Rhyme and Reason

When I decided to add "All Around The Mulberry Bush " to the last post, my point was simple; I just wanted to observe how our council goes round and round in circles.. I had three lines of the rhyme in my head, first, middle and last. I knew there were four but I had no recollection of the one missing until I googled it.

I probably learned the jingle when I was three or four years old....the way most little people learn, by hearing it repeated in play. I remember it as running in a circle song.

Just about every game we played had songs attached. Songs for skipping rope. for bouncing balls for playing beds (hop-scotch) with a stone peever and circle games

" On the mountain stands a lady, who she is I do not know'"

"Gypsy.Gypsy lives in a tent. can't afford to pay her rent."

"Tipper-ripper-rapper on my shoulder"

An anthology of Ayrshire Children's Songs has been compiled. They had never been in print before.They were simply handed down from generation to generation.

In my early childhood, in my home, we had neither radio, television nor electricity. We played outside in the yard of the building.. If it rained, we played cards or guessing games in the entry. There was little room for play in our homes and certainly not with friends. In the short while around the little fire before bed-time, we played the same guessing games, sang songs, told ghost stories in the gas-light and jokes that only children could find funny.

The entire street was a single facade and two storeys high. Buildings were different.Ours had eight ,two room "apartments". Mr.and Mrs. Bissett a childless couple lived in one unit Mr and Mrs. Loughlin in another with one child Katherine. All the rest had five to eight kids in the family. So every building had thirty and more youngsters of all ages.

Games had a season. It wasn't written anywhere. They just happened in succession.

I read the Mulberry Bush rhyme with surprise yesterday. Then I realised it was one of those medieval rhymes which did not start out as a children's song.

In the time before people could read, before print or newspapers or reporters , wandering minstrels went from town to town bringing news to the people. But the story could not be openly and freely told.

People were not free .They were serfs or slaves in modern parlance. They had no rights, no elections. They could neither read nor write. The wandering minstrel was to-day's equivalent of a reporter, slyly informing people and commenting on events of the day or months before, in a way that kept themselves out of trouble with the powers-that-be.

Who knows what was the event all those hundreds of years ago that prompted the Minstrel to sing ;

All around the mulberry bush
The monkey chased the weasel
The monkey thought t'was all in fun
Pop goes the weasel !

Nowadays we can read and we can write. We have elections . We have Blogs. No longer does a single individual or conglomerate get to decide what we should know and keep from us what they think might rock their boat.

But for all the change, we still find the same blighters and harridans in power who don't much care for the idea.

Tough!