My Plate's Empty

 I found I knew the whole of "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe"- apart from what happens at "Fifteen, sixteen". Nothing in the English language comes close to rhyming with sixteen- so I looked it up- and wikipedia told me the line goes. "Maids in the kitchen."

An alternative reading has "Maid a-kissing" but that's just vulgar....

So at "Thirteen, fourteen" we have "Maids a-courtin". at "Fifteen, sixteen", "Maids in the kitchen" and at "Seventeen, eighteen," " "Maids a-waiting". I feel there's the ghost of a story in that sequence, possibly even a ghost story. Walter de la Mare, whose stories I'm re-reading at the moment might have made something of it- something indefinite, inconclusive, teasing...

Big shout out for de la Mare as a prose writer. As a poet he's timeless. As a prose writer he's a modernist- a contemporary of Joyce and Woolf. Last night I finished "The Green Room". A young man finds an exercise book full of poems in a room once occupied by a suicide. It's a ghost story, but not exactly a ghost story. I don't think he ever wrote anything that is categorically and unmistakeably a ghost story. Whatever else it may be. "The Green Room" is also wonderfully strange and touching- and indelible. A friend once set me the task of writing a ghost story in verse- and, knowing she'd never have come across it, I shamelessly plagiarised "The Green Room". That poem will never be published- not even here- it may, indeed, no longer exist.  One of the fascinations of the original is that it contains poems- written by de la Mare himself, of course, but in a style very unlike his own- and because he was a great poet the poems he's ghosted for his ghost are, actually, rather good. I ghosted some poems for my plagiarised version too and found it was surprisingly easy to write verse in character, with no great emotional investment- and have it come out quite well...

Agatha Christie, who knew how numinous nursery rhymes can be, has a book called "One, Two, Buckle my Shoe." If I remember rightly someone gets murdered in it...

One two, buckle my shoe,
Three, four. knock on the door,
Five, six, pick up sticks,
Seven eight, lay them straight,
Nine, ten, a big fat hen,
Eleven, twelve, dig and delve,
Thirteen, fourteen, maids a-courting,
Fifteen, sixteen, maids in the kitchen,
Seventeen, eighteen, maids a-waiting,
Nineteen, twenty, my plates empty!