Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [56]
Overall, Vinnie’s working hypothesis about the differences between British and American game rhymes has been supported. The British texts do tend to be older, in some cases suggesting a medieval or even an Anglo-Saxon origin; they are also more literary. The American rhymes are newer, cruder, less lyrical and poetic.
More complex analysis will come later; she can see already, however, that violence is common in the verses of both countries, something that wouldn’t surprise any trained observer and doesn’t surprise Vinnie, who has never thought of children as particularly sweet or gentle.
Polly on the railway
Picking up stones;
Along came an engine
And broke Polly’s bones.
“Oh,” said Polly,
“That’s not fair.”
“Oh,” said the engine-driver,
“I don’t care.”
How many bones did Polly break?
One, two, three, four . . .
The chant continues, repeats itself; the rope revolves, a vibrating blur in the air, enclosing an ellipsoid of charmed space. Within it a child jumps, her long hair blown out, the gray pleated skirt of her school uniform fanning wide above thin knobby legs in gray wool stockings. Her expression of unselfconscious concentration, skill, and joy is repeated on the face of the girl next in line, who is already bobbing to the scuffed beat of oxfords on damp tarmac. As Vinnie watches, her strongest sensation—far stronger than professional interest or a shiver whenever the sun skids under a cloud—is envy.
Since she is an authority on children’s literature, people assume that Vinnie must love children, and that her own lack of them must be a tragedy. For the sake of public relations, she seldom denies these assumptions outright. But the truth is otherwise. In her private opinion most contemporary children—especially American ones—are competitive, callous, noisy, and shallow, at once jaded and ignorant as a result of overexposure to television, baby-sitters, advertising, and video games. Vinnie wants to be a child, not to have one; she isn’t interested in the parental role, but in an extension or recovery of what for her is the best part of life.
Indifference to actual children is fairly common among experts in Vinnie’s field, and not unknown among authors of juvenile literature. As she has often noted in her lectures, many of the great classic writers had an idyllic boyhood or girlhood that ended far too soon, often traumatically. Carroll, Macdonald, Kipling, Burnett, Nesbit, Grahame, Tolkien—and the list could be extended. The result of such an early history often seems to be a passionate longing, not for children, but for one’s own lost childhood.
As a little girl Vinnie too was unusually happy. Her parents were good-tempered, fond of her, and comfortably circumstanced; her first eleven years were passed in agreeable and varied semirural surroundings. It was no handicap not to be beautiful then, and all children are small. Vinnie was clever, energetic, popular. Though her size prevented her from excelling at most sports, she gained authority through her self-confidence and her good memory for games, rhymes, riddles, stories, and jokes. She loved everything about those years: the hours in the classroom and on the playground; the thrilling exploration of overgrown vacant lots, alleys, woods, and fields; the visits to stores and museums; the picnics and summer trips to the mountains or seaside with her parents. She loved the books—indeed, she still prefers children’s literature to most contemporary