"Over the Garden Wall / I Let the Baby Fall": The Poetry of Rope-skipping

One wouldn't suppose that so scholarly an activity as the collection of rope-skipping rhymes could be a life-endangering occupation, but on a recent trip to Belfast, in a predominantly I.R.A. section, I learned that even children's chants can become a matter of life and death.

Going with an Irish driver into a sector where there has been considerable trouble, I started to pull a skipping-rope from my purse. "You fool! Do you want to get us killed?" the driver hissed as he crushed the rope down in my pocketbook. "It has red, white and green handles. Anybody at a window is liable to think it's red, white and blue and you're asking their children to jump to the colors of the British flag. They'll pick us off." He told the children I had no rope and asked them to fetch a length of clothesline.

If the incident reflected the unusual stress experienced by the people of Belfast, it also said something about the importance of skipping rope and the rhymes that accompany it as a form of expression. I am convinced that through the act of skipping, of overcoming the demonic power of the rope, the child achieves a bodily and psychic loosening of emotional strictures. The rhymes, ancient in origin, durable and widely distributed, are a way for unconscious elements in the personality to surface. This is apparent in Belfast and in less explosive places as well, for skipping rope is practiced in widely diverse countries and cultures.

In Belfast, for example, children in large families are often forced to tend younger brothers and sisters, and their frustration may come out in rope-skipping rhymes. One child commented that her mother didn't like her to skip too much, since it wore out her shoes. Then she began:

My wee brother is no good.Chop him up for firewood.When he's deadCut off his head,Make it into gingerbread.

Another skipper in Belfast added this one:

Eni eni mino moSet the baby on the po [pot]When it's doneClean its bumAnd give it a lumpOf sugar plum.

However, babies can be a nuisance to skippers everywhere. In England and New Zealand children chant:

Over the garden wallI let the baby fall.My mother came outAnd gave me a cloutOver the garden wall.

And in the United States, baby care is a problem, too:

I had a little brother,His name was Tiny Tim.I put him in the wash tubTo teach him how to swim.He drank up all the water,He ate up all the soap.He died last nightWith a bubble in his throat.

Most rope-skipping rhymes about family relations have to do with a skipper's relationship to his or her mother. Often the mother appears as disciplinarian, as in this rhyme I heard in Belfast in two versions, the first from a girl's, the second from a boy's point of view:

My mother saidI never shouldPlay with gypsiesIn the wood.If I shouldShe would say,"Naughty girl to disobey"Disobey disobey,"Naughty girl to disobey."I wish my mother wouldHold her tongue.She had a boyWhen she was young.I wish my father wouldDo the same.He had a girlwith an awful name.

The boy's variant of this rhyme:

My mother saidI never shouldPlay with gypsiesIn the wood.The wood was dark,The grass was green,In came SallyWith a tambourine.I went to the sea—

Jacob Cats (Dutch, 1618). Courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library.

No ship to get across.I paid 10 shillingsFor a blind white horse,I was up on his backAnd was off in a crack,Sally told my motherI would never come back.

The girl with the "awful name" that father had in the first version sounds like Sally "with a...