‘Umm ... pity ... damn pity. Sat on a wall.’ Those, said my friend Barney definitively, were the exact words uttered way back in the mists of time in jolly old England. “It may even have been a misty day, given what happened to the poor bloke. England and mist, in any case, no big stretch in imagination needed. Given half a chance they wrap themselves round each other like long lost lovers. Stories shrouded in the mists of time…what else can they have but a sense of ‘mist-ery’, eh, Kevin?”
I have to agree, for numerous tales told to me in my childhood have, with successive retelling over the years, morphed into entirely different stories. For example, Little Miss Muffet. A pretty little maiden one would assume, sitting on a tuffet eating a bowl of yoghurt (quaintly called curds & whey back in the day.)
Now, what is a tuffet? one might ask ... Those of us who posed this question decades ago to the kindergarten teacher got shown the picture of Miss Muffet sitting atop a mushroom (or a toadstool). Cue scene two: An evil looking spider — A tarantula, perhaps? A funnel web? A red back? — creeps up. Miss Muffet, spoonful of yoghurt halfway to lips, detects a furtive movement in her peripheral vision, hops off the tuffet and flees. The end. My earliest introduction to flash fiction. Over in a flash! Today, the same story has greater significance and even looks different. Little Miss Muffet has a moustache. Little Miss Muffet is Uncle Brian! Little Miss Muffet has arachnophobia. And a tuffet I have since learned is really a tuft of anything, a clump of something, maybe a footstool or a low seat.
And so back to Barney, who to fill the idle hours of retirement is pondering the realities — the real stories — that may lie at the heart of some nursery rhymes. The one he is currently contemplating, he informs me, “was once thought to be a riddle!”
People got asked these four rhyming lines — perhaps at parties — where a guessing game ensued to try and figure out the answer. The solution of course was ‘anthropomorphic egg’, but few guessed it correctly back then.
“It’s a bit like the riddle, ‘House full, room full, cannot catch a spoonful,’” says Barney, and before giving me a chance to guess, supplies the answer, “Simple, Kev. It’s smoke!”
Anyway, in later years, Barney informs me, this same nursery rhyme — this quatrain — was thought to allude to a Royalist cannon used in a siege in 1648!
“Which might explain the lines ‘All the King’s horses and all the King’s men!’” stresses Barney, “but that’s not the true story, apparently.”
“Another version exists?”
“Course, Kev, a more believable one too.”
And so, back to the beginning, ‘Umm, pity. Damn pity. Sat on a wall!’
First, says Barney enthusiastically, you have to hear in your head the accent — Yorkshire, maybe — for this yarn has its origins in those parts. Once you’ve got that sound-tracked, picture this middle-aged chap, bald as an egg, devotee of the local tavern, staggering homeward one misty evening with great difficulty to a nagging wife. He passes a low wall and in high spirits decides to jump up and sit on it, take a breather; let the mist clear his head. Dispossessed of a sense of balance he tumbles backwards. “That’s really all there is to it, Kev. Just a bloke, totally inebriated, falling off a raised parapet, explaining the incident sheepishly to his wife (‘Umm, pity. Damn pity. Had a great fall.’)
Mrs Dumpty, out of a sense of reflex, whacks him with a saucepan and for good measure to show she’s Queen of the House, utters the next two lines about the King’s horses.
“It’s really dialogue for two, is Humpty Dumpty, Kev.”
Like most journalists, Barney says he’s guarding his sources jealously. Next up? Goldilocks & the Three Bears. Barney wants to ascertain when the ‘a’ in bears morphed, in Australia, to ‘e’!
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.