To understand the past, you need to inhabit it for a while

The first poem I ever heard was ‘Eenie, meenie, minie moe, catch a tiger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go’, etc. I found it mystifying. How would one catch a tiger by its toe? And do tigers ‘holler’? ‘There is something about this poem they’re not telling me,’ I thought, full of worry, my nappy beginning to chafe. This was last week, by the way. (Ha. Only kidding.)

The second poem concerned the rather humdrum and repetitive activities of a spider attempting to climb up some sort of drain, and its setbacks occasioned by inclement weather. I can’t say that these rhymes commended poetry to me. I would have been better off with something more relevant to my situation as a recently weaned infant living in an unjust patriarchal society, instead of tall stories about misguided tiger-hunting expeditions and dreary Sisyphean arachnids.

This stuff occurred to me lately because I have been teaching my 14-year-old daughter about poetry. It’s all part of my ‘Smash the Teachers’ alternative syllabus for lockdown — which has also recently involved a module entitled ‘How the British Empire Brought Decency, Democracy and Wealth to a Billion Grateful Natives’. Her papier-mâché bust of Sir Cecil Rhodes is coming along fine and I am looking forward to her essay ‘-Exploding Three Modern Myths — the Gender Pay Gap, Structural Racism and the Climate Catastrophe’. I see it all as a counter–balance to the stuff she is taught when the teaching staff have bothered to turn up to school.