NURSERY RHYME HORROR SHOW

 My sister Darla and I had special little cups for our morning cocoa when we were very small. I think a lot of infants of my generation did in my home town of Wapakoneta. They were made of milk-glass and were engraved with decorations—my sister’s in red, mine in blue—that included little scenes of children sitting at a table and playing outdoors. Around the outer rim of each cup was the brief children’s prayer that we recited each time we were called upon to “say grace” before a meal: God is great/God is good/And we thank him for our food…

This was the only part of the prayer engraved on the cup, but when we said grace, we were required to recite the rest as well:

By His hand we shall be fed/Give us Lord our daily bread/Amen.

We liked those tiny cups and never tired of looking at the little scenes on them. They were comforting and homey and made us feel somehow warm and protected.

But the same was not true of the bed-time prayer we, and millions of other children, were required to learn: Now I lay me down to sleep/I pray the Lord my soul to keep/If I should die before I wake/I pray the Lord my soul to take/Amen.

This was a frightening enough image that if you were a worrier as I always was as a child, it was hard to go to sleep if those words kept resounding in your head. In fact, it was because of that prayer that the thought dawned on me for the first time that adults weren’t the only people who died. Kids could die as well.

I recall a trip to the cemetery with my mother and my grandmother when they would engage in that strangest of all smalltown pastimes: visiting the family dead. As we picked our wending way through the myriad tombstones and monuments, we happened on several with child-like images—granite markers topped with delicate child angels, Jesus with tiny tots on his knees, a child’s statue with smiling face and arms thrown tight around a beloved dog’s neck. Clearly these were different from the other solemn stones.

I asked my mother about these child-images, and she told me that they were the graves of little kids whose souls were now in Heaven with Jesus. She smiled, admittedly a bit sadly, as she said it, and the thought seemed to be that even though these precious little tykes were dead, they were actually quite lucky because now they were in Heaven, a much better place than Earth, at least for good little Christians.

But the cost-benefit didn’t seem all that clear to me. And it appeared, furthermore, to be an absolute crapshoot. If the Lord decided “your soul to take,” while you lay asleep, your goose was basically cooked, because it would simply be the will of God, and there was apparently no arguing with that.

The idea plagued me. From the outset in my life, words mattered. I was sensitive to them and when the scary words entered my head, there was no erasing them.

I was at least lucky not to have been subjected to a similarly worded lullaby that some English-speaking children in the world were given to think about at bedtime, if their mothers happened to have a musical bent: If you die before you wake/Do not cry and do not ache/Nothing’s ever yours to keep/So close your eyes and go to sleep. How any even remotely sensitive child was expected to get to sleep after having those almost accursed words sung to them is really hard to say.

As if these lugubrious prayers and lyrics weren’t enough to scare the bejesus out of us, we were also treated to the macabre scenes served up by long-traditional nursery rhymes and children’s verses. I suppose many kids who heard these read to them again and again mainly just liked their iambic bounce and learned them by rote without paying any great attention to the words. But words in my mind always formed immediate and searing images, and the images that many of these traditional verses conjured up weren’t, to say the least, pretty.

For instance: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall/Humpty Dumpty had a great fall/All the King’s Horses and all the King’s men/Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

I was aided in imagining this tragic scene by vintage storybook illustrations. A large top-heavy-egg­­-shaped humanoid, dressed like a boy falls from a high wall and, it seems, shatters, making such a mess of himself that he can’t be mended.

I would come to find out many years later that, although our mothers, and their mothers, and their mother’s mothers would mindlessly read these rhymes to us as if they were truly meant for children—most of them could have done with at least a PG rating—they had, in most cases, originally been clever verses comprising codes for the lower classes that told stories involving those in power, and whose absolutist rule precluded open criticism.

The story of poor Humpty, for instance, dates back to 1648, a time of civil war in England. Humpty was actually not a person, but an extra-powerful cannon that Royalist defenders had mounted on a high tower-like wall next to St. Mary’s Church, above the strategic town of Colchester. It was a vantage point from which royal artillerymen could do some real mischief by firing directly down on Parliamentarian forces seeking to take the town—where, truth be told, the absolutist monarchy no longer was at all popular.

Parliamentarians eventually rolled in all of the firepower they could muster and hammered the wall, particularly its artillery emplacement, with withering cannon and mortar fire, until they finally were able to bring both wall and cannon tumbling down. In the end, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” couldn’t piece that big gun back together again and hoist it back up onto the wall. The town fell to the Parliamentarians, who took the “officers and gentlemen” prisoner, and set the common soldiers free to return to their homes once they had sworn an oath never to take up arms against the Parliament again.

