Proverbial Talks

Proverbs lay bare our rural traditions. Of the fifteen proverbs in our series, there are three homilies: on happiness and sadness; on means and ends; and on friends and neighbours. But the other twelve have as their themes, hearth and home; and the daily business of putting food on the family table.

Now it might seem that birds in bushes and the woods and the trees do not quite fall into this category, but the practice of shooting pigeons for food was abandoned only recently upon Queen Victoria's orders.

As for the English woods, the legend of Robin Hood is no accident of history. It was the Norman kings who tried to declare the English forests to be their own private Big Game Reservations. And it was their Latin scribblers who invented the idea of the Poacher. Up until this time, the Danelaw boundary reached down as far as the Thames Estuary and the forests of Mercia and Northumbria were under the benevolent jurisdiction of the Scandinavian Settlers with their long established traditions of Common Property, Common Rights and Common Duties. What an alien concept poaching was under the Danelaw.

Otherwise our proverbs are all about fetching water from the stream; cooking soup on an open fire; grinding corn at the mill on the floss; milking the family cow; planting potatoes; tending the chickens in the farmyard; and making the kind of decision every farmer has to make: eggs now or chicken later.

Strangely there is little mention of pigs and goats, sheep and horses, dogs and cats, in our English or Swedish proverbs. Their complete absence is so unexpected that there must be a good reason for it. And I suspect it is an important one.

If I were to hazard a guess, then I would say that it is because these have always been regarded as family and not food. You may make a joke about your mother-in-law, but you are tempting fate if you have the audacity to make a proverb about your wife.

Doubtless somebody will now send in a long list of proverbs to disprove the point. If pigs could fly, talking the back legs off a donkey, and others of this ilk. But let us not dwell for I need to address a few words to producers of these Proverbial Talks.

These fifteen radio scripts have been written in prose with the thought that they would be performed for radio in much the same manner as Alistair Cooke's Letter from America. However some of the sketches might better lend themselves to a two-voice dialogue or conversation mode...a style which appears to be gaining ever greater acceptance with the producers of television news programmes.

Some trial and error would be advisable with your particular radio station audiences to discover the best mode of broadcasting for your listeners. But I fear I am teaching you to suck eggs.

Chickens and eggs are as English as custard and apples and as Swedish as sill och potatis or blodpudding med lingonsylt. Our folk wisdom is filled to overflowing with them. We even talk of a worthless person as a bad egg and it is a great compliment to be referred to as a good egg.

And then we say things like getting egg on your face to indicate that somebody looks foolish; or a chicken and egg situation when we mean that it is impossible to tell which is the cause and which the effect. We also tell people not to teach their grandmother to suck eggs when they venture above their intellectual station and try to teach those older and wiser than themselves. Americans sometimes talk of laying an egg when a stand-up comedian is forced to sit down promptly by a jeering audience.

Taking eggs for money used to be common verbal currency before there was a cheque in the post. H.G.Wells took this notion to extremes when he went to Russia in 1921. He packed both eggs and money...and found the eggs rather more useful as a means of exchange.

As for the Swedes, they talk about cooked eggs giving no chickens - av kokta ägg blir inga kycklingar; and advise their children not to count their chickens before they are hatched - räkna inte kycklingar förrän de är kläckta. The English have this one too.

Then there are egg and spoon races. And not only in England. The last one I took part in was at a midsommerfest on Ljusterö, a little way north of Stockholm. Meanwhile Jonathan Swift had reports of a terrible war starting over the touchy question of which end of the egg the spoon should break open. Gulliver finally managed to resolve the issue with skilful diplomacy but that is another story. Until that time the Big-enders and the Little-enders had formed themselves into parties and there was mayhem throughout the Land of Lilliput.

Nor is the chicken left out of matters by the humble oval body that we know as the egg. Call somebody chicken and you could have a vendetta on your hands. It is an insult reflecting less than favourably on the person's bravery. Chicken is also a game of sorts. James Dean got forced into playing it when rebelling without a cause. He won but his pal was killed. Nigerians play the same game where their highways have just one track of tarmac. And there is a very good joke about the Hell Run that goes from the copper fields of Zambia to the Tanzanian port of Dar-es-Salaam. Remind me to tell it you some other time.

So you see what a wonderful world there is among our proverbs and our folk wisdom. We even ask why the chicken crossed the road...and reply that he wanted to get to the other side. Very funny, but why a chicken? And as to chickens coming home to roost, this is definitely something to steer clear of. It means that your actions will have unpleasant consequences in the fullness of time...a sort of vernacular karma theory.

But a word of warning. Egging somebody on has nothing to do with chickens. It means to urge them or even incite them. It comes from the Old Norse word eggja...the word that has given us the English word edge. Tant pis! What a shame! I could have used it in my Proverbial Talks about the chicken and the egg. Very edgy!

