In Competition No. 2588 you were invited to submit spiced-up children’s stories or poems.
In the interests of good taste, I steered you in the direction of sauciness rather than smut, but perhaps I needn’t have bothered. According to a book by the amateur historian Chris Roberts, sexual wickedness and political subversion lurk behind the innocuous façade of many popular playground rhymes. Children trilling ‘Jack and Jill’ are inadvertently singing about the loss of virginity, he claims; while ‘Oranges and Lemons’ is a rude wedding song.
Commendations this week to Shirley Curran for ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bares’, a raunchy reworking of an old favourite, and to Bill Greenwell for a tantalising glimpse into the future of the insufferable James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree — one of many entertaining Milne pastiches.
The winners, printed below, get £25 each. King of the castle this week is W.J. Webster who gets an extra fiver for a saucy take on Janet and John.
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