The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #11873   Message #1251754
Posted By: The Walrus
20-Aug-04 - 05:32 AM
Thread Name: Aunty Mary Had a Canary - where?
Subject: RE: Aunty Mary Had a Canary - where?
Returning to 'Aunty Mary'

The version I grew up wth as a child was similar to Dave Bryant's:

My Aunty Mary had a canery
Up the leg of her drawers
When she farted, down it darted
Out the leg of her drawers.


as for 'One, two, three o'leary', one that lurks in the memory is:

One, two, three o'leary
My ball's gone down the airy
Please give it back to Mary
Not to Charlie Chaplin.

The 'airy' was the 'area', the 'light well' in front of a basement, where the dustbins are kept and which gives access to the coal celler.

Thinking back, I must have picked this up from friends and/or family in the early 1960s - but as, by then we were living on a suburban estate with never the breath of an 'airy' for miles...
(we moved out of Battersea in about 1962, during the great clearance/rebuild, before that there were airies a-plenty, as I recall).

Walrus