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  "..apparently the reader  would hold onto a lock of the listeners hair and ask them  to choose one of the four, then pull /knock thier head or let them go depending on the answer. (Sounds a bit harsh)"

I  found these descriptions and comments on the Penguin site..

First published in 1959, Iona and Peter Opie’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren is a pathbreaking work of scholarship that is also a splendid and enduring work of literature. Going outside the nursery, with its assortment of parent-approved entertainments, to observe and investigate the day-to-day creative intelligence and activities of children, the Opies bring to life the rites and rhymes, jokes and jeers, laws, games, and secret spells of what has been called "the greatest of savage tribes, and the only one which shows no signs of dying out.


“The Opies, professors of literature and essentially folklorists, did something path-breaking: they observed children and took their play seriously…The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren reminds us that children are their own beings who create and navigate complicated social worlds, and the way they do so is worthy of respect and understanding.” —Hilary Levey Friedman, Brain, Child Magazine

To the uninvolved or excluded these chants can seem as strange and dark as any ritual. One I recall from the 60's dealt with adult worlds: When-Suzy-Had-a- Baby was a Seven Ages Of Woman piece, covering decades of Kitchen Sink drama in 3 verses and a sudden cut-off... the singer's shoulders and head slumping forward  as the elderly Suzy dies.  

We visit the school in march to record, to respectfully listen and observe and to see where it takes us.   

ABOUT THE LORE AND LANGUAGE OF SCHOOLCHILDREN

First published in 1959, Iona and Peter Opie’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren is a pathbreaking work of scholarship that is also a splendid and enduring work of literature. Going outside the nursery, with its assortment of parent-approved entertainments, to observe and investigate the day-to-day creative intelligence and activities of children, the Opies bring to life the rites and rhymes, jokes and jeers, laws, games, and secret spells of what has been called "the greatest of savage tribes, and the only one which shows no signs of dying out."