FIVE currant buns in the baker's shop
Fat and brown with the sugar on the top
A boy came in to the shop one day
Paid his money and took one right away!

FOUR.... etc.

I leant this the first day of nursery school in Calcutta, 1959, from Mrs Winifred Ray, an englishwoman.

I *think* Eleanor Farjeon in her autobiography has a reference to this song, from HER childhood.

If not, she certainly has one to a poem, which I also learnt (1964), which is tangentially relevant to the teaching numbers topic here, about a boy getting numbers and measures of things in the verbal shopping list his mother has given him mixed up in his head: "A pound of tea at one and three/A pot of strawberry jam/A dozen pegs/Four new-laid eggs/And a pound of rashers of ham." etc. ending "...And a pound of rashers of jam!" Farjeon dates this to the 1880s, I think...

Sanjay Sircar