Helter-skelter

The children were running helter-skelter.

The cubs take little notice of you at first; but after a time they suddenly stop playing, stare hard at you for half a minute, then bolt off helter-skelter into the forest of waving green wheat.

The winds knocked huge trees helter-skelter all over my garden.

But the butterflies were dead. A whiff of rotten eggs had vanquished the pale clouded yellows which came pelting across the orchard and up Dods Hill and away on to the moor, now lost behind a furze bush, then off again helter-skelter in a broiling sun.

Pellets, once released from the funnel, would bounce helter-skelter, left or right, against the pins […] to ultimately gather in the lower compartments in a pile which resembles a normal curve.

After World War II, from 1945 until the early 1960s, the helter-skelter growth of the reprint industry went largely unheeded by the general publishing industry, then under its own mounting pressures to publish new works for a growing reading public and ever-larger numbers of educational institutions.

Although his existential thoughts seem to have been tossed onto the page in helter-skelter fashion, what Gilboa does here is to open his mind and heart to the reader through verbal jaggedness and poetic unneatness.

‘I hardly know, — I imagine that it was with some dim idea of Marjorie’s being able to get in if she returned while I was absent, — but the truth is I was in such a condition of helter skelter that I am not prepared to swear that I had any reasonable reason.’

(Oh, oh, oh) / I'm looking for some shelter / (Oh, oh, oh) / From the helter-skelter / (Oh, oh, oh) / Just keep me away from / All who conspire / (Enemy fire...)

He is finishing, this week, a remarkable thing called a helter skelter: This is a circular building 50 feet high which people climb, by means of an interior winding stair. At the top they each take a seat in a semicircular wooden trough which curls around the outside of the house, gradually leading towards the ground with a terrific rush, they slide down this and are rapidly delivered on to the grass below.