Nursery Rhymes

There is a song which I used to sing and have sung to me when I was little. Perhaps you sang it too. It goes like this:

 

            Diddle diddle dumpling, mice and John

Went to bed with his trousers on,

            One shoe off and the other shoe on,

            Diddle diddle dumpling, mice and John.

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, of course, but when I was little, I just accepted that there were things which made no sense to me, but since it was the grown-ups who were running the show, as long as it made sense to them, that was what counted. I trusted them implicitly.

Well, I believe I was well into my early adult years before I discovered that the words of this song are actually:

                Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John.

The song, it turned out, did make sense after all! But how was I supposed to know? I was naïve and trusting, remember? All those years that I was going around singing those ridiculous words, and all the grown-ups around me, instead of kindly and responsibly setting me straight, abused their privileged knowledge and sat there sniggering at me!

Well, this realisation set me to thinking – about many things. About how different the world looks viewed through eyes of different ages, about how ignorant children can be and to what extent they are justified in being so, and about what dumplings have to do with anything. But most of all, it set me to thinking about how a great number of children’s songs and nursery rhymes do, in fact, have some quite serious holes in their logic, and that it is small wonder that when I came across a song which made sense, I saw fit to warp it a bit.

The literary offerings with which we are presented as children range from the sober (few and far between) to the quirky and/or peculiar, to the downright outlandish – and they are all presented as suitable material for a child’s cerebral, personal and cultural development experience.

Here is a small sample of these musical and poetic works.

1. Rock-a-bye baby

Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop,

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock,

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,

Down will come baby, cradle and all.

Now this song raises a number of quite serious issues. First of all, what on earth is a baby doing hanging from a tree? What sort of unstable, depraved parent or carer would go to the trouble of depositing a child there? If the parent were merely negligent, they he or she would simply shut the baby in its room and go and watch TV. But to engage in what is likely to be a fairly complex process in order to place a baby at the top of a tree demonstrates a particularly wanton brand of deliberate malevolence.

The song, you will note, states that “when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall”. Will fall. Not might fall. Not may fall. Not runs a slight risk of falling. The auxiliary verb “will” (and I can tell you this because I am an English teacher) is used when we predict something which we know or think is going to happen. The baby’s carer, it is clear, is hardly placing the cradle in a spot where he or she sincerely believes it will be safe.

Secondly, how do you get a baby up there? Climbing a tree is a tricky exercise at the best of times, but to do it bearing a baby in a cradle is likely to prove impossible. So the person involved probably used a ladder. But how many ladders have you seen, apart from those used by firemen and window-cleaners, that will reach up to the top of a tree? And even if it did, you wouldn’t be able to lean it against the top branches. They would be too flimsy to support it. So how do you propose to get to the top of the tree in the first place to deposit the baby?

And this leads us neatly to the matter of what you are going to attach the cradle to when you get there (if you get there). The topmost branches, as we have noted, are weak and pliable, and no sooner have you hung the cradle on one of them than it will slip off. It is highly unlikely to hold for long enough for the “wind to blow”, and certainly not long enough for you to sing a song to the baby about the whole business.

There are probably more issues with this song, but let’s move on to the next one. The next one is:

2. There was an old woman who lived in a shoe

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe

She had so many children she didn’t know what to do

She gave the some broth without any bread

And whipped them all soundly and sent them to bed.

The first question that springs to mind is: just how “old” is this woman? 45? 60? 93? If she has children still young enough to require feeding, beating, and sending to bed, then she can’t be that much past child-bearing age – say mid to late forties. But I would hardly say that qualifies as old. And it can’t be an issue of rhythm, because “There was a young woman who lived in a shoe” has exactly the same rhythm. It is just sloppy thinking, as far as I can see.

The other significant issue here is this woman’s place of residence. If you have ever, ever, even just once, seen a person living in a shoe, then I will drop this whole argument here and now.

But let us, for the sake of open-mindedness, assume that a family can live in a shoe. So the first question is this: what size is this shoe? Is it a normal-sized shoe with a miniature woman and miniature children living in it, or is it a house-sized shoe with normal people living in it? (Well, I say “normal people” – what I actually mean is “normal-sized people”. )

Secondly, and this is so obvious that I need hardly point it out, a shoe does not have a roof.

The third thing is this: can you get planning permission for a house which is, to all intents and purposes, a shoe? I was bothered enough by the question to put it to someone who knows about these things, and can report back to you that the construction proposal would run into problems right from the word go.

For a start, buildings have to fit in aesthetically with the surrounding environment, in terms of height, shape, building materials, position relative to the street, etc. Are we therefore to believe that this old woman lived in a whole street full of shoe-shaped buildings made of leather?

