Tintin Forums

I was reading The Blue Lotus the other day and had a very random question. I don't know the exact page number but right after Mitsuhirato injects Tintin with the "Raijaijah" poison, Tintin pretends to go crazy and starts skipping rope. He sings "Each peach, pear, plum. In comes Tom Thumb". I was wondering if anyone happened to know whether those lines were from a real jump rope rhyme and if so, what it's called and how the rest of it goes. Thanks!

It’s quite a common rhyme, or at least there are actually quite a lot of versions in a similar vein, so I don’t know that there is or ever was a definitive version to be “complete”.
It may be used for skipping, but it also is used in a ball game, where children bounce two balls in a double pattern off a wall while chanting the rhyme. We didn’t have this one, but presumably it was one Michael Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper knew; Alan Ahlberg used a similar version in his book, called Each Peach, Pear, Plum, which combines characters from several rhymes.

In Scotland we used it to choose people for games: standing in a circle you held out a fist, with the thumb end at the top, and someone went round tapping the fists in time to the rhyme, and the last fist touched was “it”, for whatever purpose you were choosing (someone to be the “seeker“ in hide-and-seek, for example).

Our version of the rhyme was quite ribald to many I see on the internet, and didn’t mention Tom Thumb, but included Santa:

“Eachy peachy, pare a plum,
Throwing tatties up a lum;
Een hit Santa on the bum
Eachy peachy pare a plum”

“Eachy peachy” doesn’t really mean anything, and may just be there for the rhyme of it, but I wonder if it was a corruption of “Eat a peach”?
I also think it’s “pare”, not “pear”. It would then mean “Eat a peach and peel a plum”, suggesting you eat a peach whole, but take the skin off a plum, because it can be bitter.
The next bit is Scots dialect: “Throwing potatoes up a chimney (the action being mimicked by throwing balls against the wall), one hits Santa (who allegedly comes down the chimney) on the bottom (a health and safety hazard, and an accident waiting to happen, under these circumstances)”.

That’s what passed for entertainment back in the day…!

Hahaha, that's really quite fascinating, thanks! I knew a few rhymes when I was younger but I live in the US and I expect that the ones we used originated in America within the last ten years or so. I don't know many older ones or ones from different countries. Thanks again!

Yes, the Ahlbergs' book (illustrated by Alan's wife and working partner Janet, of course) was published in 1978, so I guess that may have put it particularly to the front of the Tintin translators' minds when they were translating the Blue Lotus in the early 1980s. Or it may simply have been very familiar from their childhoods.

I wonder what the rhyme is in Hergé's original French version. (I don't have that book in French.)


If you're interested in old skipping rope rhymes and other street game rhymes, check out this 1950s short documentary film, The Singing Streets, filmed in my adopted home city of Edinburgh. The last time I watched it, at a public screening in a community centre here in Edinburgh, the old ladies sitting behind me revealed that two of the young girls in the film were them!

I believe this was an era when there was some interest in studying and preserving the folklore of children's rhymes and other oral traditions, with Iona and Peter Opie perhaps being the most well-known collectors here in Britain.

In the original French, Tintin sings:

"1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
"Violette, Violette"

which is part of a song:

"1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
"Violette, Violette
"1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
"Violette à bicyclette!"

("Violette on a bicycle!")

Thanks mct16.

I didn't know that song, but out of curiosity, have found that YouTube has quite a few versions. Who needs the freedom to play outdoors all day with a skipping rope, when you can sit hunched over your smartphone watching the traditional skipping songs being sung for you by an animated tree frog, an advance in human progress that former generations of children could surely only have dreamed of? ;-)

Someone who's extremely lazy, non-social and glued to his computer all day. Bit like me, really.

"Violette, Violette" is a common counting rhyme, something similar to

"One, two, buckle my shoe,
"Three, four, knock at the door etc.

Possible, but to me it’s more likely they just knew it – after all, it was the fact that it was a well known rhyme which made the Ahlbergs use it in their book.


Or indeed, perhaps even closer to another rhyme:
“One, two, three, four
Five, six, seven!
All good chidren
Go to Heaven!”

given that both seem to fix on the first seven digits.
This is another traditional children’s rhyme, and was quoted by The Beatles on the fade out of their song You Never Give Me Your Money.


The wonders, indeed, of modern technology…!

The version I remember from school was Each, Peach, Plum, Pie, how many children before I die? followed by a count of the number of skips.