Post-war penguins and the one-armed park keeper

A frosty answer to last week's question, several readers not only recall Darlington's post-war penguins but the one-armed park keeper with the sit-up-and-beg bike who looked after them. "He used to stop us playing hide and seek in the bushes as well," recalls one. "He couldn't half shift on that old bike."

Whether the penguins were frozen out or what "I always remember when one of the pair died, the other one looked so unhappy," says another reader, offering her initials only the South Park monkeys survived a little longer.

Others remember Albert French, who used to take a monkey into the Hope Inn because there was a sign forbidding dogs, and the monkey in the cage at the back of the Queens Head in Gainford which only bit the hand that fed it if its owner was a) inebriated and b) offering only tab ends.

The initial lady, incidentally, believes that the South Park monkey used to hold a burning cigarette, too. "At the time I thought there was nothing wrong with it," she adds.

Smoke without fire? Perhaps others can also recall lighting up time in Darlington's parks?

IS it simply advancing years, incidentally, or was one of the earliest and most delightful Children's Television programmes called Meet the Penguins, and with a theme song about Snowland. Is there substance to this flightless fancy?

THE week's greater interest, however, has been occasioned by the games children played - and particularly wee nyaffs in Scotland (what, please, is a nyaff?) like Oor Wullie.

In the 1940s, last week's column noted, Wullie and friends entertained themselves with chickey-melly, and Jack Thompson's cuddy and broken flower pots. George McKellar goes for the set.

Chickey-melly, as several other readers have proposed, involved a button, a piece of string and a sash window - particularly effective in tenement buildings, or wolly-closes as they were known in George's Glaswegian childhood.

Other suggest that chickey-melly is similar to the well remembered knocky-nine-doors, though perhaps a little more technical. ("Up market knocky-nine doors," it's said.)

Jack Thompson's cuddy, says George - in Newton Aycliffe since 1962 and a familiar football referee - reflects that Scottish "catch-all for the working man". The game involved knocking bairns from one another's backs, but if that - as George suggests - was "somewhat brutal" - broken flower pots was positively sadistic.

"Old ladies used to have rows of flower pots on their windows sills. The idea was to break the flower pot without breaking the window."

Oor Wullie should be ashamed.

JACK Middleton, now in Richmond, spent his wartime childhood in Edinburgh playing Kick-the-Can - usually a treacle tin "with the lion and bees on". Based on the 14th chapter of Judges, it was the Tate and Lyle motto - "Out of strength came forth sweetness". Has any other biblical text been so long and so successfully plagiarised?

There was also an attendant rhyme about "Engine, engine number nine, scoots along the bogey line", sundry guards and tags and another game called Tammy Reekies, involving both cans and smoking embers.

Perhaps it was similar to the can-can that Ian McDougall, now in Bishop Auckland, played in his native South Bank - only on Teesside it was called cannon. "The teams faced each other on opposite sides of the road, in the middle of which was an upturned tin with about four sticks laid crossways on the top..."

Child's play, certainly, but needs must we move on.

BARBARA Bivens in Moorside, Consett, not only rang with the rules of chickey-melly - another Oor Wullie addict, it transpires - but wrote subsequently of childhood pursuits around Derwentside.

They included Poor Mary stands a-weeping, Jack shine-a-moggy, Ickle-ockle black bottle - what? - What time is it Mr Wolf? (Ah, memories of Timothy Hackworth Infants), Blocky, In And Out The Dusky Bluebells and our old friend Montakitty.

A theme is common to almost every correspondent: they had far more fun, though they had nowt, than the computer-keyed generation - spoiled, overweight and square-eyed - of today.

YOU know how Christmas arrives ever earlier and is perpetuated into early Spring? Where the column catches the homeward bus, they're advertising "Festive specials" to Disney Paris - including the Main Street Electric Parade. "Ends 23rd March".

NEVER afraid to get its hands dirty, the column last week pondered the etymology of toe (or possibly tow) rag - now a contemptuous term but originally, Bill Wood had suggested, simply an engineer's muck cloth.

Tom Cockeram in Barwick-in Elmet near Leeds - our foreign correspondent - offers an ingenious alternative.

"Men from all parts of the British empire, with their myriad accents, spent time in North Africa during the second world war. Some met the wild, tearaway ruffians of a nomadic tribe - the Tuaregs.

"Many of these were likeable rogues, with their own code of honour, and would be rather miffed to be known as street Arabs, or toe-rags or anything else. It's a shame that a misheard word can now appear in dictionaries without the benefit of the true origin."

The Complete Oxford confirms that the Tuaregs are "A nomadic people of the western and central Sahara" but offers neither toe-rag nor tow-rag. Chambers defines "a ruffian or rascal".

But was a toe-rag originally a Tuareg? It is a most appetising mystery.

...and finally, though there is much still unacknowledged, a favourite word in a highly unexpected context.

Wet through as ever at the Scotch Corner bus stop the other day, we were somewhat surprised to be offered a lift in a shiny silver sports car - a Porsche Boxter, or some such, and just two days out of the showroom.

It was driven by one of only two multi-millionaires of the column's close acquaintance, both once raggy-arsed urchins from Sunderland who may even played Jack shine-a-moggy together. (One's George Reynolds, the other's not Tom Purvis.) The other chap had bought the Porsche, top speed 170mph, on a whim - and had got around only that morning to showing it to the lady wife.

Was she pleased? "No," he said, "she went absolutely bloody scatty."

Published: 09/05/2001