The April Baby’s Book of Tunes

List of Illustrations

‘Watched them go off with their Skates’

---

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

‘Watched them go off with their skates’	Frontispiece
‘Don't push so, you awful June’	To face page 7
Little Polly Flinders	15
‘But Flinders’ foots was cold’	17
The Strains of ‘Polly Flinders’	25
Mary, Mary, quite contrary	30
Little Miss Muffet	34
Hush-a-bye, Baby	44
The Tea Party	50
Jack and Jill	54
Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat	56
Curly Locks	60
Sing a Song of Sixpence	63
Where are you going to, my Pretty Maid?	66
‘Nobody asked you, Sir,’ she said	71
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild	74

---

The April Baby’s Book of Tunes
with
The Story of how they came to be Written

Once upon a time there were three little girls called April, May, and June. Their mother thought it simpler to call them after the months they were born in, instead of having to worry over a choice between Jane, or Susan, or Mary, or any of the ordinary girl-names. She had meant to call the eldest one Jane, because it was such a short, tidy little name; but an aunt who was staying with her nearly cried, the bare idea made her so unhappy. You see, the aunt was very fond of Shakespeare, and wanted the baby to be called Ophelia, and there is a great difference between the sound of Ophelia and the sound of Jane; but the mother didn't want to have a baby called Ophelia, and didn't want to argue either, so she settled it by having it christened after the month it was born in, and everybody said how queer.

Once she had begun doing that, of course she had to go on; but luckily the stork didn't bring any more babies after the June one, or I don't know what would have happened. How could you call a baby February, for instance? These babies lived in Germany, and that is why the stork brought them. In England you are dug up out of a parsley-bed, but in Germany you are brought by a stork, who flies through the air holding you in his beak, and you wriggle all the time like a little pink worm, and then he taps at the window of the house you are bound for, and puts you solemnly into the nice warm cushion that is sure to be ready for you, and you are rolled round and round in flannel things, and tied comfortably on to the cushion, and left to get your breath and collect your wits after the quick journey across the sky. That is exactly what happened to April, and May, and June. They often told their mother about it, and said they could remember it quite well.

They were about five, and six, and seven years old in the winter week I am going to tell you about. It was the week before Easter, when it oughtn't to have been winter at all; but strange things happen in the way of weather in those far-away forests where they live, and after having been quite like spring for a long while, it turned suddenly very cold.

At first when it began to snow they were delighted, and got out their sleigh and their snow-boots, and harnessed their mother's big dog to the sleigh, and drove him up and down the paths, only laughing all the louder when he ran them against a tree and pitched them off into the snow. But the next day the snow was so deep that it covered the sleigh right up, and came over their knees, and got inside their stockings at the top, and made them very uncomfortable; so they stayed indoors, and finished the presents they were making for their mother's Easter surprise.

German Easters are very nice things, something like Christmas, only instead of tables covered with presents round the Christmas tree, the presents are hidden out in the garden, in the grass or among the bushes that are generally just turning a faint green. Everybody gives everybody else presents; and then there are eggs of all sorts and sizes, some in sugar with chocolate things inside, and some in chocolate with sugar things inside, and some in china with presents inside, and a great many real eggs, hard-boiled, and dyed in colours that would astonish the hens who laid them, and you eat more of them than is good for you and afterwards are sorry.

April, May, and June knitted mittens for their mother. At Christmas they knitted mittens, and at Easter they knitted mittens, and for her birthday they knitted mittens; so that there was never any need for her to bother about buying mittens. They could all knit very nicely, and their mother used to say a little while before any of these festivals that she hoped Father Christmas, or the Easter hare, or the birthday sprite meant to bring her some mittens that time, for she loved them better than anything else. Then the babies were delighted, because knitting was easy, and it was so convenient that their mother should happen to like just what they liked best to make.

But in two days they had finished the mittens, and still it went on snowing.

