“If you must,” muttered Bertie.
“Very well,” said Irene. “Here we go: Bake a pudding, bake a pie,
Send it up to Lord Mackay,
Lord Mackay’s not at home,
Send it to the man o’ the moon.
The man o’ the moon’s making shoes,
Tippence a pair,
Eery, ary, biscuit, Mary,
Pim, pam, pot.”
Bertie looked at his mother. Then he looked away again. In his astonishment, he had almost trodden on a line. He would have to be more careful in future.
“So,” said Irene jauntily. “Do you know anything like that?”
Bertie stopped and looked up at his mother. “I know some rhymes, Mummy. Is that what you want to know?”
“Yes,” said Irene. “You tell them to me, Bertie, and I’ll tell you if I knew them when I was a little girl. A lot of these things are very old, you know.”
“Postie, postie, number nine,” said Bertie suddenly. “Tore his breeks on a railway line!”
“Well!” exclaimed Irene. “Poor postie! I don’t believe I know that one, Bertie. How interesting!”
“Leerie, leerie, licht the lamps,” continued Bertie. “Lang legs and crookit shanks.”
“My goodness!” said Irene. “That’s remarkable. I suspect that’s a very old one. The leerie was the lamplighter, Bertie. We don’t have lamplighters any more, and yet there you are still 60
using that rhyme in the playground. Isn’t that interesting, Bertie?
It shows the persistence of these things.”
Bertie nodded. “Here’s another one, Mummy,” he said.
“There was an old man called Michael Finigin He grew whiskers on his chinigin
The wind came up and blew them inigin Poor old Michael Finigin, begin igin.”
Irene clapped her hands in delight. “Oh yes, Bertie! I remember that. And there’s more!
There was an old man called Michael Finigin Climbed a tree and hurt his shin igin Tore off several yards of skin igin
Poor old Michael Finigin, begin igin.”
Bertie frowned. “Poor Michael Finigin,” he said. “Nothing went right for him, did it, Mummy?”
“No,” said Irene. “A lot of these things are very cruel, Bertie?
People laugh at cruelty, don’t they? We think that we don’t, but we do. Just listen to the jokes that people tell one another.
They’re all about misfortune of one sort or another. And people seem to find misfortune funny.”
“And it wasn’t funny for Michael Finigin,” observed Bertie.
“No,” said Irene. “There are lots of people for whom it’s not funny. Not funny at all.”
They had now reached the end of London Street and were not far from the East New Town Nursery School, where Bertie had once been enrolled. Irene had said nothing about the nursery school on this trip, hoping that Bertie had forgotten all about the trauma of his earlier suspension. But she noticed now that he was looking nervously in the direction of the school, and she feared that painful memories were rising in his mind.
“You used to go to nursery school there, Bertie,” she said. “A long time ago. But we don’t have to think about that any more.
We’ve moved on.”
Bertie looked down the road that led to the nursery school.
He had been happy there, and he could never understand why they had suspended him. That woman, Miss MacFadzean, had encouraged them to express themselves, and that was all he had
been doing. It was really rather unfair. He looked at his mother, and reached for her hand. Poor Mummy! he thought. She has such strange ideas in her head, but she really means well, in a funny sort of way. And here she was getting excited about a few peculiar old rhymes that he had seen in Iona and Peter Opie’s book
There was so much in it. It was a pity all of that had been forgotten – such a pity! Perhaps he would try to teach some of them to Olive, and she could pass them on to the other girls.
There was no point trying to teach Tofu any folklore – no point at all.
