The Day Gone By Read Online Free PDF Page B

gnat-like voice, once remarked: “I used to be reckoned a good singer before these here
tunes
came in.” The
tunes
he spoke of with such scorn had come in with a vengeance, and it seemed that his kind of songs, once so much admired, would be swept away by the flood of commercial popular music.’)
    I remember, once, being convalescent in bed and my mother coming back from the town in high feather. We had been talking of getting a book of songs, chiefly for the words, for my mother couldn’t read music: either she knew a tune or she didn’t. ‘Dicky, I’ve
got
a book, and it’s got “Clementine” and “John Peel” and “Polly Wolly Doodle” and all those!’ I think we started in right away. ‘Polly Wolly Doodle’, of course, was also a mystery to me. Later, I used to think it must be about a runaway slave. Now, I think it’s about a Confederate deserter in the Civil War.
    My mother used to tell me, too, about Violet Lorraine in
The Bing Boys,
and sing ‘If you were the only girl in the world’. And of course there was ‘All the nice girls love a sailor’ and ‘Tipperary’ and many more.
    I think that if you want a child to grow up to love music, singing to it is important. The thing was, my mother enjoyed the singing as much as I did, and
I was the only person she could do it with.
Otherwise she would have been self-conscious. I don’t know why, but somehow my mother couldn’t have sung with my brother on the piano. She had to be unaccompanied and uncriticized.
    She read to me, too. Beatrix Potter, of course. And Pooh. This was the heyday of A. A. Milne - 1924 to 1928. Everyone read
When We Were Very Young
and Pooh: everyone quoted them. Everyone knew that Christopher Robin went down with Alice, and that he said his prayers. What do I think of it now? I think a lot of the light verse is pleasant for a child, but needs to be mixed up with better stuff. As for the stories, I think them too trivial, but they are redeemed by the marvellous characters. Characters are the essence of fiction. This is the limitation of folk tales, of course: marvellous stories and no characters. The prince is a prince and the dragon is a dragon like other dragons. ‘Pooh’ will survive on the characters all right, no danger. But Beatrix Potter will survive on story, style and characters. She reads much better than Pooh once you’re grown-up and, as C.S. Lewis said, ‘A book that’s not worth reading when you’re sixty is not worth reading when you’re six.’ I wouldn’t say Pooh is not worth reading, but I do think there’s a detectable condescension and self-conscious ‘cuteness’ about it.
    My mother also read me poetry. Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Child’s Garden of Verses,
and ‘Young Lochinvar’ and ‘John Gilpin’ and ‘The Pied Piper’ and ‘Up the Airy Mountain’ and pretty well everything else that a child can take in. I used to shiver at ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, and indeed I’d think twice, myself, before letting it loose on a small child. The great virtue of Stevenson, as I see it now, is that it’s poetry for poetry’s sake - not poetry telling stories. You can start a child on pure poetry with Stevenson.
    As I got older, my father used to read to me, too. He wouldn’t have read Beatrix Potter - and certainly not Pooh - but he would read R.M. Ballantyne -
The Coral Island, The Gorilla Hunters,
etc. - and
Treasure Island
and
Kidnapped
; and even the ‘Dimsie’ stones of Dorita Fairlie Bruce. Above all, we read
Dr Dolittle.
The Dr Dolittle books were coming out new at this time, 1922 to 1932. (Hugh Lofting evidently wrote at great speed.) The shortcomings of the Dolittle books are easy enough for an adult to pin down. The animals, in their mentalities, are really just human beings in a way in which the animals in