My daughter slumps in the crook of my arm. She’s so tired she keeps rolling her head on to my shoulder and rubbing her eyes with tiny fists. But those fists are clenched with determination. We are in her bedroom and she won’t sleep until she gets her story so, to delay this further, she rejects every book in our house, save for one: a bumper compendium of nursery rhymes designed explicitly to test my patience.
She must know I don’t like this book, both because I am a learned and sophisticated man and because I show her every other book beforehand. She glides right past her old favourites, made from thick card and showing animals or vehicles with paws, bumpers, ears and headlamps made from different strips of material – Velcro, cotton, laminated card – solemnly intoning that this puppy or that bus cannot belong to her because it’s too scratchy, soft or shiny. Those are real literature, even if I do wonder about the salience of teaching two-year-olds that they should know, intimately, the texture of an animal’s mouth or a bus’s exhaust pipe. None of which matters as she just wants me to read a 200-page volume of every nursery rhyme you’ve ever heard of, and several dozen you haven’t.
There are about eight good nursery rhymes, and this book has 150. You already know the main bangers, I’m sure. The gory splendour of Jack & Jill or Humpty Dumpty, the crab canon joy of Row Row Row Your Boat or One Man Went To Mow. I’ll admit a fondness for child-endangerment lullaby Rock-A-Bye Baby or body horror classic There Was a Crooked Man, but more often I find myself baffled by rhymes I’ve never heard of, and from which I can mine little enjoyment. The fact is, almost all nursery rhymes are utter doggerel and I loathe them. Few make sense and some don’t even seem finished. Take the following: I see the moon/The moon sees me./God bless the moon/God bless me. Setting aside the fact that pairing ‘moon’ with ‘moon’ and ‘me’ with ‘me’, doesn’t even qualify as a rhyme, are we to believe these 15 words did everything their writer set out to achieve? Are we to imagine them, spent from their exertions, popping a quill back into its inkpot, blowing on the page and crying, ‘Darling! I’ve done it again’?
Worse than the offensively short ones are the longer versions of those you only know the start of. Oranges & Lemons isn’t great to begin with – here are some things that almost rhyme with some churches – but one fears its lesser-read final couplet, ‘Here comes a chopper/to chop off your head,’ spoils even those meagre joys. And the book tests the definition of storytelling even further when the decidedly functional Thirty Days Hath September makes an appearance – a handy mnemonic for remembering the days of each month, but surely a poem which only the most psychotic accountant would recite to a sleepy child.
And yet it’s catnip for my daughter, who dozes pleasantly around her 23rd couplet about, I dunno, making treacle so nice it conjures weasels, or the thrill of eating cherries off a plate. I am glad of her sleep, but judgmental of her literary leanings. That’s not my daughter, I sigh. Her tastes are too basic.
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