Caroline Flaherty in London, England, sent this foreshortened, fragmented (and slightly edited) version:

 “One fine day in the middle of the night,
A fire broke out in the ocean,
A deaf man heard it,
A blind man saw it.”

“A man with no legs ran for the fire engine,
The fire engine was drawn by four dead donkeys,
Sitting at a square round table,
Eating vinegar with a fork.”

This was augmented by Frank Black writing to tell us of a variant that his grandfather, George Titus, a farmer in Kingston, New Brunswick, used to recite that went:

“One fine day in the middle of the night
A bucket of water caught alight.
A blind man saw it
A deaf man heard it
And the dumb man shouted for the fire brigade.
The fire engine came pulled by 2 dead horses
Ran over a dead cat and half killed it.”

A variant of the same rhyme was remembered by Howard O’Dell, who was brought up in East London. It went:

“One fine day in the middle of the night,
The ocean caught alight,
The blind man saw it,
The deaf man heard it,
And the man with no legs ran after the fire engine.
The engine arrived drawn by six dead horses,
Ran over the dead dog,
And half killed it.”

And another reader, Galen Carlin in Australia, remembered:

“One bright day in the middle of the night,
The Pacific Ocean caught alight.
The blind man saw it, The deaf man heard it,
The dumb man called the fire brigade.”

These lines were followed by the following concepts, but in an order that Galen could not exactly remember:

“The fire brigade arrived ten minutes before the fire started,
On the way they ran over a dead cat and half killed it,
And put out the fire with petrol.” [gasoline/oil]

That another reader remembered the water that caught alight as being the River Thames that runs through London:

“One fine day in the middle of the night,
The Thames caught alight.”

With regard to a totally different version, Jim Brannigan, brought up in Scotland, remembered:

“One fine day in the middle of the night,
Two dead men got up to fight,
One had a fiddle, One had a drum,
And one had a pancake stuck to his bum,
Back to back they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other.”

…as well as another, unrelated nonsense rhyme.

The end of the version of the “Two Dead Boys” rhyme remembered by Susan Smith of Cincinnati was augmented by the two lines:

“They lived on the corner, in the middle of the block,
On the second floor of a vacant lot.”

And finally (at least, for the moment), following the “…blind brother who saw it all”, given in a version cited above, the ending – as far as variants are concerned – took off in a whole new direction:

“And the narrator,
With his story untold,
Meekly whispered,
Loud and bold,
The beginning words,

To the meeting’s end,

You, my enemy,

Are now my friend,
Oh, I see said the blind man,
To his two deaf daughters on the disconnected telephone.”