CHRISTMAS BOOKS

The Savage Seventh

By PHILIP LARKIN

IT was that verse about becoming again as a little child that caused the first sharp waning of my C:hristian sympathies. If the Kingdom of Heaven could be entered only by thoSe fulfilling such a condition I knew I should be unhappy there. It was not the prospect of being deprived of money, keys, wallet, letters, books, long-playing records, drinks, the opposite sex, and other solaces of adulthood that upset me (I should have been about eleven), but having to put up indefinitely with the company of other children, their noise, their nastiness, their boasting, their back-answers, their cruelty, their silliness. Until I began to meet grown-ups on more or less equal terms I fancied myself a kind of Ishmael. The realisation that it was not people I disliked but children was for me one of those celebrated moments of revelation, comparable to reading Haeckel or Ingersoll in the last century. The knowledge that I should never (except by deliberate act of folly) get mixed up with them again more than compensated for having to start earning a living.

Today I am more tolerant. It's not that I loathe the little scum, as Hesketh Pearson put it; merely that 'the fact is that a child is a nuisance to a grown-up person. What is more, the nuisance be- comes more and more intolerable as the grown-up person becomes more cultivated, more sensitive, and more engaged in the highest methods of adult work' (Shaw). I don't know about highest methods of adult work : what makes the contest between them so unequal is that the child is younger and so in better physical shape, life hasn't 'yet cut it down to size, it's not worried about anything, it hasn't been to work all today and hasn't got to go to work all tomorrow, all of which makes it quite unbearable but for none of which can it fairly be blamed. The' two chief characteristics of child- hood, and the two things that make it so seductive to a certain type of adult mind, are its freedom from reason and its freedom from responsibility. It is these that give it its peculiar heartless, savage strength.

These few commonplaces are intended to pre- pare the reader for the unflattering approach of Mr. and Mrs. Opie in their new book.* 'The worldwide fraternity of children,' they quote from Douglas Newton, 'is the greatest of savage tribes, and the only one that shows no sign of dying out,' and they lose no time in implanting in their reader's mind the notion that the whole seven- million-strong community of 'children can be likened to a separate more primitive population suitable for frank anthropological study, like Trobrianders or the nineteenth-century poor. With this assumption, Mr. and Mrs. Opie suspected that such a self-contained world held a great deal of traditional lore and sayings, and hence enlisted the aid of numerous field workers who appear to have spent eight years accumulating and reporting what they found. Since these workers included teachers at Over seventy schools throughout the British

*.111F LORE AND LANGUAGI, 01. S( 1100LCIIILDREN. By lona and Peter Opie. (O.U.P., 35s.) Isles, the coverage was thorough, but the field- work was clearly backed up with extensive reading and private correspondence. The authors' wish, if a large body of oral material was discovered to exist, was to get it down on paper in an accurate, unidealised way. Clearly their expectations 'were gratified, and they have brought to the task of recording the results the blend of charm and thoroughness already evinced in their nursery rhyme collections. Their 400-page book takes the reader right into the heart of the child country. What does he find there?

Leaving aside games (to be the subject of a second volume later), the mass of sayings and customs here presented refers to almost every aspect of the unofficial social life of childhood between the ages six and fourteen. It is made up of rhymes, parodies, jokes, riddles, nicknames and repartee, together with more practical formula of promise, barter, friendship, fortune and super- stition, and a miscellaneous collection of calendar customs, pranks, and such expertise as the use of lean bacon rashers to deaden caning. The vast majority involve rhyming. Children love rhymes, however pointless, just because they are rhymes: Have you seen Pa Smoking a, cigar Riding on a bicycle? Ha! Ha! Ha!

and a belief or prayer or promise is felt to be truer or more effective Or more binding if in the form of a jingle : Touch your head, touch your toes Hope I never go in one of those.

(On seeing an ambulance.)

The authors claim that this susceptibility goes deeper. 'When on their own they burst into rhyme, of no recognisable relevancy, as a cover in un- expected situations, to pass off an awkward meet- ing, to fill a silence, to hide a deeply-felt emotion, or in a gasp of excitement.' This does not mean that children are natural poets. The many lovers of the Opies' earlier books should be warned not to expect another harvest of ageless magical- simple ditties of cottage and countryside. The rhymes children do not let die (as opposed to those preserved for them by their elders) have no obvious qualifications for immortality : I'm a man that came from Scotland Shooting peas up a Nannie goat's bottom, I'm the man that came from Scotland Shooting peas away.

All the same, they frequently have unexpectedly long ancestries. In 1954 children were skipping in York to a rhyme the authors could trace back in an unbroken line to. 1725 : this is true oral tradition, exemplifying the innate conservatism of childhood in these matters that was one of the authors' chief discoveries. Norman Douglas. writing in London Street Gaines (1916), thought he was showing 'how wide-awake our youngsters are, to be able to go on inventing games out of their heads all the time.' But Douglas was wrong : the Opies report that of the 137 chants and frag-

ments he records, 108 are still being sung today, and were presumably as traditional then as now. 'Boys continue to crack jokes that Swift collected from his friends in Queen Anne's time; they play tricks which lads used to play on each other in the heyday of Beau Brummel; they ask riddles that were posed when Henry VIII was a boy.' A verse reported from Regency days by Edmund Gosse's father was sent in by a twelve-year-old Spennymoor girl 130 years later; in 1952 Wilt- shire girls were skipping to : Kaiser Bill went up the hill To see if the war was over; General French got out of his trench And kicked him into Dover.

