My Very First Mother Goose

In the small collection of items I put aside to blog about at some future time, is an obituary of Iona Opie, children’s folklorist, who died in 2017 aged 94. If this post interests you, you will enjoy her life story.

Her delightful book ‘My Very First Mother Goose’, an illustrated collection of nursery rhymes, gave us hours of fun when the children were little. Bedtime after bedtime, we would turn through the pages, pointing at the pictures, singing the rhymes we knew the tunes to, and reciting those we didn’t. Now in a box of books in the loft, it is definitely not one to be disposed of. 

Amongst my favourites to sing were:

         Polly put the kettle on
         Half a pound of tuppenny rice
         I had a little nut tree
         Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, where have you been
         Elsie Marley’s grown so fine, she won’t get up to feed the swine
         Dickory, dickery, dock
         Sing a song of sixpence
         Hey diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle
         Ride a cock ‘oss to Banbury Cross
                 (we are certainly not going to sing ‘cross’ to rhyme with ‘horse’ in Yorkshire)
         Horsie, horsie, don’t you stop
         Boys and girls come out to play
         Jack and Jill
         Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake
         Down at the station early in the morning
         Wee Willie Winkie

We probably enjoyed it more than the children.

“I don’t like that Wink Willie Wee-Wee,” son J said one day.

Iona Opie, with her husband Peter, began collecting nursery rhymes during the war when, one day out walking in the countryside, the rhyme “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home / Your house is on fire, your children all gone,” came into her head. She wondered what it meant and where it had come from. Nursery rhymes had never been codified before. From scratch, they unearthed a rich vein of children’s rhymes, traditions and folklore that had been passed down through generations, which they sought to record before it was erased by the commodification of childhood.

As in “Ladybird, ladybird”, many hint at untold horrors. The Opies suggested this was uniquely British, “All part of being frightfully tough and not minding the weather; we’re nourished with this nonsense and it does us a lot of good.” 

With us, the rhymes took on a life of their own, with changed words and new verses. “Down at the station” acquired a second verse in a minor key:

         Grandson and -daughter¹ wave goodbye to Grandma,
         She’s on the train, she’s on her way home,
         Ten minutes later a face at the window,
         “Hello, it’s me, I’m baaack² again.

                 ¹ their actual names were used here
                 ² exaggerated southern accent

The odd thing about this is that it is not entirely true. Our extra verse refers to an incident that occurred before either of the children was born.

Grandma used to travel up from the South on the main line to Sheffield and then take a local train through Barnsley. She was appalled by the thought that any future grandchildren might grow up with Barnsley accents.

On this particular day, we saw her off home on the local train, but she returned an hour or so later and knocked on the window. What had happened is that, just outside our station where the line becomes single-track, the driver of the train coming in the opposite direction stopped to inform Grandma’s driver about a broken joint in the track which had allowed him to pass but would have derailed Grandma’s train. Grandma’s driver then had to wait for permission to reverse back to our station. 

How many of our traditional rhymes are similarly muddled?

 

Iona and Peter Opie (rhymes with ‘soapy’) published several other books, including ‘The Oxford Dictionary Of Nursery Rhymes’. We also bought ‘Here Comes Mother Goose’ which is in the same Walker Books series as ‘My Very First Mother Goose’, but most of the rhymes are unfamiliar to us.

A Practical Wife

New month old post - last month’s old post was part of a longer piece. This is how it continued (first posted 18th August 2014).

In ‘Dad’s Thursday Helper’, I wrote about the dubiously wonderful things Dad could do with fire, lead, tar, meths, petrol and so many other substances while Mum was out. Yet, Mum never thought him particularly skilled in practical things. There was another reason for this too, which was that Mum was by far the more practically gifted of the two. She did all the gardening and repairs around the house.

She inherited a naturally practical, creative imagination that had run in her family for generations. Her great grandfather had maintained steam engines on barges in the 1870s. One of her brothers was a plumber, another was a self-taught mechanic. I watched the plumber dig down at Grandma’s house to connect a water-toilet to the new drains that had reached the village. And later, the mechanic effortlessly dismantled the broken mini-van lock and made it work with the ignition key. Even Mum once rescued me from a car maintenance disaster with pointed kitchen scissors after I had stupidly twisted the top off a grease nipple. She could use tools in entirely different ways from their intended purpose.

“Aren’t I lucky to have married such a practical wife,” Dad used to say.

I remember them decorating together, a paintbrush each. Mum got on quickly and efficiently with long smooth brush strokes, whilst Dad stabbed away awkwardly, making slow progress. I later realised she had given him an old brush, the stock clogged up with dried paint, stiff and ineffective, but he did his best without realising anything was wrong.

This kind of thing is pretty insidious. Dad, who made himself a cat’s whisker crystal radio as a boy, taught both me and my brother to assemble Airfix models and make things with Meccano, preserved fences with creosote, repaired punctured bicycle tyres, helped maintain his firm’s cars and vans in the 1940s and 1950s, and had the confidence to melt lead and tar on the kitchen cooker and get away with it, gradually came to believe himself functionally incompetent in all matters practical. We all came to think it.

After Dad retired he made some real howlers. He decided to help around the house by cleaning the finger marks off the furniture with a mixture of vinegar and water like his mother used to do. Within minutes he had knocked the vinegar water on to the carpet. “For goodness sake, get a bloody job,” Mum yelled.

Mum spent her final months explaining how to do the household things she had always done for us all. Dad carefully wrote it all down in a notebook, but it did not always help. Mum became so exasperated at his ineptitude as she tried to instruct him how to build cane pyramids for runner bean, she exclaimed “I’ve got more sense in my little finger than you have in your whole body.” Dad knew she you would never harvest them, and she didn’t.

Later, most memorably, he melted the plastic lid of the kettle by putting it on the gas ring without water. The next day, having bought a new lid, he did exactly the same again. “They always used to have metal lids,” he complained.

It was a vicious circle, lack of practice leading to lowered confidence. Were those tar splashes on the yellow shed and the flaming pool of meths creeping across the table, mentioned in the last post, early indications?  

I like to think I inherited Mum’s practical abilities. I can garden, hang wallpaper, service a car, replace light switches, maintain computer software, put new taps on washbasins, mend toilet cisterns and make guinea pigs hutches, to mention but a few. Dad visited us one day to find me hammering a hole in the bedroom wall to fit a new electrical spur socket. The floorboards were up displaying my neat new wiring all ready to connect up. I proudly showed him what I was doing.

“Aren’t you lucky to have married such a practical wife,” he told me.