Authorgraph No.100: Iona Opie
The first thing you hear when visiting Iona Opie at her home in Hampshire is the honking of ten geese strutting around her large, rambling garden. The world’s leading authority on nursery rhymes, she’s a tall, handsome woman who looks younger than her age. She and her husband, Peter, have been writing about child lore in all its various forms since 1947. Their high reputation for human scholarship, first established with their magisterial The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951), has remained unchallenged ever since.
Peter died in 1982, but Iona still forges on. Her next major work, promised for 1999, will be Games With Things, a survey of all the games children play with different equipment from skipping ropes to marbles. But before that there is My Very First Mother Goose: a selection of 60 traditional rhymes illustrated by the award-winning American artist, Rosemary Wells. The rhymes themselves are taken from the Opies’ collection built up over the years. Nursery rhymes often change in detail from one person’s memory to another, but the versions recorded in the Opies’ books have tended to become those used by other compilers ever since, whether acknowledged or not. Iona can tell if someone has been plundering their work if the punctuation remains the same as their own.
While the Opies have written little themselves for children, they’ve had a huge influence on the many anthologies of nursery rhymes published since 1950. The moment of inspiration for their life-time work is best told by Iona herself. Shortly after their first baby, James, was born in 1944, ‘We were walking along the path beside a nearly ripe field of corn when our future was decided by a ladybird. Idly one of us picked it up, put it on his finger (was it Peter? I don’t remember) and said to it: “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home. Your house is on fire and your children are gone.” The ladybird obeyed, as they always do – and yet it always seems like magic; and we were left wondering about this rhyme we had known since childhood and had never questioned until now. What did it mean? Where did it come from? Who wrote it?’
There followed the beginning of delving into libraries and the building up of their fabulous collection of antique books. Also important in this choice of subject were their more general feelings about modern Britain. As an unlikely but highly efficient sergeant in the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force), Iona heard and agreed with conversations towards the end of the war about the need for change in Britain’s rigid social class structures. Recording and celebrating nursery rhymes – the voice of the common people over the years – fitted well into this desire for a new start. The Mass Observation surveys of the time had made sure that ordinary citizens could at last be heard. It’s not too fanciful to see nursery rhymes as a poetic branch of Mass Observation reaching into the past for the voices of parents entertaining their children centuries ago.
The Opies’ first book for children was The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, first published in 1955 and never out of print since. In keeping with Peter’s fierce spirit of independence, the book arrived at the press as a finished entity down to the last comma. Peter had previously made a small facsimile of the entire volume, showing the order of rhymes on each page, accompanied by illustrations taken from early chap books and toybooks often from their own collection. When no appropriate illustration was available, there were wood engravings by Joan Hassall. Her final little picture shows Iona, Peter and Joan sitting together over one of their many lesser known rhymes:
‘Our bow’s bended,
Our book’s ended,
If you do not like a bit
You may mend it.’
It’s unlikely any reader has ever taken this advice; this is a magical book, a suitable gift for any age.
The next children’s book, also never out of print since first publication in 1963, is The Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes. The Opies made sure that every rhyme in it, other than the 150 or so best-known ones, was either additional to the 800 rhymes previously listed in the Oxford book or else a distinctly different version. Following the interest raised by their work, the couple were now receiving contributions from all over the world. Sometimes colourful individuals sent in their own versions: George Bernard Shaw, for example, and Robert Graves. For however often the Opies made the point, people remained convinced that the particular version of a rhyme they knew from childhood must also be the standard one for everybody else. One reason for printing deliberately different versions in the Puffin collection was to drive home the point previously made by them in their Oxford collection: ‘We have no desire to establish standard texts. Oral tradition recognises no “correct” versions: the only defensible version is how one knows it oneself.’
There followed a number of classic studies more about than for children. These included Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969) and Iona’s own favourite, The Singing Game (1985). Of the songs in this volume she now says, ‘I love some of the wonderful corrupted, loony words in them. They are sometimes quite surreal. They can create pictures in your head of the most alarming nature.’ The next collection with a child audience clearly in mind was Tail Feathers from Mother Goose (1988). Here, some of the best contemporary children’s artists were each given one double-page spread to illustrate some of the unusual versions of nursery rhymes collected by the Opies over the years, together with family rhymes sent in by individuals unable to bear the thought that these might otherwise disappear with the passage of time.