He say if the Bone Man come Stick your bayonet up his bum.

To come upon the shadowy figure of Kaiser Wilhelm 11, and the still more shadowy Napoleon Bonaparte, standing in a children's song like ghosts at midsummer noontide shows as well as anything could the way a particular rhyme will be trans- mitted unthinkingly from generation to generation until it loses all significance. Yet, paradoxically, the child has a keen sense of the topical. Lottie Collins becomes Diana Dors; Bonnie Prince Charlie becomes Charlie Chaplin; Jack the Ripper becomes Kruger and then Mickey Mouse. There are even purely modern songs:.

Catch a Perry Como Wash him in some Omo Hang hitn on a line to dry.

The authors explain this paradox by insisting that 'schoolchild chant and chatter' is made up of two very distinct streams of oral lore : the modern mass of catchphrases, slang, fashionable jokes and nicknames, and the traditional inheritance of dialect and custom governing such things as play- ing truant, giving warning, sneaking, swearing, tormenting, fighting, and in general the darker and sterner side of life. This dichotomy receives curious reinforcement from the discovery that while terms of approval (smashing, bang on, flashy, lush, smack on, snazzy, etc.) change rapidly with the fashion, terms of disapproval (blinking awful, blootnin"orrible, boring, cheesy, corny, daft, disgraceful, flippin' awful, foul, fusty, frowsty, etc.) show very little alteration. But the persistence of tradition is seen even more clearly in non-verbal ways : in calendar customs, for instance, in superstitions, in mysterious convic- tions connected with assembling a million milk- bottle tops, of saying rabbits on the first of the month. Many of these are strictly local. Egg- rolling at Easter, widely practised north of the Trent, is quite unknown in the Midlands and the South; Mischief Night (November 4) occupies a belt east to west across the country between, say, Derby and Saltburn. (From my observation this custom is spreading and growing more violent and disagreeable : I suggest a Herod's Eve to coincide with it, on which hands of adults might roam the streets and bash hell . out of anyone under sixteen found out of doors.) Long before the reader finishes the last chapter he will be asking himself what this tumult of rhyming, joking, riddling, jeers and epithets (the extent of which I have done no more than hint at) really amounts to in terms of knowledge about children today. Here the authors are not helpful. No doubt designedly, they have spent their space on recording the greatest possible number of jingles, nicknames, synonyrris, customs and conun- drums for posterity, rather than trying to draw Conclusions from them. The trouble is their material Is not sufficiently interesting to stand by itself. To me it demonstrated that on the whole children are quite 'as boring and nearly as un- pleasant as I remember them. To read the. chapter 'Wit and Repartee' is to live again those appalling half-hours in playground, corridor or cloakroom when the feeble backchat almost suffocated one by its staleness. And since the authors assure us that they are not concerned with the delinquent. the verses called `Today's Menu' ('Scab and matter custard . . .') must not be regarded as untypical.

Nevertheless, I can't quite subscribe to the Opies' delineation of all children as an entirely separate race of quasi-savages, or not without some reservations. All their examples are collected from non-private, non-fee-paying schools, which means in practice that, like most folk-lorists, they are sampling from the least literate section of the community : the title of the book should be modified mentally in conse- quence. Again, I cannot accept unquestioned the authors' remark that '[childhood] is as unnoticed by the sophisticated world, and quite as little affected by it, as is the culture of some dwindling aboriginal tribe living out its .helpless existence in the hinterland of a native reserve.' Children copy adults ceaselessly. In fact, it might be argued that both streams of oral lore, topical and traditional, are largely cast-offs from the grown-up world. The fact that children cross their legs in examina- tions for luck like eighteenth-century gamblers suggests that customs and superstitions persist in childhood long after maturity has abandoned them. Already we are beginning to call Christnias `the children's festival.' How long will 'Here's the Bible open, Here's the Bible shut, If I don't tell the truth,' etc., continue to be chanted after the present legal form of taking the oath has vanished?

Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults. or there is ,no incentive to grow up. But there has been much agitation recently about whether grown-ups themselves are deteriorating by reason of addiction to mass media, loss of traditional self- amusements, and the like. To me (if I may quote After Many a Sununer)ihey look as if they were having a pretty good time, in their own way of course,' but the question may be asked whether there is any evidence in this book that the hypothetical blight is spreading backwards into childhood. It is not an easy one to answer. During the time that the Opies were collecting their material, television licences increased from 800,000 to 8,000,000. It is possible, therefore, that the lore they record will soon be largely obsolete. On the other hand, we cannot be certain of this until a comparable investigation is made fifty or a hundred years hence. It 'is likely that the whole traditional corpus' is expiring at a slower rate than we can measure, just as it has among adults. and if this is so many will regret it. But I do not think it can be said to matter seriously provided childhood retains the vitality to convert and adapt new material to its obscure and secret ends. Nor- man Douglas took a pessimistic view of the future : 'the standardisation of youth proceeds endlessly.' The Opies do not : 'we,cannot but feel that [this] is a virile generation.' The reader is left

feeling, in short, that the old rhymes are not so marvellous that it matters if children forget to sing them. The important thing is that they should sing. And there is no evidence here that they are forgetting how to do this.