Education: The Secret World

Have children forgotten how to entertain themselves? Last week British grownups got the lowdown from an exuberant piece of scholarship: the Oxford University Press’s new Lore and Language of Schoolchildren* TV may seem to be taming the last of the world’s savage tribes, report Authors lona and Peter Opie, but juvenile culture is indestructible.

Few know better than the Opies, a British husband-and-wife team whose previous exegesis of juvenile literature produced the authoritative Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (TIME, Sept. 24, 1951). This time the Opies left the library to listen on school grounds. For eight years they hunted rhymes, rites and riddles among 5,000 children at 70 schools throughout the British Isles. Delighted to teach adults something, children unbuttoned their lips.

Dors & Drawers. From Aberdeen to Bath, boys cracked jokes that the Opies trace to Queen Anne’s day. Girls cured warts by rubbing them with lard and then burying the lard (a method described by Francis Bacon). They performed a levitation stunt that once fascinated Samuel Pepys. They still believe that reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards makes the Devil appear, and like the Elizabethans, seldom dare try.

How does all this survive? Most British schools have a new generation every six years; play-yard lingo ought to be highly perishable. Yet the Opies found little girls skipping to “Little fatty doctor, how’s your wife?/ Very well, thank you, she’s all right,” a chant that goes back at least 130 years. Measured in school time, it has had more than 20 generations of wear. Children find it as fresh as ever.

Each generation has a touching faith that its ditties have just been invented. The rhyme “House to let, apply within/ Lady turned out for drinking gin” was standard in 1892. The Opies have collected it as far away as Australia and South Africa, but little English girls are sure that no one else has ever heard it. When they sing a modern hymn to Cinemactress Diana Dors, none dream that it comes straight from a 60-year-old original, “Lottie Collins has no drawers.”

Adults plant a child’s garden of verse. Juvenile satire nourishes it. What British children did to The Ballad of Davy Crockett in 1956 should make Walt Disney shudder. Not a vestige remained of the 17 official verses. New versions ranged from “Born on a table top in Joe’s café,/ The dirtiest place in the U.S.A.” to “Born on a rooftop in Battersea/ Joined the Teds when he was only three.”

Many a tender nursery rhyme barely holds its own. At seven or eight, children tire of versions tied in pink and blue ribbons. They prefer:

Mary had a little lamb,

She fed it castor oil,

And everywhere the lamb would go

It fertilized the soil.

Kelly & Jelly. To juvenile minstrels, adult foibles are fit for parodies that spread with lightning speed. During the crisis over King Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936, when censorship hushed grownups, English children everywhere blithely chanted: “Hark, the Herald Angels sing,/ Mrs. Simpson’s pinched our King.”

The really enduring lore is the local jargon of dark doings—the terms for playing hooky, teasing, scrapping. The extraordinary thing, report the Opies, is the abiding loyalty of children to prattle that seems “more vastly entertaining to them than anything they learn from grownups.” TV will never conquer the favorite jump-rope rhyme of little girls throughout much of the English-speaking world:

Old Mister Kelly

Had a pimple on his belly.

His wife cut it off

And it tasted like jelly.

* U.S. publication date: March 3.