Hilo Piccolo. Children's games from Walney
These playground chants and the choreography of clapping and skipping that goes with them are from Walney, off the coast of Barrow. No-one composes them as such. They seem to wait in the playground to be discovered, dusted down and tried on for size. Obsolete features are removed, others survive and others are added. Populated now by UFOs rather than (as I recall) Elsie Tanner, their rhythms, calls and responses and fizzy backchat deal with pecking orders, identity and territory. https://soundcloud.com/bifocals-2013/walney-childrens-games The Opie's " Lore And Language Of Schoolchildren" is probably still the set text on this.. They came up here in rhe 50's and found this nursery rhyme in Ulverston.. Wrangel a wrangel a Pig-a-machine, All his mighty men: Fly,cock, goose or hen. Poet Kate Davis -who lives within earshot of the school playground when the wind drops reports "..a pparently the reader would hold onto a lock of the listeners h