For instance, I had once given as an answer “bee-hive,” and said that one word in the question was “correct.”
The first question I read out was from George Leghorn. He had written: “If a cockney nurse wished to correct a child, what insect-home would she name?” This was accepted.
The next question was from Violet Orpington: “If you had never corrected a naughty boy before, where would you correct him?”
“But, Violet,” I said, “the answer to that could not be ‘bee-hive.’”
“Oh,” she said, “you said ‘hive,’ did you? I thought you said something else.”
I have never been able to guess what it was she thought I had said; and she refused to tell me.
Another of our pencil-games was Missing Rhymes. One of us would write a deccasyllabic couplet—we always called it a quatrain, as being a better-class word—and the rhyme in the second line would not be actually given but merely indicated.
For example, I myself wrote the following little sonnet:
“I have an adoration for
One person only, namely je.”