There Is A Sting In Some of Those Old Nursery-Tales

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 290, 12 January 1945, Page 9

There Is A Sting In Some of Those Old Nursery-Tales

(Written for "The Listener" by

J.C.

R.

hundreds, and _ probably thousands, of parents will be reading or reciting to their children from books of nursery -rhymes which were deposited in the Christmas pillow-case. Over the centuries these nursery rhymes and tales have been repeated so often that they have become almost meaningless-mere innocent jingles of words. It might come as a surprise to some parents (and their children). to: learn’ that these jingles are not quite as innocent or meaningless as they sound. They are, however, harmless enough. ,Time takes the sting even out of political satire and topical lampooning — which, in many cases, is what these nurseryrhymes originally were. . THIS time of the year,

Similarly, the years have drawn the talons of Swift’s savage: Gulliver's Travels, and made the book into a children’s reader. It is well known, too, how the apparently innocuous inn-titles such as "Pig and

Whistle" (Pyx. and Missal) contain the ashes of old religious controversies, and how such words as "hocus-pocus" enshrine one of many Protestant gibes at the Catholic liturgy, in this case, at the words of Consecration in the Mass "Hoc est enim corpus meum." So also many of our most familiar nursery-rhymes, behind their apparent inconsequence, conceal stories of royal tragedies, popular satire on leading figures, thus expressed to by-pass censorship, and barbed thrusts at the personal

weakness and blunders of English leaders. What could be seemingly more innocent than "Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow With silver bells, and cockle-shells And pretty maids all in a row?" But what a different story is told when it is realised that Mary is no idyllic creation, but Mary Tudor, "contrary" because of her endeavours to restore the Old Religion of her "garden" England, "the silver bells". are the Sanctus bells of the Mass, the "cockleshells," the male religious orders, and the "pretty maids" the nuns, all of which she tried to bring back into English life.