IN MY YOUTH

Childhood stories and rhymes are a shadow of what they used to be, but Alexander McCall Smith is delighted to see that some age old traditions linger on

Alexander McCall Smith is pleased that some of the rhymes and traditions he knew from his childhood still live on

The other day, walking along a quiet residential street in Edinburgh, I came across something I had not seen for some time. The pavement had been marked with chalk by a child. Small squares had been drawn, one piled upon another, with numbers inscribed within each. Hopscotch!

The name came back to me from a distant corner of memory. Hopscotch was also known in Scotland as peevers, after the stone or slate tokens that were tossed into the squares. The game was predominantly the preserve of girls, in the same way in which playing with marbles was mostly an occupation for boys. Boys could watch, of course – and I have an old photograph of boys providing an admiring audience for a group of accomplished-looking girls hopping from square to square, but the governing body of the game was definitely female.

I found the sight of these chalked designs on the pavement strangely nostalgic. Children no longer play in the street – for obvious reasons, heavy traffic being one of them. Look at a photograph of Edinburgh or Glasgow in the 1950s, and cars were few and far between. Children could play in the street with little fear of being knocked down by a passing motorist. And what cars existed were far less powerful than today’s over-powered vehicles. Being knocked over by a Morris Minor or an Austin Ten was never pleasant, I imagine, but one’s chances of survival were far greater than they would be today. There was also the question of visibility: in streets that were not lined with cars parked nose to tail, the chances of a child stepping out onto the road from nowhere must have been much smaller.

The street games that children played were part of a rich culture of childhood that I suspect has all but disappeared. The locus classicus for the recording of this culture is an astonishing feat of folklore scholarship carried out by the husband and wife team of Iona and Peter Opie. The Opies’ The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren was first published in 1959, but is still in print. The Opies were effectively anthropologists who, rather than setting off to record the ways of a remote people in Papua New Guinea, went down among the children – a descent into a world that was, in many respects, every bit as much a jungle as those in which other anthropologists might pursue their research. They observed and spoke to young children up and down Britain, including many in Scotland, realising that their world was complex, inventive, and, in its way, poetic.

Browse through Lore and Language and you will find many of the games and rhymes, the beliefs and sayings, that we knew as children decades ago. The field is extraordinarily rich, from simple counting rhymes to elaborate rituals gone through to seal a promise, avert disaster, or humiliate an unpopular rival. Some of these are innocent – others are downright nasty, reflecting the psychological truth that most small children are red in tooth and claw until the dawning of significant awareness of the feelings of others.

All the old favourites are here. Remember Skinny Malinky Long Legs, Big Banana Feet? He went to the cinema and slipped down the seat. The Opies recorded that from the mouth of a twelve-year-old boy in Helensburgh, but children everywhere knew it, learned word perfect from older brothers and sisters through a route of purely juvenile transmission.

Other notorious thinnies included Boney Moroney, who was well-known to children in Glasgow, where one might also have encountered this refrain: ‘What’s your name? Baldy Bain. What’s your ither? Ask ma mither.’ Misfortune stalked – Michael Finnegan, it will be remembered, ‘grew whiskers on his chinigin; The wind came out and blew them in ag’in.’ In another verse, Michael Finnegan scraped his knee and tore off several yards of skinigin. These rhymes took no prisoners. They were resolutely non-PC.

The Opies did not restrict themselves to childhood songs and rhymes – they studied, with all the solemnity of the anthropologist, the strange pre-scientific beliefs of children. I imagine I am not alone in remembering that if you cut the skin between thumb and finger, you almost invariably got lockjaw. If someone stabbed you with a pen and the ink got into your veins, you died of ‘blood poisoning’. If you put blotting paper in your shoes, you fainted – useful for getting out of tricky situations.

Some of these adverse events could be forfended by uttering various nostrums. In the past, children in the west of Scotland, on seeing a large black slug or snail, could avert disaster by spitting on it and intoning ‘It’s no my Da, an it’s no ma Grannie’. Similarly, in Perthshire – and elsewhere – if you saw a white horse you were advised to make a wish and keep your fingers crossed until you saw a dog.

Some of this vast body of lore has survived, but only in an attenuated form. The world of childhood is an electronic one now, with stories drawn from adult-created entertainment. But every so often, an echo of the rich world of what used to exist, will be heard – a muttered saying, a snatch of rhyme, crayon marks on the pavement washed away by the rain, blurred by the passing feet of others.

“Michael Finnegan scraped his knee and tore off several yards of skinigin