Nursery Rhymes

You know that you are getting older when you start to think or say things like "Ah, back in my day, it was different..."

Things were different back in the day.... we went out to play in the morning and came back for tea. Nobody knew where we were or what we were up to. And nobody worried about it. Today, with better street lights, cctv on every corner and universal mobile phone access, no-one seems to dare go out at all. Fear seems to be prevalent.

It made us think - is it the immediacy of communication that has caused the problem? Surely people were just as wicked 'back in the day' as they are now, but a crime then would be reported locally, but even national news would not infiltrate lives as fast as a viral You Tube video. Now everyone sees the distressed parents within minutes of the event and it gets played over and over. Comments fly around Facebook and within minutes the whole nation seems to be personally affected and feel a part of the pain.

In some ways it's great - a whole nation can be drawn together and share common and significant experiences. It helps to bond, to give a sense of belonging... Yet the downside is that fear spreads like a pernicious virus for which there seems to be no vaccine.

Which is where nursery rhymes come in. Back in the day (way back, even before my day) the world for many was a far more dangerous place than it is today. Corruption, criminality, injustice, political and religious bigotry, rampant disease and poverty combined to create a fearful cocktail of disaster for pretty much everyone. Without chat shows, celebrity interviews, counsellors or Facebook, how did people process the fear, how did children especially, cope with such a world? How did anything get done against a backdrop of imepnding doom that should have disempowered even the most adventurous?

Mary, Mary quite contrary

How does your garden grow?

With cockleshells and silver bells

And pretty maids, all in a row

It's not a medieval version of Gardener's World. It's a satirical condemnation of 'Bloody Mary'. Her religious views were contrary to the reformation that her Father had begun. The garden refers to the ever increasing graveyards needed to accomodate the martyrs, tortured by the 'cockleshells and silver bells' (thumbscrews and worse) and executed by the 'maiden beheader' (a primitive version of the guillotine).

But it's also a way of mocking the horror of it all. Children could laugh and make light of what was too traumatic to deal with fully.

Ring, a ring of roses

A pocket full of posies

Atishoo, atishoo

We all fall down

A dance and a rhyme to take away the horror and loss of the plague. A means of diminishing the pain, of rising above the terror.

"London's burning", "Old Mother Hubbard", "Pop goes the weasel" and scores of others - all with the same underlying message: "We ridicule death and hopelessness. Despite the circumstances, we will not submit to fear, we will be children, we will play.

Nowadays we attempt to sterilise the world of danger. We kill 99.9% of all known germs - dead. We spray, we vaccinate, we insulate, we isolate. And all that's left is the cloud of fear, drizzling down from anxious parents to their increasingly fearful and risk-averse children. And they now have no means of processing it, leading, one supposes, to a rise in OCD, IBS and other anxiety related illness.

Oh the irony! We live in a safer world, yet worry more. We live in a global village, yet imprison ourselves in smaller and smaller cells of fear. We live in  the immediacy of communication, where the message of hope could blaze through the fog of fear. But instead what we communicate is the fear itself.

Instead of the nursery rhyme we retreat to the x-box. We make death and destruction our plaything, but it doesn't reduce the fear of reality. We outgrew the nursery rhyme, the fairy-story, the moral tale. We gained our independence, our right to sue, our extended life-expectancy.

But somewhere we lost hope, somewhere we lost God.