Secondly, from the point of view of safety, the shoe would need to be fire-resistant. Now, I don’t know if you have done a fire test with your shoes recently, but if not, I can save you the trouble and tell you that while leather itself is not particularly flammable, the softeners, colours, and other products which are applied to the leather in the shoe-making process can certainly be.

Still on safety, the shoe would need a sturdy superstructure to keep it from collapsing in fires or earthquakes. I can’t say I’m convinced that standard-issue steel toe-caps would be sufficient.

And on to environmental issues, and here we are into slightly murkier territory, because this old woman’s location is not clear. If she is in the UK, however, which she may well be, then she is going to find herself running up considerable expense over the next few years, as she invests in roof-mounted solar panels and wind turbines (except she can’t, because she doesn’t have a roof to mount them on), rainwater harvesting, and special insulation, in line with the government’s plans to increase the number of carbon-neutral buildings by 2020.

Finally, if you apply for planning permission for anything that is a bit unusual, it will be refused, and you have to reapply several more times, with something more toned down each time. So if you want to build something very odd (a shoe, say), you apply for permission to build something completely outlandish, get refused, and then gradually tone it down to simply very odd. So my question is this: what on earth did the architect suggest in the first round of applications?


Having developed something of a headache, we may wish to move, at this point, on to the next song, about a family of cats.

3. The three little kittens

Three little kittens, they lost their mittens

And they began to cry,

“Oh mother, dear, see here, see here,

Our mittens we have lost!”

“What? Lost your mittens? You naughty kittens!

Now you shall have no pie!”

“Meow! Meow! Now we shall have no pie.

Meow! Meow! Now we shall have no pie.”

The three little kittens, they found their mittens

And they began to cry,

“Oh mother, dear, see here, see here,

Our mittens we have found!”

“You’ve found your mittens! You good little kittens.

Now you shall have some pie.”

“Prrr! Prrr! Now we shall have some pie!

Prr! Prr! Now we shall have some pie!”

My questions here number two.

1)      Kittens? Mittens? Which planet?
2)      Have you ever, at any point in your life, no matter how remote, encountered a cat which, when informed, “You may not eat this food” simply replies, “OK. I accept that without protest”?

We shall now look at a meteorological phenomenon - and, come to think of it - a corporeal one.

4. I can sing a rainbow

Red and yellow and pink and green

Purple and orange and blue

I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow

Sing a rainbow too.

Listen with your eyes

And sing everything you see.

I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow

Sing along with me.

The line that particularly bothers me here is “Listen with your eyes”. Even when I was little, I was aware of the illogic of this.

“How can you listen with your eyes?” I would wonder. “You see with your eyes. You listen with your ears.”

But I just assumed it was one of those things that only grown-ups understood (those same responsible grown-ups who didn’t tell me that it wasn’t “mice and John”), and that I would understand it one day when I was older.

Well, I grew older, and older, and I regret to inform you that this line still makes absolutely no sense to me.

Here is our final song:

5. She'll be coming round the mountain

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes

She’ll be coming round the mountain

She’ll be coming round the mountain

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.

A fairly pedestrian song, as songs go, about an approaching visitor, but an effective enough way of keeping a group of small children occupied for five minutes or so. There is nothing in the first verse, as far as I can see, which is particularly lacking in sense. We have to go to the second verse for that:

                She’ll be wearing silk pyjamas when she comes, etc.

Now tell me this. If you were going to visit someone far away, at least as far as a journey round a mountain, do you not think it would occur to you to attire yourself in something marginally more appropriate than silk pyjamas? The only people, to the best of my awareness, who regularly venture out in pyjamas are mothers dropping their children at school. But you will have noticed that the words are “when she comes” and not “when they come”, eliminating the possibility of the school run. But there may be a rational explanation. Perhaps her house caught fire during the night, and she had to leave in a hurry and didn’t have time to get dressed. But that doesn’t account for the next verse:

                She’ll be riding six white horses when she comes, etc.

Did you get that? She’ll be riding six white horses. Not “a white horse”. Not “she’ll be riding one white horse and leading another five along beside her”. Not “she’ll be walking six white dogs”. No. She is, if we are to believe the song, effectively perched on the backs of six large animals simultaneously.

A quick search on Google yields a number of songs in which a woman “drives” six white horses, that is to say, she is travelling in a coach being drawn by six horses. Which makes rather a lot more sense. But it does not leave me entirely satisfied, because I am certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that what I was taught at school was the version I have given you here.

IN CONCLUSION

The world is a confusing place, and you can't always trust people. This does not change as you get older, and is the reason why a person's cynicism is directly proportional to their age.