Then they had to fall back upon their dolls, for it was snowing as though it never meant to stop. Never had been seen such an Easter. People went about saying, 'Did you ever?' to the people they met, and couldn't get over it at all. The window panes were sheets of ice, for there were I don't know how many degrees of frost, and each night it froze harder than it had done the night before. In the daytime the rooms were full of a wonderful white light from the snow outside, and the fires blazed extra cheerfully, and it was very cosy indoors in their mother's pretty rooms, where flowers blossomed all the year round, no matter what was going on outside, and where it always smelt of violets.

For two days, then, the babies played contentedly enough with their dolls. But dolls are but mortal, and how can you expect a doll you have had given you at Christmas to be anything but mangled by Easter? What they were playing with could hardly be called dolls at all, for although there was a great abundance of arms, and legs, and heads, and dresses, and wigs, and eyes, there was not one single complete doll in all the heap. June went about rattling half a dozen eyes in her pocket as grown-up people rattle their money; and when her mother asked her what made that noise, she pulled out a handful of them in different sizes, and they looked so like real eyes that it quite gave her mother what is known as a turn,—which is a sort of feeling as though you were being suddenly pulled inside out and back again very quickly.

In two more days they had got to the stage in doll-playing in which you begin to chop up parts of the bodies and boil them, and warm bits of the wax and mould it into puddings, and make reckless porridge out of the bran stuffing and the water your face was washed in before dinner,—the stage, that is, which comes last of all, and just before you are put in the corner.

And still it went on snowing.

Their mother, who had been placidly reading all this time, began to be uneasy when she saw with what ardour the cooking in the next room was being carried on. The playroom opened into the library, where she sat this cold weather like Polly Flinders, warming her toes; and she got up every now and then and peeped in, stealing away again softly, half inclined to laugh, and yet disturbed by visions of corners in the near future as she saw the three chopping, and pounding, and stirring, with scarlet cheeks and dishevelled hair and mouths shut tight, and an oddly vindictive look on their faces, as though there was more than mere cooking in what they were doing,—the look almost of those who are paying off old scores at last, and can't do it too thoroughly. And if you want to know what vindictive means, you look at your nurse's face next time she takes you behind a tree in the Park to shake you in comfort, without the least provocation, and when you know you have been an angel.

In another hour all their stock of remains had been used up, and they had had a banquet, which they cut rather short, however, on realising the dulness of only pretending to eat; and then, instead of tidying everything up, and washing the saucepans and plates like good children, they leant disconsolately against the window-sills, staring out into the white world outside through little holes they had scratched in the frost on the panes, and flattened their noses, and felt cross.

'Don't push so, you awful June,' said April, giving June an impatient shove. They often talked English together, though they were German babies, and if it was not quite like the English that little girls in England talk, neither was it, I am sure, any worse than the German would be that English children of the same age might try to talk.

‘Don’t push so, you awful June’

'I doesn't push,' said June blandly: and pushed with all her might.

June was a short, thick baby, and couldn't reach up to the windows as comfortably as the other two; and besides, April had scratched lovely big eye-holes with her nails in the ice on the pane, and June coveted them. Do you know what covet means? It is a dreadful feeling that seizes people when they see somebody else with the things they would like and haven't got, and makes them feel as though they were going to burst. June was sure she would burst if she didn't soon get April's holes, so she pushed and wriggled with all her strength, and when April protested, merely repeated reassuringly 'I doesn't push.'

But April was not to be put off like that, and finding that her legs were being violently dragged away from beneath her, swooped down on June, who would not let her go, and they both rolled over on the floor together, while May sat on her window-sill kicking her heels in great delight, and egged them on with cheers.

Then Séraphine, their French nurse, came in, and threw up her hands aghast at what she saw,—the room all littered with bran and doll's hair, the table covered with the remains of the feast, the sofa strewn with saucepans, and the two babies rolling over and over each other on the floor.

Séraphine had been meek, and soft, and delicate when first she came to be the babies' nurse, but that had all worn off long ago, and she had grown robust in the healthy forest air, and round and rosy on the wholesome country food, and with her roundness and rosiness had come a determination to have her own way and circumvent the babies; and they, after lording it over her during those first few blissful months, had found to their sorrowful surprise that she had unaccountably grown to be a match for them.

