It was a collection of rhymes, incantations, ruderies, counting-out rhymes and children's songs, which would generally be called "Nursery Rhymes", although emanating more probably from the street and the playground than from the "nursery". "I saw Esau" is one of the best known, of which naturally several versions exist.

The authors of this little book are husband and wife: Iona and Peter Opie. They have since extended their labours and researches, and have published two new collections, of which one, "The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes", is the indispensable referencework for anyone interested in the subject.

But the Opies brought out a further book : "The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren". I could not recommend it highly enough to anyone wanting to learn English, or to perfect their knowledge of I.

In another collection "Fifty Nursery Rhymes", published in Pris, Madame Dorothy Bussy recommended the study of these poems one wants to know English, and with good reason. I remember the time, after staying for a period in England, when I was perfectly capable of sustaining a long philosophical discussion in English with Bertrand Russell, and discussed literature and poetry with Rosamund Lehmann and Stephen Spender, but the next morning I couldn't understand a word that was said to me by my cleaning-woman. I've never felt so humiliated. If you want to learn a language don't begin with literature and grammar, but get really to grips with it - that is, from below, through the speech of the people, or far better still, through the language of children.

In "The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren" may be discovered the rhythm, the music of English, the meaning. echoes and resonances of words, as English children discover them, with the naive wonder that they feel each time they meet a double meaning, a homonym or homophone, a rhyme, an assonance or an alliteration, a verbal trap or a conundrum.

Of course this isn't the only interest of the book. The aspect which I most want to stress is something quite different. No book has ever convinced me more, that despite the superficial differences which separate us, despite the multiplicity of human characteristics, we are born, in whatever country, with more similarities than we suspect. Our national differences are very much more acquired characteristics than fundamental differences - differences acquired in growing up, in becoming adults, but veneered onto identical timber. On almost every page of this book, I have discovered parallels with the lore and language of French Schoolchildren.

The Opies begin by underlining the continuity of child-lore and its uniformity in different regions where, despite variants, one finds the same ideas, the same usages. Few new creations - children are traditionalists without knowing it. What they believe to be new, or claim to have made up themselves, proves to have existed since the time of Shakespeare or earlier. Several rhymes which I knew in my childhood in France or have since collected from the lips of French children were already to be found in a curious little collection of Norman traditions entitled "La Friquassée Crotestillonnée", dating from the 15th.century.

Always, when there is a recent creation which it is possible to date, when for example children parody or vary a popular song, a success from stage or cinema with a known source, one is struck by the prodigious speed of its transmission. In less than a week, the same parody is current in many places widely separated, at either end of the country, and at the four cardinal points. It happens as if there were a secret telegraph, a mysterious underground radio. One suddenly has the feeling that, in the bosom of our society the world of the children is a foreign nation with its own laws, and organs of communication different from ours.

I have myself confirmed not only this rapidity of transmission in France, but its extent. I have heard French children repeat a deformed version of an English rhyme of which they evidently didn't understand a word, having picked it up phonetically. There is an old and widely known rhyme beginning:

In this current version, the word 'nigger' reveals that it is Anglo-American. French children say:

This is a recent phonetic corruption, since earlier English versions don't have the word 'nigger'. But there is also a French- Canadian version. And in Germany:

In Austria:

There is:
A bug and a flea
Went out to sea

Animals naturally have a great part to play, and among them, the Elephant particularly interests children. In France, we have the rhyme "Un éléphant, un corbillard, un éléphant, Rran"

The pursuit of Brunius' final question is undoubtedly more fruitful than finding the answer would be. But in the years since he wrote in 1959, other questions have arisen. The significant factor in the poetic currency of children he discusses is that it was all picked up, and used, in their spare time, when schoolroom conditioning was not taking place. Since then, there has been a systematic invasion of this area of life by marketeers, by 'liberal' political interests, and above all by protagonists of Pop culture and television - from which sources most of the children's sparetime values now derive. These values are formulated deliberately for them, and are no longer evolved from their own play experience of the world and of each other. The material (identical throughout the country) fed to children is as much a part of their conditioning for consumerism as schoolteaching is for obedience. But it is more dangerous, not less so. First of all, it leads in the end to the same thing - Obedience, but whereas schools at least use different books, different standards, different dialects and traditions having at least some concordance with the different regions, television and Pop culture have a standardizing (i. e. stultifying) effect on the liveliness of the individual imagination, and the development of inter-relationship with immediate environment. In addition, where Authority is easily recognized in the schoolroom for what it is, and is pilloried in games, rhymes and comics, in Pop culture and TV it is most adeptly camouflaged beneath an ostensible appeal to the Pleasure Principle (actually, to cupidity and the safety of uniformity), rather than to rectitude and ambition, so that children do not see the enemy, and consequently develop little capacity to defend their autonomy and liberty of imagination.

The takeover of leisure by the manipulators is already co-existent with school-age; already a number of highly suspect social agencies, of which Women's Lib is one, are pressing to begin the process even before the child can speak, demanding in the name of 'freedom' that the Government provide crèches for all, and clamouring for pre-school playgroups to be officially provided.

Childish scorn of adult values is now canalized into channels devised by adults with axes to grind. Such scorn is seldom "cheeky" these days - an insouciant reminder to grown-ups that the child, too, is an independent being - but more often takes the form of 'protest' on behalf of the child as part of a sub-culture, rather than for himself as individual. The values, desires, and limits of that sub-culture are evolved not by its members, but by the adult world in its most rapacious and negative aspect.

Either there is some substance in these suggestions, or there isn't. If there isn't, then the proper attitude is the silent acceptance everywhere manifest. But if there is substance in them, then there is a much greater danger to the freedom of human mind and desire than in any of the much-trumpeted political issues; there is very little time to cope with it; and even less experience of how to prevent it.

Our self-confessed 'revolutionaries' are in the same position as the children - they are able to react to obvious political oppression, but not used to facing something which is new in the world - an oppression where the weapon is the Pleasure Principle wielded with the full assent and backing of established authority.

By the time the mass of to-day's children are conditioned and grown up, who will there be left with the capability to stand for, or even conceive of, Man as an individual, with freedom of choice, and unique being ? The generation which is carrying out the surgery is also the last which can put a stop to it - can we be quite confident that the erstwhile extraordinary resilience of the child can continue to withstand methods which it has never previously been called upon to meet ? At least let us try to find out, so that the race will not be disembrained by our default.