Bumpity bumpity bumpity bump,
Here comes the galloping major!
Bumpity bumpity bumpity bump,
Here comes the galloping major!
All the girls declare,
He’s a grand old stager!
Hi ho, here we go!
Here comes the galloping major!

So sing I to Tom as he bounces on my knee, smiling so broadly his eyes become little upside-down half-moons, like an extremely chuffed Pokémon.

It’s funny the fragments of nursery rhyme, stories and nonsense verse that resurface when you have a small baby to entertain. The Galloping Major song popped into my head unbidden after 30 or more years gathering dust in a brain cupboard marked “not really relevant to adult life”. Jane admitted she’d never heard it before, and looked up the lyrics on the internet. It turns out it was written in 1906 by someone called George Bastow, but Google couldn’t impart any further information.

We did find there were a lot more lyrics than I’d remembered. This is a general problem, most of the stories I stored away as a child are now badly degraded. For example, I dredged up and began telling Tom the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears last week, and suddenly realised it was missing the entire ending.

I got to the bit where Baby Bear had discovered Goldilocks still sleeping in his “just right” bed, and then drew a blank.

Did Goldilocks just run off? It seemed rather anti-climactic. The more realistic ending to a tale involving a small girl trapped in a room with two extremely large and powerful mammals (who are well known for violently protecting their young) didn’t seem particularly likely either, even for a children’s story.

But perhaps that’s why I’d blanked it out, the ending being too traumatic for my tiny mind.

I should really make the effort to look up the ending to the story, but really it doesn’t matter anyway. At this age, Tom would be quite happy if I read him the back of a cereal packet, as long as I did it with lots of silly noises.

So we’ll probably stick to the new ending. Intoned in a sing-song voice it works fine: “and Daddy bear swung his huge paw, tossing Goldilocks across the room like a rag-doll. Oh yes he did!! She crashed heavily into the bedroom wall – CRUNCH! – and landed in a lifeless heap on the floor. Poor Goldilocks! The bears then ate her – NOM NOM NOM – and all agreed it was a lot nicer than porridge any day! The end!”

Besides, rather than trying to remember ancient stories handed down for generations, I’ve found it a lot easier to recount tales that had a far greater impact on my young mind. The other day Tom really enjoyed the story of Luke Skywalker and the One Bear, Two Robots, and Alec Guinness.

In my version, Han shoots first.