Saturday 25 July 2009

Chelp, Shitun And Shim Shams

Now that I have reached a fairly advanced stage of my second-childhood, I often find myself recalling incidents from the first time I was there. Such an incident occurred yesterday when I was teasing, Sandy, our ginger cat. The more I teased him the more he was talking back to me and I suddenly found myself using a word I have not heard for over fifty years. As he rolled around on the carpet miaowing, I said to him, "and I don't want any of your chelp." Now 'chelp' is not a word you will find in the dictionary, then again I may be spelling it wrong, I presume, therefore, it was an old word peculiar to Lincolnshire dialect. As a young boy, back in the 1940s, if you dared to answer back when talking to an adult, you were met with the retort "less of your chelp."
One of my grandfather's favouite words was 'shitun', it doesn't take much imagination to realise where this derivative came from. If he was trying to use, or assemble, something and he couldn't get the hang of it he would say "this is a shitun thing." Thankfully, I didn't pick-up on it and start saying it myself, otherwise I would have got a good clout round the ear, which would have left me in a dazed state wondering what I had said.
My mother had a stock answer for when she was preparing dinner. Whenever there was a wonderful smell coming from the oven and you asked her "what's for dinner mam" she would always reply "shim-shams for medlers." I never did find out which part of the meal were the shim-shams, but they always tasted damn good.