Starting school around the turn of the century meant several things: a cool 2000 Micky Mouse notebook (beginning my lifelong habit of never finishing a notebook I started writing in), a longstanding question about which century exactly it was (which never got answered because I never bothered to ask), and of course, school. 

There were lots of things I enjoyed about primary school: the fact that our classrooms were on the first level, so we could sneak in through the windows (and when we were moved to the higher levels in later years, monkeys could come and steal the potatoes were growing for class), the piano in the canteen where you could play the two-person duet that somehow, everyone seem to know, the ketchup potato chips and mayonnaise chicken,not to mention the spooky stories about how the school was built on a cemetery and in fact someone has found a suspicious scrap of fabric near a very smelly pile of rocks, do you want to go see? And of course, the clapping games. 

I’ve not thought of the clapping games since… well since I got on the Internet but I’ve recently been listening to the Folklore podcast and their episode on what is folklore had me thinking about clapping games. If I didn’t get it wrong, clapping games and other schoolyard rhymes fall under Children’s Folk Lore (or Childlore) and that sparked a memory or two of clapping games. 

So what did I do? 

I started writing what I remembered down. And then I went around and asked my friends and family if they knew any rhymes from the past. I’ll share them all in a separate post at a later date, but today I wanted to focus on two nonsense rhymes that caught my attention because they’re not completely local to Singapore.

The first is a two-person clapping game that I remember playing. The only catch with this rhyme is that I don’t remember how it ends.

My version:  

See see my baby
Come on and play with me 
We will be jolly friends 
Under the apple tree
Slide down the rainbow 
Into the toilet bowl 
We will be jolly friends
Forever more more more 
One two three four four four 
The lion roar roar roar 
(The teacher scream scream scream
The children shout shout shout)

I have to say, I’m not certain about the last two lines. I asked an older cousin and she mentioned that pretty much anything goes after “the lion roar roar roar”, and cited the example “the underwear drop drop drop”. I think the game ends when someone messes up the clapping sequence. 

What’s fun about this clapping game is that my sister, who’s a couple of years younger, also remembers playing it but with a different tune. It’s also one of the two rhymes that I didn’t really see when looking for Singaporean childhood rhymes – which made me wonder if it was unique to my school until I did even more digging and realised that this is a variant of the playmate clapping game (you can even see the song on youtube).

It took me some time to find the song because while some of the lyrics did match (the apple tree and the rainbow), it started with different words and it seems like the American versions also have a verse about the flu, something we didn’t have. Inititally, I looked for information on this rhyme online and according to this article I found, the tune of the song dates back to 1904/1905 and was written by Charlie Leslie Johnson, while Saxie Doxwell either wrote the words or put a Victorian-era rhyme to Johnson’s tune. After a bit more reading, I learnt that folklorists Iona and Peter Opie date the song to the Doxwell’s 1940 song, while also noting that “I don’t want to play in your yard” by Henry W. Petril in 1894 also has a similar chorus that could have inspired the 1940 song.

The 1894 song chorus goes like this:

“I don’t want to play in your yard
I don’t like you any more
You’ll be sorry when you see me sliding down our cellar door,
You can’t holler down our rain barrel,
You can’t climb our apple tree,
I don’t want to play in your yard, if you won’t be good to me.”

It’s pretty clear there are similarities, even if the rhymes aren’t the same! Sadly, Opie did not find a reason how and why the song became a clapping game, much less how it crossed the ocean to Singapore!

Another popular nonsense tune among kids my age (and my older cousin’s age!) was Quack Sally O Soh, which went like this:

Quack Sally o soh quack quack quack 
Quack a ringo ringo ringo ringo 
So la so la so so la so la so la 
One two three four five six seven eight nine ten 

I honestly had a very hard time finding out more about this one because none of it makes sense. Ringo means “Apple” in Japanese and the way we sing “So La” is similar to 手拉 or “holding hands” in Chinese but there is nothing else that is Japanese or Chinese about this song! But I also couldn’t quite believe that it was local only to my school and so even more digging brought up another American clapping game: Stella Ella Ola. According to its wikipedia page, there is a variant of Stella Ella Ola that goes: 

Quack dilly oso,
Quack quack quack
Señorita,
rita rita rita,
flora, flora,
flora flora flora,
1, 2, 3, 4!

Honestly, for me the only thing the lyrics have in common is the word “Quack”. If it weren’t for another youtube video of some girls singing this rhyme, and playing it the exact same way I used to play it, I wouldn’t have connected the dots at all. 

There are, by the way, an amazing number of variants of Stella Ella Ola. A blog named Pancojams has four posts collecting the various versions that exist (here’s a link to the first post) and that was eye-opening. In fact, in Pancojam’s post on the origin of the song, someone mentioned that kids on a coffee farm in Nicagragua were also playing the game! Clearly this rhyme has travelled the globe. 

Incidentally, Pancojam’s post on the origin of the song connects it to an old (somewhat racist) rhyme called In China There Lived a Great Man which might have inspired a 1945 song called Chickery Chick which might have inspired Stella Ella Ola/Quack Dilly Oso. 

So yes, all these words to say that two of my favourite childhood rhymes are not actually unique to my school or Singapore or even the region! I have no idea how it came but America’s Library of Congress has a good blogpost about how children’s folklore can travel across the ocean and I suppose the song either came via a old schoolmate with relatives overseas/spent time overseas or perhaps our school’s mission-school legacy meant we had more foreign visitors at one point that brought it there.* I don’t think we’ll ever know how it came over but learning all this has been a bit mind-blowing, given that I’ve always had this impression that the world was smaller/less influenced before the internet. This is a good reminder that even back then (okay fine, it wasn’t that long ago), the world was connected and even small things like childhood songs could be passed around. 

In my follow-up post, I’ll be sharing other rhymes that I have managed to gather from memories, friends, and family that I think are more local to the region, if not Singapore. 

*My mum told me about a rhyming game she played in the 80’s that went “Johnny Johhny Johhny Johnny Whoosh, Johnny Whoosh” which was apparently first recorded as a Nebraskan finger game in 1966! She also went to a mission school, though a different one from me, so I wonder if there’s something to the theory that mission schools had a higher exposure to Western culture.