Oral traditions

[bohemiancoast]

Or 'all knowledge is not contained on the internet' in fact. When I was a small child my father used to tell me bedtime stories. Some of them were poems. And one of our favourites was this...

"It was a dark and stormy night
The brigands they sat in their cave
The chief of the brigands arose, and he said
"Antonio, tell us a storio!"
And this is what he said.

"It was a dark and stormy night..."

Well, you get the idea. This could go on for some time. It's clearly a fairly widespread meme; the Ahlbergs wrote a book about it, for example.

M has just noticed that Googling for the version I learnt yields no results, though there's an instructive comment thread here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listeners/openinglines.shtml in which various people ascribe it to their fathers or the Scouts.

So. Do you remember this from your childhood? What words did you use? Where were you, geographically, at the time?
I have noted before that despite the work of the Opies, the rhymes remembered and told by children (in playgrounds and around campfires) are not, by and large, well documented as a tradition.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

My grandfather Hiram Weaver born near Selkirk, Ontario in 1877 and living in Cheapside, Ontario, Canada in the 1940s would recite this on the dreariest, stormy nights in an ominous voice and drawing out certain words. Not sure about gazable or what it meant or was spelled but this is how it sounded:
'Twas on a dark and stomry night
The campfires were burning bright
There were brigands small and brigands tall
And the little gazable said to the big gazable
Tell us an oooold war story
And the big gazable begun
'Twas on a dark and stormy night...