On this occasion also she was a match for them. First she threw up her hands and shrilly cried Mon Dieu! Then she ordered them to clear up all the mess they had made; and then, exasperated by the unwilling slowness of their movements, and still more so by the conviction that it was she who would ultimately have to do the clearing up, swept them off, after a moment's impatient watching, into the three corners of the room, kept carefully clear for such emergencies. It was a good thing there was not a fourth baby, for there would have been no corner to put it in, because, though there was a fourth corner in this, as in most rooms, it was occupied by the stove. April pointed this out one day to her mother, who agreed that it was all very conveniently arranged.

Their mother in the next room heard Séraphine's entrance and exclamation of dismay, and then the sudden stillness which she knew from experience meant corners. She got up and looked out the window. It had left off snowing, and the garden was covered up with the loveliest smooth, thick, white coat, and all the trees looked like Christmas trees. It made one long, somehow, to run out and make footmarks everywhere on the spotlessness.

She waited a little while, so as not to interfere with Séraphine's ideas of justice, and then went into the playroom with an appropriately grave face, and called them out of their corners, and gave them a short lecture as mothers have to do when children are not good. She told them, when she had done, that of all things in the world she disliked having to lecture, and she would be so grateful if only they would keep out of corners and save her the trouble of it; upon which there was a sudden outburst of enthusiasm, and a confusion of arms and legs, and a great amount of kissing, and then they made a determined attack on the saucepans and scoured with such goodwill that in ten minutes everything was tidy again, and they could pull on their boots and gaiters and go out and help their mother spoil the beautiful, fascinating snow.

But they sank right in, June up to her ears, May up to her neck, and April up to her shoulders, and it was quite impossible to move. So the mother ordered the sleigh, and had them wrapped up to the eyes in furs, and fur hoods pulled over their foreheads, and took them sleighing along the wintry roads.

Where these babies lived, when you drive in winter you sit in fur bags up to your waist, and the rest of you is so covered up that nothing but your eyes can be seen. If you don't do that you are frost-bitten, which is a very disagreeable thing to be, and may end in your nose crumbling away, and your beauty crumbling away with it. It is no use my telling you how cold the thermometer showed it to be, for children who live in London and go for walks every day in the Park or Kensington Gardens needn't bother much about thermometers, so you wouldn't understand. But where April and her sisters lived, you look anxiously at the thermometer hanging outside your window before you go out, so as to know how many furs to put on, or whether you can venture out at all. Sometimes it is so cold that for days you are shut up in the house, especially if you happen to be a baby. The babies' mother very nearly decided to oil them all over, as the people do who live more or less at the North Pole, so that they should not feel the cold so much; but then she remembered that babies are sent into the world chiefly that mothers may have something to kiss all the time, and how can you kiss oiled babies? She soon found out in the sleigh that this was one of the days when people who are not oiled are better at home, and she turned back and sent April and May in again. June begged so hard to be allowed to stay that she took her a little further, giving in because June was the fattest, and fat babies are never so cold as lean ones. That is why, I suppose, everybody who lives up in those forests where the babies did, are so fat. They eat and drink a great deal all the summer, so that when the long, bitter winter comes they may be nicely protected against the cold, and needn't buy so many furs; and though that sort of figure may not be pretty at a party, it is very convenient in a frost.

But the mother and June soon had to turn back too, for their eyelashes froze tight on to the long fur round their faces and they couldn't open their eyes any more, which made it dreadfully dull. So they went home again, and had to grope their way in, and thaw their eyelashes at the fire; and then the mother sat down and wondered what she could do to help the babies over the long days that had to be got through before it was time to hide the Easter eggs.

The schoolmaster who came every day to teach them was snowed up too in his house, so they had no lessons to keep them busy. Séraphine couldn't teach them, because she didn't know anything herself, which was the best of reasons; all she could do was to sing French songs without any tune in them over and over again till the babies had learnt them, by which time the mother in the next room was almost distracted. They had cooked their dolls, they had no lessons, they couldn't get out and run in the garden,—I don't believe any baby in the world could keep long out of a corner under such conditions, or any mother, knowing its difficulties, be happy.