Review: Nanny Says April 9, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Diana, Lady Avebury (ed) Nanny Says (London: Dobson, 1972)
The Nanny was an institution of upper middle class and aristocratic families in Victorian, Edwardian and inter-war Britain. She was the efficient and often frightening family child carer. She stepped in at a couple of weeks after birth taking over from the harassed mother (who would be allowed to return to balls and social engagements) and the father (who was never home anyway). Nannies were basically the single most important figure in the life of their charges: Beach has previously described the powerful relationship between Churchill and his nanny. And, naturally, the habits taught by Nanny followed the young through their lives. Nanny Says is a very short (no page numbers!) but very entertaining collection of Nanny sayings, the phrases that would be thrown at young children, and then be recalled thirty years later when ‘the Gatling was jammed’ and the dunes were covered in blood. They are wonderful because they are part witty, part inconsequential and many rhyme. They are the relics of a strange encounter. The lower middle classes aping their master’s ways with their masters’ children, but in their own unmistakable demotic. A few samples taken at random from the book: no point in picking they are all good.
Give me a kiss and I’ll give you a windmill.
Curiosity killed the cat/ information made it fat.
I thought I saw a shabby funeral going down the road. [the child boasts]
There someone not a hundred miles from here who’s being rather stupid.
Master Roberts is talking German. [farting]
You are going through a phrase [Love this one]
It is a sin to steal a pin/ Much more to steal a bigger thing.
There’s a dear smiling little kitten sitting on your shoulder today.
We don’t like that girl from Tooting Bec/ She washes her face, and forgets her neck
In short, Nanny was a Tory Struwwelpeter and her wisdom came pre-packaged and bizarre.
The book, retailing for a penny on amazon.co.uk, comes with some lovely line drawings of large imposing women, an introduction by Joyce Grenfell and, perhaps best of all, a final poem by Virginia Graham which as it is not on the internet deserves to be typed up. It was apparently written in the blitz.
Where is my Nanny in her long grey coat and skirt,
And a black straw hat stuck with a pin to her head?
Where has she gone with her creaking Petersham belt,
And the strange, flat, comforting, senseless things she said?
‘Cheer up, chicken, you’ll soon be hatched!’ she would tell me,
Drying my ears in a rough methodical way
And ‘Mark my words, it’ll come out in the wash’,
And ‘It’s just Sir Garnet Wolseley!’ she used to say.
I still don’t know what she meant, but oh, it was nice
To hear that distrait voice so ruggedly tender,
As glimmering starchily she would cross the room
To hang my liberty bodice on the fender.
Would she were here on this perilous bomb-scarred night,
As warm and satisfying as a loaf of bread,
To stand like a round shield between me and the world,
To give me a bath and carry me up to bed.
