Gypsy and Ginger spent their honeymoon on Hampstead Heath. It lasted
from Saturday to Monday, and by great luck the Monday was Whit Monday.
So they did the end of the honeymoon in Swings and Roundabouts, and
slid several times down a little Spiral Tower, and had gingerbeer
and oranges and hokey-pokey, and bought each other a great many
beautifully-coloured wedding-presents, such as feathers and streamers
and little balls of pink and blue and yellow and green and gold
and silver, swinging from elastics, and tin trumpets, and striped
cornucopias. And Gypsy came away with sixteen cocoanuts. He felt in
great form, because, he said, the cocoanuts that hadn’t been to the
barber’s looked exactly like Ginger’s head, and it was too good a
chance to be missed. He did have nineteen cocoanuts, but he dropped one
in the last Roundabout, very late at night when the flares were lit. It
was a Motorcar Roundabout with an automatic Jazz Band in the middle of
it that got jazzier and jazzier as the motors got faster and faster.
But when Gypsy dropped his cocoanut he got even jazzier than the band,
and stood up on the back of his seat and yelled for the thing to stop,
and for several rounds had a fierce argument with an attendant, whom
he accused, every time he whirled past, of conspiring to rob him of
his nut. But all the attendant saw was an occasional lightning-streak
of a young man with wild hair and glittering eyes and gesticulating
hands, superbly balanced on one foot; and all the attendant heard was,
“Nut! nut! nut!” And all the attendant said was, “’E’s fair gawn orf
it.” As the motor-jazz simmered down so did Gypsy, and by the time
they came to a standstill he realised that he had done the attendant an
injustice, so he gave the man his eighteenth cocoanut as a keepsake.
And Ginger won a penknife. She threw a little ring right over it and
won it. It was an awful surprise to her, because she never knew she had
it in her, but it was an awfuller surprise to the Man with the Rings,
because nobody ever _did_ win a penknife. He simply hated losing it.
So he offered Ginger anuvver frow, free of charge, if she would give
him back the penknife. She was delighted and said, “How generous! oh,
but are you _sure_?” she was so afraid of doing him. The Man with the
Rings was quite sure. So they put back the penknife, and Ginger threw
her free throw and won it again. Then the Man with the Rings said,
“Blarst!” and burst into tears.
Ginger said, “Oh, dear, what _is_ the matter?”
“Well may you arst!” sobbed the Man with the Rings, “an’ me wiv a wife
an’ five little ’uns at ’ome.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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