Road Apples
March 22, 2010


The Mother Goosed generation

By Tim Sanders

I firmly believe that a lot of my generation’s idiosyncracies–the ones that aren’t due to drugs ingested in the ‘60s, at least–are due to nursery rhymes. I can imagine that in the olden days, way before the advent of Captain Kangaroo, let alone SpongeBob Whatchamacallit, strange conversations took place in nurseries all over the country.


MOM: ... when the wind blows, the cradle will fall,
and down will come baby, cradle and all.

LITTLE LESTER: WAAAAAH!

DAD: Sniff, sniff, sniff–SOMETHING STINKS!

MOM: Shhhhh! Little Lester did a doody in his diaper poo. That little rhyme relaxed his tummy.

DAD: I don’t think a song about a baby falling out of a tree relaxed his tummy. It just scared the doody out of him!


So Little Lester probably spent most of his teen years with the haunting image of a baby in a crib not unlike his old crib, hurtling earthward from the top of a forty-foot white cedar, permanently etched into his subconscious. It could well have driven him to delinquency.

And a good percentage of the old nursery rhymes, most of which we inherited from those wacky 18th Century English wandering nursery poets, had a macabre tone to them. Would any modern, politically correct, mother repeat the following to her child?


Tom, Tom, the piper’s son,
Stole a pig, and away he run.
The pig was eat, Tom was beat.
And he went howling down the street.


Larceny, pork consumption, high cholesterol, the inevitable plaque buildup in Tom’s arteries, child abuse, and disturbing the peace, all in one innocent little nursery rhyme. And if that didn’t affect little Lester’s digestive tract, how about the Song of Sixpence, which features “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.” Feathers and all. Of course, from the blackbirds’ point of view, this one ends on a positive note, because “when the pie is opened, the birds begin to sing.” And, like a scene from Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” one of the half-baked blackbirds gets his revenge. While the king is counting his money and the queen is eating bread and honey, “the maid is in the garden, hanging out the clothes, when down comes a blackbird and pecks off her nose.” Isn’t that a fancy rhyme to set before a toddler?

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. My generation was assaulted by rhymes about the ladybug who was told to fly home immediately because her house was on fire and her children had been burned to a crisp; and the little old lady who lived in a shoe along with four dozen offspring all smelling like old feet, each and every one of which she whipped soundly before sending them off to bed. There was the enigmatic Little Miss Muffet, sitting around on her fat little tuffet eating curds and whey because they were all out of bird pie. But did she get to finish her curds? No, no curds, no whey. Certainly not in Nursery Rhyme Land. Along came a banana spider the size of a dinner plate and she spit up her whey and off she shot like an arrow to find a mallet. Those old 18th Century British nursery rhyme poets just had to go all medieval on us.

And for the past two or three centuries, lucky toddlers on both sides of the Atlantic were told over and over again about that fool Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater, who not only had a bad case of jaundice, but also had a wife who was what they used to call a “runner.” She had an active libido, and he “couldn’t keep her.” The solution–he put her in a pumpkin shell, which meant that either a) his wife was a potato worm, or b) he’d grown a pumpkin the size of a Volkswagen bus, like something out of Little Shop of Horrors.

Even in that beloved masterpiece about the monkey chasing the weasel around a mulberry bush, the poet wasn’t content until the weasel exploded. And no, it wasn’t a nasty old congressional-type weasel that went “POP!”, only a regular little furry weasel who’d never passed a bit of harmful legislation in his life. So the poor child listening to the story was left with nothing but a bewildered monkey covered in weasel parts. And our parents were convinced that this was the kind of image that would brighten our day.

Which brings us to Jack, an accident-prone little oaf who appeared in at least a third of all nursery rhymes. When he was very young, his last name was Horner, and while he sat in a corner eating his Christmas pie, he jammed his thumb into the thing and pulled out a plumb. He was proud of himself, and said, and I quote directly here: “What a good boy am I!” Then, of course, he bellowed “YEEEEOWTCH! OOOOH, MOMMA!”, because he’d just scalded all the skin off his thumb. In a few years Jack and his wicked step-sister, Jill, went up a hill to fetch some mushrooms or some home brew or something, and Jack fell down and “broke his crown.” Jill, of course, had a good laugh, which made her mother switch her legs with a coat hanger before sending her to bed. And since Jack soon became known as the village doofus, some neighbors dared him to be nimble and quick and jump over a candlestick. Had there been acetylene torches back then, that nursery rhyme would have been even scarier. After Jack grew older and his private parts healed from the candle experiment, he changed his name from Horner to Sprat, moved to another village, and married. There Mr. and Mrs. Sprat constantly argued over fat meat versus lean meat, and one day while they were both licking the platter clean, so as to save on dishwater, Mrs. Sprat bit the tip of Jack’s tongue off and spit it on the floor, where three visually impaired mice without tails found it and ran up a clock.

I’m sure you remember the rest of the story, how the clock struck one, and the rest escaped and sued the Waltham Clock Company for psychological distress, pain, and suffering.

These were the kinds of nursery rhymes youngsters from my generation were traumatized by, and they are the reason that today you more sophisticated, well adjusted children can sneak up behind old goosey Grandpa and holler “GRAMPS, THERE’S A HUGE TARANTULA CRAWLING UP YOUR TUFFET!” and he’ll crash his Hoveround into the kitchen table. (He may also do a doody in his diaper poo, so give him plenty of room.)