Nursery rhymes

Do children still have nursery rhymes sung to them? Whenever I look at young children’s books, or watch the strange tv programmes they now have I wonder whether nursery rhymes ever appear. Thankfully my children missed the Teletubbies… not that I’m against programmes which have no understandable language – I adore the Clangers for example!

Nursery rhymes conjured such lovely pictures, even without having little books to look at. I always could imagine naughty Little Boy Blue snoozing away instead of looking after his sheep; I always imagined him with blond curly hair because that’s how I thought of naughty children when I was little. I could imagine the sheep and cows munching away, pleased to be in the wrong field, while the boy’s horn remained silent. His horn was another mysterious thing, it seemed so wonderful for a boy to have such a thing.

Humpty Dumpty, that great round thing looking down disdainfully before he fell… and then the gallant King’s soldiers and men, dressed in their wonderful uniforms and able to do anything, except put Humpty together again. Then there were the other lot of soldiers, ten thousand of them – and I could really see these brave men slogging up and down hills at the command of the Grand Old Duke of York.

Mary, the ultimate naught girl… whatever contrary meant, I wanted to be it… although I wasn’t necessarily so keen on the silver bells and pretty maids, but I had dug, cooked and eaten cockles with my Dad on Norfolk beaches, so I liked the idea of the cockle shells. Was she the same Mary who had a little lamb? I thought not, because although I was too young for comics I did sometimes see my cousin Jackie’s comics and read the story of the Four Marys at their boarding school, Mary Simpson, Mary Radleigh, Mary Cotter and Mary Field.

Perhaps Mary who had the little lamb was friendly with Little Bo-Peep… and silly Jack and Jill, I was never very keen on them, maybe I didn’t like the picture of them in my little nursery rhyme book. Jack was always skinny and weedy looking unlike Little Jack Horner who was definitely on the chubby side and sneaky and greedy. Jack is such a popular name now, but when I was young I didn’t know anyone my age called that, although my father had friends who were.