Terror of the tots

Call me old-fashioned, but I worry sometimes about the song lyrics to which young people are exposed, with their amoral and often warped attitude to life. Take this example, more or less typical: "Three blind mice/ Three blind mice/See how they run/See how they run/They all ran after the farmer's wife/ She cut off their tails with a carving knife/ Did you ever see such a thing in your life/As three blind mice?"

The mouse is not everybody's favourite animal, to be sure. But why anybody should rejoice in its abuse by a knife-wielding farmerette is beyond me. Even worse, however, is the song's casual mockery of the mice's visual disability, without which the tragicomedy in which they ran after - rather than away from - the farmer's wife would presumably never have happened.

Here's another example, from the opening verse of an equally cheerful children's song: "Five little worms on the garden lawn/ Wrigg-a-ling around at the crack of dawn/ Along came a magpie, yum, yum, yum/Now a little worm is in his tum . . ." I won't distress readers with the next four verses. Suffice to say they make depressing reading from a worm viewpoint. But at least getting eaten by birds is a routine part of a worm's life. What about this brutal account of a family tragedy, which children are traditionally encouraged to sing to ladybirds to ward off bad luck: "Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home/Your house is on fire and the children all gone/All except one, and that's little Ann/And she has crept under the warming pan."

OK, the likelihood that little Ann has survived the conflagration does hint at redemption for the ladybirds. But in any genre other than the nursery rhyme, the note of hope in the midst of tragedy would be rather more developed. Given the callousness towards animals in children's song, it's a wonder that The Teddy Bear's Picnic doesn't end up with a massacre, eg. "If you go down to the woods today/You're sure of a big surprise/Some vandals have started a forest fire/ Anyone for teddy-bear fries?" But humans are not spared either. Consider perhaps the most popular of lullabies to which generations of children have been exposed: "Rock-a-bye baby, on a tree-top/ When the wind blows, the cradle will rock/ When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall/ And down will come baby, cradle and all." How the hell is a kid supposed to sleep with that thought? No wonder some people grow up damaged. And what's a cradle doing in a tree-top anyway?

The answers probably lie in the genre's deeply pessimistic view of life, classically expressed in the tale of the old woman who lived in a shoe. The Theatre of the Absurd meets the Theatre of Cruelty in this verse from an era when family planning was unknown: "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe/She had so many children, she didn't know what to do/She fed them on broth without any bread/Whipped them all soundly and sent them to bed."

Nursery rhymes are a grim catalogue of human fears and failings: whether the subject is arachnophobia (Little Miss Muffet); livestock theft and its consequences (Tom, Tom the Piper's Son); the risk of serious head injury while hill-climbing (Jack and Jill); or just the possibility of a bird flying out of a pie and pecking off your nose (Sing a Song of Sixpence).

Not even the subject of eating disorders is left alone, as the sordid tale about the old woman who swallowed a fly indicates. The initial incident involving the fly ("Perhaps she'll die" goes the chorus, with typical bloody-mindedness) may be an accident. But the sorry saga, in which the woman subsequently ingests a spider, a bird, a cat, a dog and a cow, suggests a serious mental imbalance which is hardly the material for a children's song. This being a children's song, the victim does not recover. "There was an old woman who swallowed a horse/She's dead of course," the song ends.

The profound pessimism of the genre is summed up in the fate of the egg-like but pathetically humanoid Humpty Dumpty. It's not just that Humpty is doing nothing more harmful than sitting on a wall when he has his appalling accident, but that his subsequent care is left in the hands of the king's men (no medical qualifications) and - God help us - the king's horses. His prospects, we are unnecessarily informed, are not good.

Apart perhaps from the case for contraception made by the plight of the shoe woman, nursery rhymes steer mercifully clear of sexual issues. But there may be oblique references here too. As, for instance, in the strange story of The Ugly Duckling.

The lyrics of this song would have us believe the hero was in fact a duck before his transcendental experience among the swans; and that furthermore he continued to visit the family which had shunned him (swanning around, no doubt). Maybe. Indeed, on one level this song could be read as a cautionary tale about the outsider who craves acceptance by polite society. Many great artists have lived to curse their seduction by the beautiful people, with their smug assurances that "You're a swan, just like us".

But the plain truth about the Ugly Duckling is more likely an issue of paternity. His "ugliness" is probably nothing more than the length of his neck; and the story of his miracle "transformation" a transparent fib to spare the blushes of his family, and of the notoriously straight-laced duck community.

Frank McNally can be contacted at fmcnally@irish-times.ie