Out of the frying pan into the fire is not something the Swedes say, but they do have something like it that means the same thing - ur asken i elden - out of the ashes into the fire.

Now this of course raises all kinds of interesting speculations on the differences in cooking techniques between the Swedes and their English, Scottish and Irish cousins.

I was once surprised when I roped in some Colombian friends to prepare dinner for guests at an Academic Inn Dinner-Discussion and found them throwing the meat into the open fire. And whenever our friends in Dalarna throw one of their weekend summer feasts, pride of place is given to the pig cooked by the men over an open fire.

But this is hardly evidence that the English did not also cook this way when the need was there. And pigs do not fit easily into a frying pan...except as bacon. Perhaps here is our clue. My usual source of reference at times like this is John Seymour and his Encyclopaedia of Household Crafts but for once he was unable to save my bacon.

Here in England we think of eggs and bacon as peculiarly English. And though the Americans have confused things by adding pancakes and calling it a New England Breakfast, we do not find the Swedes partaking in such strange early morning behaviour. In fact I have yet to find a Swede who does not become quite sick just watching an Englishman with his English breakfast...yet much of our bacon comes from Denmark, so the plot thickens.

What's more, it gets us nowhere nearer finding out why Swedes jump into the fire from the ashes, while the English jump there from the frying pan. Perhaps it is all in the subtle difference in the behaviour of the Swedish and English moth. For what other creatures would be jumping into fires anyway?

As to what it all means...the moral of the story...it is like this. Things may be bad, but you should look before you leap, because they could get worse. In fact, you could find that you are between the devil and the deep blue sea. In which case better the devil you know. On the other hand, nothing ventured nothing gained even though fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

With advice like this, the only safe course of action would seem to be to put out the fire...but not before you have burned your boats.

Quite clearly 'Too many cooks spoil the broth' is a universal truth because the Swedes have the same idea in mind when they exclaim 'Ju fler kockar, ju sämre soppa' - the more cooks, the worse the soup.

But perhaps we should ask ourselves why the Swedish word soppa which lends itself so readily to a translation as the English word soup is replaced in the English proverb by the Scottish word broth. I do not dare to go too far with this, but here are two hints.

In Old English there is this word, a most important word too, breowan, which means to brew. Hops are breowanned and as a result we have for hundreds of years had taverns where the ale doth flow and the men are men. Broth comes from breowan so the Chambers English Dictionary tells us.

It also tells us something else. The Irish, bless their cotton socks, talk about 'a broth of a boy.' Now the Irish talk about anything and everything, so this part of it all is no wonder. But 'a broth of a boy' is their way of telling you that he is the quintessence of a good fellow. Too much breowanning if you ask me.

In England any declaration that 'Too many cooks spoil the broth' invites the immediate retort that 'Many hands make light work.' This goes under the broad heading of English humour and is best left to the English. Besides, the remark is likely to prompt a clip round the ear, an admonishment not to be cheeky and just possibly, if the mood is right, a short discourse something along these lines.

'You, young man, may think these two remarks contradict each other, but that just shows that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and that you are too big for your boots. Older and wiser people than you know that two seemingly contradictory statements can both be true at the same time. In fact, if you did your Greek homework instead of sneaking off fishing after school...Oh yes, don't think we don't know what you get up to young man. We weren't born yesterday...then you would understand that there must be moderation in all things. You can have too much of a good thing. Yes, and even too little of a bad thing. Had you had a few more spankings when you were young, we would not be having so much trouble with you now.'

So when there is work to be done, the call goes out to the inn across the village green that many hands make light work, and out troop the men adequately brothed of course to do the ladies' bidding.

But something quite different is called for when the kitchen is so crowded that nobody can hear themselves talk.
'Martha. Away with you. Lay the table.'
'Jack. Make yourself useful. Take Nicholas and go and bring the wood in.
'Linda. Don't just stand there getting in everybody's way. Make yourself useful.'
Too many cooks spoil the broth!

Say 'En fågel i handen är lika med två i busken' to a Swede and he will look at you with considerable surprise. To understand his consternation, try saying to an Englishman that 'A bird in the hand is worth ten in the forest.' You see the problem. And what an interesting one it is.

Much of our English history is pure speculation. And the further back you go the greater the imagination required. By the time we reach our Scandinavian period we find that our historians are basing their assumptions on the Venerable Bede's History of the English Church and People...and that taxman's manual from the end of the eleventh century - The Domesday Book. Both are rather skewed versions of reality. You have only to read H.G.Wells' history in conjunction with Hilaire Belloc's response to see how different events become under the guiding pen of an alternative theology.