Another rather disturbingly nonsensical rhyme, Ring Around the Rosie, is from just a bit later than Humpty in the seventeenth century, and is even more tetric than it may sound: Ring around the Rosie/A pocketful of posies/“Ashes, Ashes”/We all fall down!

It was less than two decades after the English Civil War that London was gripped for about a year by The Great Plague, otherwise known as bubonic plague. Despite its place of historical significance—it’s hard to find a world history course that doesn’t include it—The Great Plague is estimated to have killed about seventy-five thousand people. In our times of yet another great pandemic, most American politicians would consider “so few” plague fatalities to be a positive trend, considering that COVID has killed more than a million Americans, despite the early discovery of some of the most effective vaccines in history. But in all fairness, the entire population of London at that time was probably not more than four hundred thousand, so seventy-five thousand would have been about eighteen percent of the total.

Anyway, the Ring Around The Rosie verse that we were taught to sing in kindergarten as a cheerful little ditty—performed while standing in a circle, holding hands, turning like a human merry-go-round, and “all falling down” at the end of the last line—was actually all about the bubonic plague. Symptoms of the dread disease included the formation of a bright rosy-red-ringed rash on the skin of the victim. Although the infectious illness—also known as the black plague—was caused by a bacterium prevalent in rats and transmitted to the fleas that bit the rats and then bit people, many Londoners at the time associated the disease with bad odors. They carried flowers and herbs (posies) in their pockets to ward off the plague. And finally, the bodies of the mounting dead (all those who had “fallen down”) were incinerated.

What a delightful little rhyme! Don’t you think?

Another lovely illustration in one of the storybooks my mother read to us when we were small is of “Mistress Mary” the “contrary” little girl with her rake and watering can, tending the flowers in her perfect garden. This one didn’t seem scary at all, but it was indeed enigmatic. Mary, Mary quite contrary/How does your garden grow?/With silver bells and cockle shells/And pretty maids all in a row. The adjective “contrary” made me think of some snooty Little Miss Perfect who was only interested in her impeccable garden and would never think of playing with another child. But the most unfathomable part of that verse was the last line. Who were those “pretty maids” and why were they all in a row? Were they the flowers in Mary’s garden, the blooms of which might look a bit like the pretty faces of young women standing side by side?

Turns out, nothing so innocent. Seems the Mary in the sixteenth-century rhyme was none other than Queen Mary I of England. The eldest daughter and eldest child of King Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, she was passed over for queen in deference to her half-brother Edward VI, Henry’s first and only son (this time with Queen Consort Lady Jane Seymour, whom he married after having his second wife, Anne Boleyn beheaded). Edward was the first British monarch to be brought up a Protestant after his father broke with the Roman Catholic Church, which refused to grant him a divorce from Mary’s mother, Catherine.

The almost inadvertent religious reformation that gave birth to the Church of England—a basically Catholic religion but with the British monarch as its head—was jealously defended and expanded during Edward the Protestant king’s reign, in which he was assisted by a royal regency, since he was only nine when he succeeded Henry to the throne and fifteen when he died, probably of tuberculosis. Fearing that Mary, a staunch Roman Catholic like her mother, might succeed her stepbrother and reverse the Anglican reform, King Edward’s handlers helped him, during his long illness, to devise an exception to direct succession and had him name his cousin, Lady Jane Grey to assume the throne upon his death. But Mary wasn’t having any of this and managed to have the new queen executed when Lady Jane had only been sitting on the throne for nine days.

"Bloody Mary"

Starting with this act and continuing to fight the Protestant reform throughout a sort of English inquisition of her invention, in which Anglicans were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and beheaded, she appropriately gained the moniker “Bloody Mary.”  So the lovely sounding “silver bells and cockle shells” are thought to have represented the instruments of torture used on Protestant captives to try and persuade them to return to the Roman Catholic fold, while those mysterious “maids all in a row” would have been a line of brand-new guillotines used to behead those who remained unconvinced.

Even older than Mistress Mary is the verse contained in the children’s song Baa, Baa, Black Sheep. We sang that tune in kindergarten and first grade, and it seemed to encompass such a sweet and pastoral image: Baa, baa, black sheep/Have you any wool?/Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full!/One for the master, one for the dame/And one for the little boy who lives down the lane.

