The Croquet Player (1936) by H G Wells is set in an alternative universe where croquet and archery have the same exalted sporting status as tennis. It’s a novella of serious frivolity, and seems to be most highly regarded now for its apparent foreshadowing of the Second World War. Given its publication date, after six or more years of literary anticipation of conflict with Nazi Germany, it would be astonishing if anything Wells wrote at this period did not anticipate war. His First World War novel, Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916), and his own first-hand knowledge from that period, supply the detail of what happens when civilians are bombed.
Much more interesting is how he channels H P Lovecraft with Gothic horror. Georgie Frobisher is an international croquet and archery champion, and resides with his maiden aunt, Miss Frobisher. Out of season she and he concern themselves with the Woman’s World Humanity Movement, but as soon as mallets and longbows may be brandished, she drops political agitation and they go on tour. They are at the English seaside resort of Les Noupets, for its fine club croquet lawns, which is near Cainsmarsh, a village name with the highest Lovecraftian implications. The local doctor buttonholes Georgie with a dark and unnerving tale of hauntings, terror, tortured children and open graves.
The delight of this story is the impressive inverse bathos that Wells produces by making the frivolous Georgie, who only lives for his game and is under the severe thumb of his aunt, the serious, unaffected hero character. Wells piles on the Gothic, with a Neanderthal skeleton, a dog beaten to death, murderous threats, endemic panic and a thoroughly objectionable psychiatrist. The reader is thrilled and repelled: Georgie simply listens calmly and then leaves to play a game of croquet for which he has been engaged.
Lifting the surface layers of this intriguing and entertaining story, some interesting elements emerge, not least the wartime predictions, and Wells’ views on the misappropriation of science by the barely educated. I was so happy to stumble upon it.
H G Wells, The Croquet Player (1936), (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 1998, 2003), ISBN 0-905488-89-X.
Existential crisis or what? But according to the Opies, who made the study of the nursery rhyme and playground song an academic discipline in its own right, this is about a 17th-century prostitute. Well! That certainly makes a difference to how I might also think about Little Miss Muffet. The Opies list many theoretical origins for Miss Muffet, but my favourite is that she was one of many parodies (along with ‘Little Mary Easter sat on a tester’, ‘Little Miss Mopsey sat in the shopsey’, ‘Little Polly Flinders’, ‘ Little Poll Parrot’ and ‘Little Jack Horner’) of the cushion dance in which someone had to sit and wait for something. Maybe it was a May Day ritual, or a marriage rite, or a folk custom lost in prehistoric mists. What the Opies don’t say is that these rhymes follow (more or less) the metre of dactylic trimeter or tetrameter, ie a waltz tune. Maybe it was a dance around the sitting person?
The Opies said of their Dictionary ‘we believe we have assembled here almost everything so far known about nursery rhymes together with a considerable amount of material hitherto unpublished’. In their Dictionary they included ‘nonsense jingles, humorous songs, and character rhymes, the more common lullabies, infant amusements, nursery counting-out formulas, baby puzzles and riddles, rhyming alphabets, tongue twisters, nursery prayers, and singing games’. It doesn’t include ‘rhymes of divination, magic spells and fairy tales in verse’, which is perhaps a good thing.
I wonder about ‘the more common lullabies’: I don’t think I ever sang a lullaby to my children in the 1990s, because singing to them in their cots meant to infant minds that it was time for them to get up and dance. How common were lullabies in the 1950s, or earlier? This is perhaps the point, that in 1951 it was felt necessary to record and collate in a scholarly way the lineage of traditional rhymes, whether destined for nursery or schoolroom, because they were dying out. The collected scraps and snippets of ancient poetry are also garlanded with historical context: ‘a knowledge of their past adds to the pleasure of them in the present’. The Opies researched thoroughly in the standard collections, but also advertised for contributions, especially for material ‘never seen in print’, to try to capture the oral tradition that stretched its fingers of memory back to the nineteenth century and beyond. Their research crosses the sea: many of the ‘English’ rhymes are actually American (‘Three little kittens they lost their mittens’) and British rhymes have North American variants.
The Dictionary is a treasure, especially if you’re looking for historical events preserved in folk rhyme. ‘To market, to market, to buy a fat pig’ is from the sixteenth century, as is ‘Ding dong bell, pussy’s in the well’. ‘London Bridge is falling down’ dates from the seventeenth century. ‘Hot cross buns’ is from the eighteenth century. It has apparently been suggested that ‘Dr Foster went to Gloucester’ derives from an incident in the reign of Edward 1, from the thirteenth century. I don’t actually care whether that is true or not true: it’s a wonderful idea that oral traditions preserve the words that people sang for pleasure, and what they sang about, reused and revived periodically.
