Anserine Reform

Three kind mice

See how they run.

They all ran after the farmer's wife.

She cut them some cheese with a carving knife.

Did ever you see such a thing in your life

As three kind mice?

The lucky little mice are brain children of Geoffrey Hall, a bustling Manchester textile manufacturer who decided a year ago that what the world needed was a bowdlerized version of Mother Goose. Last week 10,000 copies of New Nursery Rhymes for Old were selling in England like Christmas pies, at sixpence (7-c-) a copy.

Manufacturer Hall got his idea a year ago when he read a letter in the London News Chronicle by a father who reported that Mother Goose was playing hob with the children. His own five-year-old daughter, he reported indignantly, had come home in tears after hearing about Mother Goose's three blind mice who had run afoul of the farmer's wife, had their tails cut off by a carving knife. Geoffrey Hall decided forthwith to turn out some nicer rhymes.

If little girls follow Hall's New Nursery Rhymes for Old version they will no longer sing that little boys are made of "frogs and snails and puppy-dogs' tails." According to Hall:

Strength and line, and all that's fine, That's what little boys are made of, made of.

Another verse fits in with current government propaganda for more factory production, and the worker in the rhyme finds that his pay stays the same under the Socialists' present frozen-wage policy, as in the old version:

Seesaw, Margery Daw Jacky shall have a new master. He shall have now a penny a day Because he can work so much faster.

Mrs. Hubbard's dog gets his welfare-state ration:

Old Mother Hubbard

Went to the cupboard

To get her wee dog a bone.

When she got there

She found plenty to spare

And so the dear dog had one.

And then Humpty-Dumpty makes out all right, with the help of the National Health Service Act:

All the king's horses and all the king's

men Soon picked up Humpty-Dumpty again.

Surveying the success of his new book, Author Hall made it clear that in turning it out he hoped he was working for a happier future. Said he: "I don't like children very much, you know. I really hate the nasty little brutes. But I've got to live with them when they grow up."

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