“Don’t point,” my father warned. “You’ll make holes in the air”. As a kid I heard my parents share sayings like that almost daily. The admonition against pointing was really just a way of telling me that pointing could be rude in some situations, and the warning of holes in the air was just a bit of friendly verbal embroidery to make the advice more playful than didactic. Not many of these parental sayings had that kind of point, however. Many were little more than fob-offs.
For example, when asked where some item was, my mother would reply (if she didn’t know, or didn’t want to say): “Up in Annie’s room, behind the clock”. I still have a mental image of this imaginary upstairs lodging space where fictional Annie watched the hours go by. It’s dusty up there, and very cluttered. Also, if I asked my mother what a thing was, or what it was used for, she might say offhandedly that it was “a wing-wong for a goose’s bridle”. I gather this was a common saying in many families, but most people apparently said it as “wigwam”. Again, I have an enduring mental picture of a goose, saddled up for riding by a very small person – possibly a leprechaun. According to this Wikipedia entry, the original saying used the word “whim-wham”. My father had some fob-offs of his own. If, after several minutes in the back seat of the car, I impatiently asked him where we were going, he’d usually reply: “There and back to see how far it is”. In other words, shut up and wait. Alternatively, he might say we were heading to “Bullamakanka”.
I soon gathered that many of these household sayings had been handed down to my mother and father by their own parents, and perhaps some of them came from generations before that. Mum told me recently that her “Annie’s room” line came from her grandmother, with whom she shared a bed for some years when she was a little girl, growing up in a small house in a small country town. “Every night Grandma Long would look under our bed,” Mum told me. “She said she was looking to see if Roy Rogers [a star of cowboy movies way back when] had put his shoes under there. She always said she’d like it if he did.”
If Dad was particularly unimpressed by the untidiness of my school homework (and I have always had very untidy handwriting) he’d scathingly say it looked “like a packapoo ticket”. When pressed for an explanation my father had to admit he had no idea. It was a saying that he had inherited from his father, without knowing what it meant. For years I thought it might be a weird toilet paper reference (poo ticket??) but I eventually learned that packapoo is a Chinese gambling game. It’s a sort of lotto, played with a ticket that to those unschooled in Chinese writing must have seemed chaotically illegible. Wikipedia helpfully explains the rules of the game.
If Dad was about to leave and go somewhere he’d say: “I’m going to love you and leave you.” Unless he chose to use rhyming slang, in which case he said he was going to “hit the frog and toad” (road). He’d call me “China” – short for “China plate”, which means mate. On the rare occasions he was called upon to wear a suit, he called it his “bag of fruit”. If I didn’t close a door he’d ask me was I “born in a tent?”
When I explained something to Dad and he didn’t think he quite understood he’d say: “That’s as clear as mud in a beer bottle”. If I’d tried to make something and it was a bit wonky, he’d say it was “straight as a dog’s hind leg”. This applied particularly to the part I tried to comb in my hair. If I wasn’t moving as quickly as he would have preferred he’d urge me not to “drag the chain”. “Come on,” he’d say, “you’re as slow as a wet week”. “I’m coming,” I’d reply, prompting him to impatiently observe that: “So’s Christmas!”
If he felt something I’d done wasn’t really up to scratch he’d tell me it was “so weak it’s nearly a fortnight”. On the other hand, if I’d done something to win his approval he might tell me that my blood was “worth bottling”. All through my childhood and teen years I was an avid reader and generally preferred to be lying down reading a book rather than helping my Dad with yard work. “Where’s that bloody kid? Spine-bashing again!” he’d fume, good-naturedly, when he discovered me skulking in my room. “Always got his nose in a bloody book!” Spine-bashing was one thing. “Ear-bashing” was another. This was when somebody wouldn’t shut up and you really wished they would.
Hipless Harry is spine-bashing again
If Dad wanted to mock me – skinny runt that I was – he’d pinch one of my biceps and declare that I had “muscles as big as chickens’ insteps”. When a pair of pants I was wearing was in danger of falling down he’d call me “hipless Harry”. If I was very hungry and wanted yet another helping of food he’d marvel at my “hollow legs”. “No doubt about you, you’re good on the tooth!”
Something that had happened a long time ago had occurred “when Adam was a boy”. To walk somewhere was to ride “Shanks’s pony”. If you were driving slow and he thought you ought to accelerate he’d tell you to “give it some herbs”. If you were driving too fast then you were a “leadfoot”. Eating bread crusts would “make your hair go curly”, while drinking beer would “put hairs on your chest”.
On those occasions when I skated close enough to the line where corporal punishment might have been on the cards he’d warn me that, once he got started with the strap, I’d think all my birthdays had come at once. If he got cranky with somebody he’d say he’d like to “knock their block off”.
Most of my father’s sayings made sense in one way or another, but one linguistic mystery remains unsolved. For as long as I can remember Dad referred to the male genital organ as a “congo” or, more elaborately, a “congobongolo”. I haven’t compared notes with other people about family names for such items so I can’t say for sure that this term was unique to our household. I’ve wondered whether Dad’s father brought the name back from his wartime stint in New Guinea, but I can’t find anything to support that theory. So maybe it was just a weird bit of whimsy, apropos of nothing.
Dad also had a song he recalled from his childhood in the Newcastle suburb of Cardiff. It went along the lines of:
The Cardiff boys are we, the Cardiff boys are we,
We’re always into mischief, wherever we may be.
When the teacher says we’re lazy, he makes a big mistake
Cos whenever you see us Cardiff boys we’re always wide awake.
How many eggs for breakfast, how many eggs for tea?
A lump of bread as big as your head, that’s all you’ll get from me.
It turns out this was a variant of a Great Depression song called The Doley Mob, the chorus of which went like this:
Ham and eggs for breakfast, ham and eggs for tea,
A loaf of bread as big as your head and hard as buggery,
And if you do not like it, a piece of bread and jam,
We all got sent to Queenscliff in a Black Maria van [police wagon].
Dad helped us make slingshots out of Y-shaped sticks and rubber bands. A lot of kids at school used to call these “shanghais”, but Dad always called them “gonks”. According to one account I’ve read, the name shanghai was an indirect reference to boys annoying Chinese people on the goldfields by shooting rocks at them with slingshots. As for the etymology of “gonk”, well I guess it might refer to the sound the stone makes when it hits something. Otherwise, it’s another mystery.
From time to time Dad would warn us of a certain type of monster that lurked in the darkness and would do bad things to us if we weren’t careful. These monsters were called “Pye Wyes” – I don’t know how to spell it – and I gather they originally came from coalmines where they used to trouble susceptible miners with their supernatural shenanigans. Also not sure about this but I seem to recollect something about them having fingers protruding from their sightless eye sockets. Dad’s father spent some years as a coalminer, so I think he probably brought the pye wyes home with him from one of the pits.
Words, sayings and stories. How they stay with us, and how they continue to make us smile.
