It’s been a bit chilly in the bower lately, so this musing is rather short! I was thinking about my early school days, and, unbidden, a verse popped into my head:
May brings flocks of pretty lambs
Skipping by their fleecy dams.
In 1954, our teacher, Miss Dodgson, at the Cowley Road infants school in Brixton, taught us the twelve two-line verses that make up this poem, getting us to copy them into an exercise book in our best pencilled printing, with an illustration for each month. Much later I found out that Sara Coleridge, daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, composed the verses in the nineteenth century.
Whenever we learnt a new verse we would carefully draw the picture with our coloured pencils on a small piece of ‘sugar paper’, and then give it to our teacher who would take them all home with her to stick in our books. (Maybe they didn’t have the right kind of glue at school! If I remember correctly, the school’s glue came in a jar with a white wax seal. It was called ‘Pollywog’, smelt like marzipan and tasted quite nice……….) One terrible day, she stuck the wrong picture in my book. Sadly, the boy who had drawn it liked my picture best so he said that it was his. I still have the book – and still feel cross when I look at the September page!
It’s odd how facts and rhymes we learn when we are young tend to stick with us throughout our lives, whereas those we try to learn later seem to need ‘topping up’ regularly to ensure we don’t forget them. Maybe it’s just me! I had a book when I was I was three, one of the Little Golden Books series, which contained a poem about a wren. Even now I can say that poem with no hesitation, yet although I check the weather daily I still have to look up it up in Fahrenheit, as I just can’t relate to Celsius. I keep trying to teach myself that 21C is about 70 degrees, and 23C is about 75 degrees, but it won’t stick in my brain.
Talking of temperatures brings me back to the thought of how chilly it is for May. May is my birthday month, it has always been a warm flower-filled time of year – but this year I know that we won’t be partying in the bower. More than likely we’ll be gathered round a fire, drinking hot soup and discussing the weather!
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