This is a song I've been looking for, my grandmother, who was in vaudeville, used to sing it to us as a lullaby, I've found it listed in Barbershop Quartet books, as '1923, Wilson-Brennan (Moon)' I think Moon was the publisher. It showed up in the film Distant Voices, Still Lives, set in Britain in the 50's, so I know it has a British tradition as well as American, don't know which Wilson-Brennan they might be, we sang it in this American version:

Barefoot Days, when we were just a kid,
Barefoot Days, Oh boy the things we did
We'd go down to a shady brook
With a bent pin for a hook,
We'd fish all day; we'd fish all night
But the doggone fish refused to bite
And then we'd slide, down some old cellar door
We'd slide and slide till our pants got tore,
And then we'd have to go home
And get in our bed
While momma got busy with the needle and thread
Oh boy, what joy, we had in barefoot days.

And I think cellar doors are an American thing like the door over the root cellar in the 'Wizard of Oz', that Dorothy gets locked out of. It slopes and can indeed by slid down.

HTML line breaks added. --JoeClone, 16-Feb-03.