Pater’s Bathe
A charming children’s rhyme that is also a test of the clearest speaker’s diction.
1895
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Sparrows and starlings having bath-time fun.
© Peter Trimming, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 generic.
Sparrows and starlings splashing about in a bird bath, though there looks to be a little tension brewing. Parry, who was Welsh, though born in London, set his story in Ireland, in a house beside the sea. Pater (father), Mother and their children Olga, Molly, Kate and three-year-old Tom were all preparing for Christmas Day, but the children were not coping well with the excitement. In fact, they were exhibiting the symptoms of katawampus, which Parry explains is a temper-tantrum only much worse — the word itself suggests a ‘portmanteau’ of caterwaul and rumpus. At any rate, during his bathe Pater had the distinct impression that some goblins had given him a little bottle with the cure for katawampus. “He returned home to dinner, very puzzled indeed, intending to consult Mother, as he always did when things bothered him.”
Introduction
Sir Edward Abbott Parry had recently been appointed one of her majesty Queen Victoria’s judges when he published Katawampus (1895), a book of tales and rhymes for young children. It all began, it seems, when Pater (Latin for father), in despair over his fractious children, took a Christmas Day dip in the sea... but before telling that extraordinary story, Pater gave these little verses from his ‘book of rhymes’.
YOU can take a tub with a rub and a scrub in a two-foot tank of tin,*
You can stand and look at the whirling brook and think about jumping in,
You can chatter and shake in the cold black lake, but the kind of bath for me,
Is to take a dip from the side of a ship, in the trough of the rolling sea.
You may lie and dream in the bed of a stream when an August day is dawning,
Or believe ’tis nice to break the ice on your tub of a winter morning,
You may sit and shiver beside the river, but the kind of bath for me
Is to take a dip from the side of a ship, in the trough of the rolling sea.
From ‘Katawampus’ (1925) by Sir Edward Abbott Parry (1863-1943).
* Fans of tongue-twisters will recognise the rhythm of ‘How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”. Fans of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings will have been put in mind of Pippin singing Bilbo’s ‘favourite bath-song’, which is strikingly similar.