But there was nothing really sweet originally about this image. It was a satirical reference to the consequences of a cruel tax imposed on the peasants in 1275, under the reign of King Edward I. And it seems too, that the cheery last line that we sang was reformed for later audiences, because the original words to that final line went: And none for the little boy who cries in the lane.

In Medieval England, wool was a major source of commerce and wealth. This was also the time of the Crusades, and Edward I was in dire need of extra revenue to finance his armies, over and above what he was already bleeding from his vassals, and so too, their serfs. The rhyme, then, signifies that with still another tax being applied to the already heavily taxed wool trade, a bag of  wool would go to the king (the master) and his landholding vassals, another to the Church (the dame), and nothing would be leftover for the young shepherds (the little boy who cries in the lane), who actually did the hard work of caring for the flock.

A few of the nursery rhymes we kids in the US recited, however, were actually home grown. For instance: Rock-a-bye, baby/In the 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.

This strangely disturbing verse dates back to the time of the Pilgrims. The arriving immigrants were fascinated by a custom of the Native American women, who, it seems, took advantage of the wind to rock their babies to sleep. They would do this by tying a makeshift cradle between two branches with their crying baby in it, and allow the rocking motion of the breeze to gently lull their child to sleep.

Some of the Pilgrim settlers found this disturbing. What happened, they wondered, if the weight of the cradle and child swinging from a tree was sufficient to snap a branch in two? Didn’t these women see how dangerous it could be?

Hmm, white people…always stressin’!

Another American addition to the nursery rhyme repertoire is, already on first glance, quite obviously politically incorrect: Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater/Had a wife and couldn’t keep her/He put her in a pumpkin shell/ And there he kept her very well.

The meaning seems pretty clear. It is a deadly if iambic warning to young women to not even think about infidelity. Peter’s wife liked a little something on the side, and just look what happened to her! He killed her and hid her body in a giant pumpkin shell. End of problem.

Okay, obviously no women’s lib or MeToo back then.

A much more modern nursery rhyme that is utterly terrifying is the haunting and most famous (infamous?) poem penned by Hugh Mearns (1905-1965), a dark if lilting verse entitled Antigonish. Besides being a poet, Mearns was also a Harvard-educated pedagogy professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The thrust of his research focused on stimulating creativity in children ages three to eight. He joined, rather like a fly on the wall, the conversations of kids in this age group and recorded his findings for later application to his pedagogical studies. 

Those who knew Professor Mearns observed that when he was with children, he tried his best to fade into the background and get them to forget there was an adult in the room. He never asked the kids questions or showed surprise at any of the crazy things they extemporaneously did or said. He merely observed and later typed up what he had seen and heard in his notes.

What Mearns observed in kids that prompted him to write Antigonish is hard to say, but whatever it was, this particular “children’s verse” is singularly chilling:

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away...

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away...

I can remember that in the huge vintage house where we lived on West Auglaize Street, old Wapakoneta’s most traditional and iconic residential street, the downstairs connected to the three bedrooms upstairs solely by means of a windowless, narrow staircase that was only accessible through a dark back corner of the kitchen. My parents slept in the master bedroom downstairs, while my sister, brother and I slept upstairs. I had no fear of that staircase during daylight hours, but when I had to mount its steps alone at night for bed, there was always an instinctive terror that something or someone awful lay waiting for me there in the darkness.

Earlier, in the previous house where we’d lived on South Pine Street from the time I was about five until I was eight, an evening pastime had been listening to radio shows, even though, by this time, we already had TV. One that we listened to was The Shadow, and before the story even started, I was always already chilled by the standing introduction in which a creepy, beyond-the-grave voice would say, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" And then there would be an insane, ominous laugh. It was on that show that I heard a few of the lines from the Mearns poem for the first time. And what stuck in my mind as I would sneak into the back corner of the kitchen and rush as fast as I could up those steep and narrow steps were the words, on the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.

This image combined nicely with the demented axe murderer/strangler/slasher who, my older sister had informed me, might be waiting beneath my bed, just to grab me by the ankles and jerk me under. So the route to bed was always a mad race up the steps and into my room. Once there, I would leap from a safe distance into my bed and cover my head under the blankets to ward off any evil that might still be lurking there.

Which leads me to think that perhaps Antigonish wasn’t meant at all to be a nursery rhyme. Maybe it was simply a compelling and disturbing description of the poet’s own nocturnal delusions, or of the irrational fear that he shared with children, of “things that go bump in the night.”