All proceeds of this delightful book went towards the costs of keeping the Opies’ collection of over 20,000 items together in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The nationwide appeal was successful, and the collection with its own catalogue is now safe. But Iona is still surrounded by books, together with an amazing collection of toys, pictures and a large working archive of notes for her next book. I asked her what she most valued in nursery rhymes after all these years.
‘Life. Their vitality. They are like a short drink, perfect for kicking off at the beginning of a day.’ Or as she writes in the introduction to Tail Feathers from Mother Goose, the rhymes ‘can cure moments of ennui and black desperation, or grace moments of exuberance or tranquillity’. This quotation gives a good idea of the direct, limpid quality of Iona’s prose style, also seen to advantage in The People in the Playground (1993). This is a delightful selection from the informal notes she kept while observing over many years children playing in her local primary school. But up till Peter’s death, it was he who did the writing and Iona who got on with the research. In the early days, weighed down by having to look after three children, she barely had time to appreciate the rhymes she was cataloguing, so great was the pressure. As unfunded scholars, the Opies were always dependent upon what they earned from their books. Times were not easy for some years; she recalls that ‘In the spring, when greens are dear, we used to eat nettles from Alton Municipal Park.’
Now she’s on her own with more time. Some of this is given to her geese, bantams and garden; much is still preserved for research. A highly resistant contributor to radio and television, she’s unfailingly generous when it comes to sharing her ideas informally in conversation. So what does she say to the charge that nursery rhymes are too concerned with violence?
‘Violence is part of human nature. Anyhow, comical nursery rhymes often make fun of violence. Laughter is still the best weapon for fighting back.’ Peter also wrote about this topic in the preface to the couple’s equally successful survey, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959). ‘People seemed astonished that we had discovered the “secret world of childhood”. Those who had thankfully forgotten the nastiness of their schooldays were amazed when they were recalled; those who recalled them only too clearly were comforted to learn that other children all over Britain had suffered the same cruel indignities.’ If nursery rhymes provide any sort of counter as well as preparation for the rough side of life to come, this can only be a good thing. For Iona, they are a reflection not a cause in themselves for some of life’s little difficulties of the type sometimes experienced in the playground.
I also asked her whether once nursery rhymes went into print this stopped them developing further.
‘Not really. Because the oral tradition always wins out over print. If a baby is screaming its head off, no mother is going to try to quiet it by reading from a book. Instead she’ll fish around in her memory for some bit or scrap that immediately comes to mind.’ Are there then any modern songs or jingles well enough known to qualify as nursery rhymes if compilers were still looking around for new ones?
‘Whenever we were asked this question, Peter always used to mention a once popular song about a chicken. I always chose Yellow Submarine. But neither seems to be in any anthology for children now.’
Oral traditions are indeed the staple of parent-child communications. But parents who may remember only the first two lines of a nursery rhyme still need reminding how the rest of the verse goes. In 1951 the Opies made sure such reminders would always be available by putting nursery rhymes firmly back on the map with the success of their famous dictionary. Since then more nursery rhyme collections have been published than ever before, the best of them designed and illustrated to new levels of brilliance. This tradition continues with the publication of My Very First Mother Goose. Its tough little characters, cuddly only on the outside, fully meet with Iona’s approval. ‘I loved their wicked look. These are not soppy little children. These are fully-fledged fighting people.’
But it’s time now for other things. The deceptively gentle-voiced and mild-mannered modern Mother Goose and custodian-in-chief of children’s most ancient cultures goes off into her garden. There she is surrounded by hissing, honking geese waiting to be fed, behaving just as they would have done hundreds of years ago. For Iona, children, too, have largely remained the same over the centuries. The nursery rhymes collected so patiently are testimony to how much we all still have in common with a past she and Peter worked so hard to rescue and then make secure.
Photographs by Richard Mewton.
Details of books mentioned:
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, Oxford, 0 19 869111 4, £27.50
My Very First Mother Goose, Walker, 0 7445 4400 9, £12.99
The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Oxford, 0 19 869112 2, £14.95
The Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes, Puffin, 0 14 030200 X, £4.99 pbk
Children’s Games in Street and Playground, The Singing Game, Tail Feathers from Mother Goose, The People in the Playground, and The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren are now, sadly, all out of print.
