Are nursery rhymes relevant? I hope not, says Griselda Heppel
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| A relevant jump by Daisy |
The Times recently ran a front-page story on
the demise of the nursery rhyme: schools are teaching these rhymes less and
less apparently, as they are ‘no longer relevant.'
This did
make me laugh. At which stage in our history, exactly, was a cow jumping over a
moon relevant? Or four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie? The wonderful thing about children is that
they don’t give half a pound of tuppenny rice for relevance;
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| Blackbirds are no longer baked in pies |
what they can recognise – which, sadly, some education experts apparently can’t – is the magic of strange words and bizarre ideas woven together to stretch both their vocabulary and their imaginations. It doesn’t matter that the rhymes make no sense, or refer to a piece of long-forgotten history. My 22 month old grand-daughter has no idea that Rock a Bye Baby may refer to the ousting of James II by William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution of 1688;
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| Neglectful parenting, not tolerated today |
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| Down with this irrelevant plague! |
Other rhymes are
even more absurd, and impossible to analyse for a hidden meaning, as in Hey diddle diddle and Sing a Song of Sixpence mentioned above. Or how about this one, a
favourite of my own children:
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| This working practice has no place in today's society |
There was
an old woman tossed up in a basket,
Ninety-nine
times as high as the moon.
Where she
was going I couldn’t but ask it,
For in her
hand she wielded a broom.
‘Old
woman, old woman, old woman,’ said I,
‘Where are
you going to up so high?’
‘To sweep
the cobwebs off the sky!’
‘May I go
with you?’ ‘Aye, by and by.’
How
wonderful is that image? It literally sends the imagination soaring, all the
way to the moon and far, far beyond, through a night sky latticed with cobwebs…
To demand that nursery rhymes be ‘relevant’ when you could offer children such
riches feels mean and restricting. And worse. Nursery rhymes are not so
different from fairy tales, both in their literary heritage and in their ability to create strange, fantastical
worlds. Consider, then, Albert Einstein’s famous advice to parents:
‘If you want your children to be
intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them
to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.'
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| Albert Einstein was clearly read a lot of fairy tales |
And
– as I know Einstein would have added, had it crossed his mind that it might be
necessary – please, please don’t try to make them relevant. Not like a hand-puppet board book, This Little Piggy, recently given to my granddaughter. This version, while using
charming finger puppets, has ‘updated’ the classic rhyme for our more sensitive
(?) era, destroying meaning and rhythm in one fell swoop:
This little piggy
went to market. (Original line, good. From here things go
downhill.)
This little piggy
stayed home. (Preposition?)
This little piggy
had cookies. (What?? Where’s the roast beef?)
This little piggy
had fun.
(No, he didn’t. He had NONE. Everyone knows this. Line altered presumably to
spare children’s distress for a piggy who had nothing to eat. I have news for the publishers: children don’t care. It’s
life. They can cope with that.)
This little piggy
sang wee wee wee all the way home. (No, he didn’t. He CRIED wee wee wee. He was
squealing. That’s what pigs do.)
Which
brings me to the many, many books and recordings of nursery rhymes on the
market, and a heartfelt plea: your children matter. Don’t give them rubbish. Buy
them a book of the stature of The Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes by the incomparable Raymond Briggs: a beautifully illustrated collection, including lesser
known rhymes such as Charley Barley
Butter and Eggs as well as Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star.
Find out more about Griselda Heppel here:
and her children's books:
Comments
The rhythms and rhymes are certainly part of their appeal, but it must also be, as Griselda says, the weird, poetical images -- a cow jumping over the moon, a cat playing the fiddle, an old woman flying past the stars in a basket. Look at the long list of artists who've delighted in illustrating the rhymes.
They aren't relevant today? Well, since most of them seem to have been comments on current affairs, they were 'relevant' for a few years: then they were just remembered because they were odd and beautiful. If we need to make them 'relevant' we need some modern, scathing satirical verse - God knows, we have enough material. Anybody feel up to the job?
Inventing new ones, now that's a challenge. As you say, Susan, if people managed it in other eras, making brilliantly snide political comments, surely SOMEBODY should be able to do something with Brexit and Twitter ...