Politics and nursery rhymes don’t mix
Christopher Howse says that the children’s minister’s plans for a policy on nursery rhymes are misguided — these ancient poems are immune to the bland categories of politicians Violent, arbitrary, monocultural and deeply conservative, nursery rhymes, like ‘fairy tales’, can express deep, dark human urges. Yet Beverley Hughes, the so-called children’s minister, said this week that some parents know that to sing nursery rhymes to their children ‘will get them off to a flying start’. She is probably thinking on the level of the acquisition of ‘communications skills’, but it is hard to think that she appreciates how strongly subversive nursery rhymes are.
Edgar, alias Tom o’Bedlam on the blasted heath, as a foil to Lear’s madness, chants, ‘Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man.’ To which any child lucky enough to have a Bev-approved parent (or who has been to the pantomime) will be able to add, ‘Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.’ A flying start indeed.
The well-Bevved child can join in the debate on the role of faith schools with Goosey Gander’s prescription, ‘I met an old man who wouldn’t say his prayers. So I took him by the left leg, and threw him down the stairs.’ Not that children of nursery land have much time for school. They are too busy fetching pales of water, getting up to feed the swine, losing their sheep, falling asleep under a haycock when they should be looking after them, or getting but a penny a day because they can’t work any faster.
By night they leave their supper and leave their sleep and join their playfellows in the street, with whoop and call, climbing up a ladder and down a wall, then resorting to a junk diet of a loaf and a pudding. And never mind about appropriate use of reli gious symbols when it’s one a-penny, two-apenny hot cross buns.
Foreigners don’t figure much in nursery rhymes, except for mysterious entities like the King of Spain’s daughter. But my mother said I never should play with the gypsies in the wood. It’s foreign enough just to come from other villages: ‘I went to Noke/ But nobody spoke;/ I went to Thame/ It was just the same.’ Then, never mind about the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, how’s this for responsible parenthood: ‘There was a mad man and he had a mad wife,/ And they lived in a mad town;/ And they had children three at a birth,/ And mad they were every one.’ Nursery rhymes do not develop a coherent programme of citizenship, for their content, like that of fairy tales, seems pretty random. And yet there are hints of an unseen world far back in time. It is the nearest that England has to a mythology. ‘The man in the Moon came down too soon’; ‘A man in the wilderness asked me,/ How many strawberries grow in the sea?’; ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed,/ And here comes a chopper to chop off your head’; ‘The tailor of Bicester/ He has but one eye;/ He cannot cut a pair of green galligaskins,/ If he were to die’; ‘And all the tune that he could play/ Was, “Over the hills and far away”.’ That is poetry, and not the less so for making no easy sense. It appeals to the imagination like anything. It scans in the native jog-trot rhythm that Gerard Manley Hopkins described in such a confusing manner, and it can be sung by the oldest woman together with the youngest child. Since most adults, for most of their lives, gave no thought to nursery rhymes, they throve in the hard-headed traditionalist secret society of children — the world they keep from adults. To have supplanted them with the latest lyrics from Kylie’s ‘Showgirl Homecoming’ is as damaging as allowing Grand Theft Auto video games to take the place of outdoors games like The Farmer’s in his Den or Chinese Wall.
Nursery rhymes are essentially conservative in a way that Edmund Burke did not, I think, specify. They are good because they are handed down and embody not values, exactly, but presumptions about the world. ‘The pig was eat, and Tom was beat, and Tom went roaring down the street’ — fair enough. ‘When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,/ And down will come baby, cradle and all.’ Oh, there’s no end of death. But there are consolations too, for if Mother Hubbard can’t find a bone for her poor dog, at least she tries, in later stanzas, to fetch him both beer from the alehouse and wine from the tavern.
So the decline in the knowledge of nursery rhymes, just like the decline in the ability to cook, is an indicator of the ruin of a living culture. Mothers can’t now pass on cooking skills or the words of ‘Hey, DiddleDiddle’, because they were never taught them by their own mothers. And although now one in three Londoners were born abroad, it will not be so long before knowledge of the making of a good borsch evaporates with the words of Wio koniku (‘Go, horsey, go’).
Politics and nursery rhymes don’t mix. Historico-political interpretations of nursery rhymes are usually nonsense. Some rhymes, especially riddles, are old enough, to be sure. ‘Two legs sat upon three legs’ is adumbrated by Bede in the 7th century, ‘Yidi bipodem super tripodem sedentem’. But when Little Bo-Peep is said to be Mary, Queen of Scots, or the cat with the fiddle Elizabeth I, these are mere inventions, perhaps derived from The Real Personages of Mother Goose published in 1930 by an American, Katherine Elwes Thomas. Even ‘The grand old Duke of York’, which is firmly attached to a historical figure, Prince Frederick, Duke of York (1763–1827), does no justice to a popular commander-in-chief of the army devoted to the improvement of the service and the rooting out of incompetent officers.
As for turning nursery rhymes to political advantage, Labour has tried that before. Miss Hughes had better watch it. In March 1948 the government placed advertisements in the national press carrying parodies of ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’, beginning, ‘Who’ll kill inflation?/ I says John Bull,/ I speak for the nation —/ We’ll work with a will/ And we’ll thus kill inflation.’ Within days, the chancellor of the exchequer, Hugh Dalton, was forced to resign over a Budget leak, and Stafford Cripps took over, only to be driven to devalue the pound, before sickness ended his career.
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