Local housewives were left flustered last night thanks to schoolboys and their enthusiasm for Halloween larks.
Answering the door to suspected trick-or-treaters the women were, in stead, surprised to be regaled with romantic poetry.
"It all started with our English teacher, Mr Snodgrass, who comes from Aberdeen," said 13-year-old Graham Byron "He told us that all this trick or treat stuff was American rubbish and that when he was a boy he and his mates in Scotland used to go round knocking on neighbours' doors and reciting poetry."
Mr Snodgrass's neighbours would have heard stories of Tam O'Shanter and other hairy verse by the likes of Robert Burns.
But his pupils have been surprising their adult neighbours with far more racy stuff.
Said Mrs Christina Rossetti, who says she is no relation to the celebrated 19th-century poet whose brother, Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, achieved fame as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, founding father of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, said: "Young Jimmy Keats from down the street started telling me 'Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime' and how he'd like to spend two hundred years admiring each of my breasts!
"Well, I was so flustered I didn't know where to look!"
But Mrs Rossetti's ordeal listening to Andrew Marvell's earnest yearning recited by a tumescent adolescent was nothing compared to Mrs Florence Tennyson's encounter with her sexually charged 14-year-old neighbour.
"I just opened the door to Kenny Wordsworth and he came straight out with 'Oh my darling Flo, I love you so, Especially in your nightie. When the moonlight flits, across your tits, Oh Jesus Christ almighty!'
"I was thinking about closing my curtains at bedtime, but..."
