Hi there

My Dad used to sing little ditties to accompany whatever activity he was doing. When he was chopping up chips for lighting the fire, he would sing and abridged version of this that went:

'He holds the lantern while his mother chops the wood.
He holds the lantern like every good boy should
And when his mother's tired cause she's done her very best,
He puts down the lantern and helps her to rest.'

I remember him singing this from the time I was a young child in the early 1960s, when he would have been getting on for 50. We didn't have a radio or TV at that time, so I don't know where he had picked it up,but since he also sang distorted bits of things by Nellie Wallace and Norman Long my guess is that he had heard it in the music halls here in England sometime in the 1930s

It's nice to be reminded of it. I guess chopping up chips is something nobody does any more