Nursery rhymes, the kind found in the perennial classic Mother Goose, have been with us for generations.
They’re often the first stories read to us by our parents and the first we read to our children and nearly everyone can recite at least one, whether it be Humpty Dumpty or Hickory Dickory Dock.
These rhymes stick with us, but how often do we consider their meaning? We’re told, through illustrations, that Humpty Dumpty was an egg that fell off a wall, but in fact, Humpty Dumpty was a cannon.
Hickory Dickory Dock isn’t really about a clock and a mouse. It instead comes from a counting system shepherds used in northern England and was later adapted as a way for children to decide who was in or out of a game.
Those are just two interesting and fun nuggets that come from the pages of Katherine Govier’s latest book, Half for You and Half for Me: Best-Loved Nursery Rhymes and the Stories Behind Them, with illustrations by Sarah Clement of Vancouver.
“I also thought that Humpty Dumpty was an egg,” said Govier, who splits her time between Canmore and Toronto, “and I guess that was because you couldn’t put him back together again. It was broken.
“But actually, Humpty Dumpty was a cannon. It was a rotund kind of cannon that was set up on a wall during a siege on a town but it fell off the wall. The loyalists were being besieged and all the king’s horses and all the kings men couldn’t put it back up again, that was the incident it memorializes.”
Hickory Dickory Dock, Govier said Monday (May12), is derived from the Celtic language and represents eight, nine and 10.
Like all of the classic nursery rhymes, Hickory Dickory Dock and Humpty Dumpty were passed orally from one generation to the next as moral lessons or historical memories until they were written down in the 17th and 18th centuries, Govier said.
While the written word has certainly preserved these rhymes, allowing us to perpetuate them, they weren’t necessarily meant for the page or the book.
“In some ways, they’re oral history, they are ways of telling stories for people who maybe didn’t write or couldn’t write, ways of keeping alive certain ideas and morals. Some of them are quite moralistic.
“(They were) bits of wisdom and bits of history that the common people – not the intelligentsia, not the intellectuals, not the writers – that the common people wanted to remember and wanted to have remembered,” she said. “And it comes from a different place than written history, a different point of view; less from the people of power and privilege and more from the common folk in the street.”
The title of the book – Half for You and Half for Me – is a reference to the street cry hot cross bun sellers used based on the folk belief that anyone who shared a hot cross bun, which is associated with Easter, Govier said, with his or her enemy would become good friends.
And that is why the cover, one of the 50 illustrations by Clement, shows a cat and a dog, with a leg and a paw around one another, sharing a hot cross bun.
Govier set out to learn more about the meaning behind the rhymes after her mother, who was 95 at the time, presented her with a 100-year-old copy of Mother Goose. It was the same book Govier’s mother read to her and her two sisters from when they were children.
“We looked at this beautiful old Mother Goose and we started talking about them (rhymes), we’re both curious about the meaning of the rhymes. I started reading them over and my mom by this time was quite forgetful and she couldn’t concentrate on things and she couldn’t see very well, but we loved reading the nursery rhymes. It was a reversal. Instead of her reading them to me, I was reading them to her.
“She could remember them. I’d start on one and she could recite the rest of it and we started talking about them, what did they mean, who was Bo Peep, why has this moment of her losing her sheep been enshrined in history?”
Govier doesn’t claim to have done the original research to discover the meaning of the rhymes, she instead delved into the work of experts who have been studying these rhymes; her book came from a deep-rooted love for the rhymes themselves and the connection they represent between her and her mother.
“It was very personal. We remember the nursery rhymes. They come to us; let’s say I’m in Piccadilly, I remember these words, but to revisit them in this way and to really think about them, it impressed upon me the beauty of that time. It really is a wonderful time, with an adult and a child, when they are introducing them to books and the magic of words on a page and all these charming little stories, and scary moments and meeting monsters that will grind your bones, all of that,” she said.
Half for You and Half for Me: Best-Loved Nursery Rhymes and the Stories Behind Them is published by Whitecap Books. It is available for $22.95 at Café Books in Canmore and Willock and Sax Gallery in Banff. Willock and Sax is planning to host a reading and book signing later this summer or early fall. A signing planned for later in spring was postponed.
