I was musing once again on verse encountered in childhood, and memorised without understanding. As you do, on dull afternoons when you’ve nothing better to do than count the hours between Beechams ‘Flu Powders.
My father, bless him, suffers from an utterly uncensored and unhindered connection between his mouth and his hind-brain. While perfectly able to speak or not speak on most matters, anything unsuitable, pas-devant-les-domestiques, unsavoury or liable to offend will be said. Loudly. In front of nuns and vicars and small and inquisitive children. This is the man who, when I was sixteen, told me what contraceptives he was using with his new girlfriend. And who amiably referred to his infant grand-child as ‘a little fucker’ in front of his understandably startled daughter-in-law.
Anyway. He has a penchant for dirty limericks, and one in particular that I remember him standing in the middle of the living room and chanting for us, blushing and beginning to giggle as he did so, because, oh yes, he knew he was being naughty:
From the depths of the crypt at St Giles
Came a scream that resounded for miles.
Said the vicar, ‘Good gracious!
Has Father Ignatius
Forgotten the bishop has piles?’
Why on earth were all the adults laughing and protesting through the laughter? Me? Oh, I was eight. I was baffled. Vicars are funny? And piles? What’s a pile? Why is everyone refusing to tell me? After deep cogitation, I decided that anything to do with screaming in crypts had to be about vampires, and that the adults didn’t want to frighten me by talking about them, especially as I tended to react badly to the Addams Family, let alone Dracula. And I knew what a pile-driver was, so a pile must be another word for stake, and that’s it, Father Ignatius was a vampire who fell into the trap the bishop in his great holy wisdom had set for him in the crypt he had to retire to every morning. With lots of piles. Ha! to you, adults, for I am clever enough to work it out all by my self. And until the age of (oh God) fifteen or so, that’s what I believed it was about.
A limerick about vampires.
Indeed.
