The ghastly truth behind baby’s favourite rhymes

You realise that a Fiat Punto is not a suitably sized car for a couple with a young child. You realise that life is just an endless succession of buckles and straps and togs. But mainly buckles.

Everything has buckles. And you realise that nursery rhymes – the pleasant little ditties that your own mummy and daddy sang to you at night or when you just needed cheering up – are some of the most morbid and fantastically violent songs ever penned.

And you wonder how stupid you must have been back then to fail to grasp the reality of the rhyming horror stories spewing out of your parents’ mouths. And you wonder why, 32 years on, you are inflicting the same misery on your own young one.

Take Humpty Dumpty, for example, who ended up scrambled at the bottom of a wall. Or the three blind mind. Not only were they visually impaired, which seems such an unnecessary element to the story, but they had their tails hacked off by a knife-wielding farmer’s wife.

And whoever left rockabye baby on the tree top probably needs a visit from Social Services.

I’ve had a good look into this and it seems almost every popular children’s song or nursery rhyme is mired in either unnecessary acts of violence, calamity or terrible misfortune or is just outright odd. Take, for example, the sorry tale of Jack and Jill.

‘Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.’

This seems unnecessarily tragic for Jack, but, sadly, is standard nursery rhyme fare.

But then it just goes plain weird in the seldom sung second verse:

‘Up Jack got and home did trot as fast as he could caper, to old Dame Dob who patched his nob with vinegar and brown paper’.

That’s enough to make any man wince, and I think most of us would conclude that it was a bad day all round for Jack.

But it gets worse in verse three, when Jill’s mother enters the scene and attacks her own daughter for laughing a poor old Jack’s misfortune.

Tragic for all concerned.

Or consider this which, as it happens, is a favourite in the Heath household: ‘The big ship sails on the ally-ally-oh, the ally-ally-oh, the ally-ally-oh. Oh, the big ship sails on the ally-ally-oh on the last day of September.’

(All seems fairly positive so far)

‘The captain said it will never, never do, never, never do, never, never do. The captain said it will never, never do on the last day of September.’

(Ah yes, here we go. Anyone care to guess what happens next?)

‘The ship sank to the bottom of the sea, the bottom of the sea, the bottom of the sea. The ship sank to the bottom of the sea on the last day of September.’

Of course it did. Ship sinks. Everyone probably dies. Not ‘the ship sailed across the Atlantic without incident in calm seas and the worst that happened was that the guests had to sit through a Jane McDonald concert’.

No, none of that, just more unrelenting tragedy and misery.

And what’s this all doing to our little ones brains? In reality probably nothing, as most of us have progressed into adulthood without feeling the need to push someone down a hill or hack the tail off a small rodent.

But nine years ago the sheer level of aggression or calamity in these songs was revealed by a team from the Bristol Royal Hospital for Children who found that nursery rhymes expose children to far more violent incidents than evening television programmes.

After gathering evidence from TV regulator Ofcom, the team found that there was an average of five violent scenes per hour of viewing evening television programmes – compared to 52 per hour when listening to back-to-back nursery rhymes.

The only saving grace for nursery rhymes, the study found, was that they rarely spelled out the end result of the violence or tragic incident, leaving children to draw their own conclusions, which were often less tragic than the likely outcome would have been in reality.

And in many cases it is only later in life, when you are older and more cynical, that you fully understand the meaning behind those little rhymes.

The researchers admitted that their study was not entirely serious but said it did make the point that blaming television for increasing levels of violence was just too simplistic.

And so these songs are strangely violent, but that’s only half of the problem. The second, more annoying element to nursery rhymes is that they a) are absolutely impossible to get out of your head and b) sing themselves.

You find that you sing them, or hum them or sometimes sing and then hum them all of the time, whether baby is with you or not. And regardless of whether you actually know you are doing it.

Two weeks ago while buying an emergency bottle of pinot noir at Waitrose I gained the attention of both the checkout operator and the elderly woman in front of me by humming The Big Ship Sails. I was not with baby at this point. I was a 32 year old man, alone, a bottle of wine in hand, humming a nursery rhyme.

They both looked at me with sympathetic eyes. They either understood my embarrassment, or, after all their years, had just realised the terrible fate of those on board.

Richard Heath