickery Chick - "as broadcast by Joe Loss and his Orchestra".

The opening verse ("slowly, with an emphatic lift") tells of a chicken that grew tried of saying "Chick, chick" all day and determined, perhaps by buying the Readers Digest though the means is not elucidated, to increase its word power.

Thus the chorus:

Chickery chick cha-la-, cha-la, check-a-la-romey in a banan-ika

Wollika, wollika can't you see, chickery chick is me.

It was 1945, or MCMXLV as classical sheet musicians prefer. Chickery Chick was clearly the forerunner of songs like that one about the lucky sweep and the super-cally-what-not. They don't make them like that any more. Do they?

AFTER Chickery Chick, what of chickey-melly, a game much loved by older members of The Broons and (of course) by Oor Wullie.

It featured in a Wullie strip as far back as 1939 when a visiting professor - the comic cuts answer to Peter and Iona Opie - asks the wee man to talk him through some of their finest games. There's John Tamson's Cuddy, it's explained over the sugarelly water - that's liquorice, apparently - and Broken Flower Pots and, inevitably, chickey-melly. In search of translation, we rang Duncan Bannatyne, the Darlington based multi-millionaire who in Saturday's paper recalled playing "kick the can" in his post-war Clydebank childhood.

Oor Duncan, sadly, is unable to help. Though he believes that "kick the can" was started by throwing a tin backwards over the head - in Shildon we called it kickey-ock-chock - he cannot recall the others.

Scottish ex-pats may be able to help. Have we given up? Not on your chicken-melly.

STILL playful, we turn again to paste eggs - and to jarping, the Easter exercise ever popular in these parts. Without particular reason, Steve Leonard from Middleton Tyas loans a 19th Century volume of the naturalist Charles Waterton's wanderings in South America - and of his early education, 1790s, at the Roman Catholic boarding school at Tudhoe, near Spennymoor.

Whatever the merits of Mr Ted Shaw's present campaign to redeem the reputation of his Teesdale ancestor William Shaw - otherwise Wackford Squeers of Dotheboys Hall - the Rev Fr Storey of Tudhoe appears altogether more alarming.

"A fiery, frightful, formidable spectre," notes Waterton, who recalls being birched for "various frolics independent of school erudition" and sometimes for acts of kindness, too.

Still, good Christian gentleman that doubtless he was, Fr Storey did at least refrain from thrashing his charges on Palm Sunday, sparing the rod and his displeasure until flogging on the following morning. All was forgiven by Easter, however, when the head would provide "Pasche eggs" for his pupils.

"They were boiled hard in a concoction of whin-flowers, which rendered them beautifully purple. We used them for warlike purposes, by holding them betwixt our forefinger and thumb with the sharp end upwards and as little exposed as possible.

"An antagonist then approached and with the sharp end of his own egg struck this egg. If he succeeded in cracking it, the vanquished egg was his, and he either sold it for a halfpenny in the market or reserved it for his own eating. When all the sharp ends had been crushed, then the blunt ends entered into battle. Thus nearly every Pasche egg in the school had its career of combat."

SO a "paste egg", of course, is a corruption of "Pasch", both the Latin and Greek root for "Easter". But what, we'd wondered, of the first part of the familiar North-East rhyme - "Tid, mid, misere, Carlin, Palm, Paste Egg Day"? As might be said of a jarping champion, both Tom Purvis in Sunderland and Bill Wood from Shadforth, near Durham, have cracked it. Tid was Lent's second Sunday when Te Deum Laudamus was sung, Mid the third Sunday (Mi Deus) and the fourth the occasion on which the Miserare was no doubt solemnly chanted.

That little doggerel, explained an article in a 1903 edition of Country Folk Lore, was used only by "the vulgar in the North". Its presence here is thus abundantly explained.

SINCE he's put pen to paper - or forefingers to what may be a vintage Remington - Bill Wood also offers a PS to last week's note on television's mispronunciation of Tow Law. A toe rag, he adds, is misspelt and should be tow-rag - "a piece of rough cloth used by engineers to wipe away excess oil from machinery. It became very dirty, hence the connection to human low-life."

LAST week's column also reproduced the back of a 1955 football programme, a full page advertisement for a Hull sports shop called Asbestos. Philip Jones in Northallerton, Bill Coates in Darlington and Roger Cliff in Low Coniscliffe - though a Hornsea lad originally - all confirm that it was owned by the Asbestos and Rubber Company.

The firm, says Roger, was formed in the 1880s to make "various industrial products", though in childhood they'd catch the train to Hull in the hope of a visit to the sports emporium. "Probably it was the equivalent of today's JJB Sports, though well before the days of designer trainers, more the realms of black or white plimsolls."

Bill Coates, who worked in a previous Asbestos shop in Hull, recalls that it had a rubber pavement outside; Philip Jones remembers asbestos lined gloves for the Humber's trawlermen.

The sports shop remains, and according to Roy Wilkinson from Hull, is called All Sports. Why it is no longer considered prudent to call a sports shop Asbestos may not need further explanation.

* And finally in this chicken and egg column, a note on birds of an entirely different feather. Whilst we all shivered on Monday afternoon, a chap in the Brit recalled that there were once a pair of penguins in the South Park. Can it be true - and if it is, did Darlington simply become too cold for them? Perhaps we shall pick up on that one next week.

Published: 02/05/01