READER TRIP TO AMSTERDAM AND HAARLEM
Page, in Schoolgirl Jen at the Abbey (1950). On page 18 she is heard complaining about her current treatment at school. ‘ “Miss Jaikes, she calls me Vinny. The boys call me Lav. I hates it.” And Lavinia flushed resentfully.’ He also enjoyed Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s 1937 story Dimsie Intervenes, with the girls’ headmistress at one point roundly declaring, ‘My dear, I am never off duty except when I’m in bed – and not always then.’ Were these minor literary transgressions always accidental? Could there sometimes have been darker, unconscious forces at work, pushing the pen or the typewriter along ways authors at least on the surface had no wish to go? We shall never know.
My 1960 comprehensive school pupils, already with their own ribald vocabulary, were quick to seize on anything that hinted at the otherwise unacceptable. Since then, children have been increasingly showered by obscenities either on television comedy shows or else at home. In print they are no longer sheltered from the ‘bad language’ that finally broke through with the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Instead, their reading matter is steadily returning to the earthy humour found in Tommy
Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, the first ever British children’s book. Published in 1744, this included the following rhyme, dropped from all future anthologies: ‘Piss a bed Piss a bed, Barley Butt Your bum is so heavy You can’t get up.’ Today, even picture books rival each other in trying to get laughs from previously taboo subjects like poo, wee, farts, belches, bogeys, bums and willies. The children’s author Josephine Pullein-- Thompson in Fair Girls and Grey Horses (1996), a joint autobiography written with her sisters, recalls writing her first novel while still a pre-war child. In all innocence she called her hero Edwin Pisspot, a name she had previously made sure was absent from her local telephone directory and which could not therefore, she hoped, lay her open to a libel suit. Her parents gently suggested another name might be more appropriate. A character called Edwin Pisspot would now pass without notice in a new book for children.
Inadvertent double entendres and the laughter they caused once spotted could only flourish when verbal taboos were more numerous and therefore more at risk of being unintentionally flouted, either via the odd literary accident or else simply through changes of meaning brought on by the passage of time. But perhaps artificial double entendres are now the future, given today’s greater tolerance of what goes into print for any age. Do You Want to Play
with My Balls? (2015), an American publication written by the Cifaldi brothers, deliberately uses its ambiguous title for comic effect. Intended for adults but written as if for children, every page is packed with contrived double entendres. Some think it funny; others find it repellent and have objected to its presence in bookshops. I wonder how it would fare over here?
Only a few brave titles continued to cling on to the once innocent meaning of the word pussy