Besides Scandinavians sing songs and tell sagas. They build ships and look after their herds and flocks. They plough fields and fish the lakes. They treasure personal possessions and revere the common wealth of the clan. All this means that the more successful they become, the less evidence they leave of their presence. In a word, their civilisations are biodegradable. But there are clues. Most of them in the simple things of life. Like numbers for instance.

By the time of Domesday Book, much of the Danelaw was assessed to public burdens not in terms of hides and yardlands...the customary units of English England south of the Thames...but in terms of carucates, or ploughlands, and of oxgangs and bovates. The English divisions bore all the marks of an artificial system based ultimately on agrarian usage but weathered by long contact with government officers and landlords: a yardland was a quarter of a hide, a substantial notional stretch of territory amounting to as much as thirty acres in some parts of the country.

The Danelaw divisions into carucates and bovates were much nearer the soil and much further from the taxman and the moneylender. The ploughland represented the land that could be tilled by one plough-team in a year; the bovate or oxgang was an eighth of a ploughland or the amount of land that could be apportioned to a farmer contributing one ox to the eight-ox plough team.

In at least three of the shires of the Danelaw: Nottingham, Lincolnshire and Norfolk, extending from the land of the Five Boroughs...Lincoln, Stamford, Nottingham, Leicester and Derby...into East Anglia, traces are to be found of a further division, Scandinavian in name and paralleled in Normandy. This was the mans-lot or portion of allotment to one free settler.

And then there is the currency. If you ever wondered about the twelve pence in a shilling and the twenty shillings in a pound back in the good old days, then you should know it was the fault of the Scandinavians. The ora of the Danelaw was sixteen silver pennies.

The silver penny was the most widely used coin in the Danelaw as in English England, but for accounting purposes larger amounts were assessed in terms of hundreds or long hundreds of silver. And these were equivalent in the eleventh century at the time of the French invasion to eight pounds in English money.

As for the mark, also in wide circulation in the tenth century, this consisted of eight oras. Everywhere you look, in fact, you find this great Scandinavian fondness for divisions into eight both in agrarian measurements and in currency. Binary reckoning, two by two by two, was the natural way that not even the Domesday Taxman could get away from. In the Danelaw at the time of Domesday Book many of the sums paid as rent for mills and fisheries still gave trace of the early and fundamental system of reckoning in units of account of sixteen silver pennies...one ora.

And it is all this which makes it both interesting and strange to find that the English are talking of two birds in a bush while the Swedes are thinking about ten birds in the forest. Eight yes. Sixteen perhaps. But not ten. The tens were imposed on the sea-faring, song-singing, garden-tending Scandinavians by the desert dwellers from Middle Earth. Beware! The priests have usurped your ancient proverbs!

You see how much history there is to be found in the simple local things of life. As G.K.Chesterton was fond of saying: 'Only the local is real.' But what of the other problem? Why the great pessimism of the Swede? Or is it optimism? To the English one in the hand has an exchange rate of two free flying creatures. To the Swede the exchange rate is one in the hand to five times as many flying free.

The English have long had a fancy for racing their pigeons and hunting with their hawks. Perhaps this has led them to be much more confident about their ways with our feathered friends. Another possibility of course is that it may be five times as easy to shoot a bird out of an English mulberry bush than out of a Swedish fir tree. Perhaps English birds are better fed too, reducing their mobility and making them sitting ducks for the strong man with his bow and arrows, or even the young boy with his sling or catapult.

Bush birds are in themselves most unusual in densely pine forested Sweden. So perhaps the English expression has been usurped by the princes and their country house set, evoking images of pheasant shoots and grouse moors.

And who was it who killed Cock Robin anyway? 'I', said the sparrow, 'with my bow and arrow. I killed Cock Robin.' But who believes this sort of confession any more? It rather has the ring of a student on Chinese television confessing to the killing of patriotic Chinese soldiers. What we English call the pot calling the kettle black.

Besides the question is out of date. 'Cock Robin! Pay attention! Listen up! We know there were seven other co-conspirators with you in the mulberry bush at the time the arrow entered your heart. Are you going to tell us who they were? Remember 1798! Remember Wolfe Tone! Why go to Peking? Dublin and Belfast are just a few minutes away across the water. Answer me boy! Know what's good for you...and your family!'

Sit in an English semi-detached house, that's half a double-fronted one, and gaze through the French windows into the back garden and there on the lawn you will see a thrush or a starling pecking away anxiously at the green turf until suddenly his head shoots back and there stretched between his beak and the grass is a long juicy worm. You almost expect the blue-tits, long-tailed tits and sparrows to burst out into a round of applause.

This is an everyday sight in English suburbs. The dampness of the Spring and Autumn mornings, the heavy dew on the ground, and the frequent showers may also have a part to play, but whatever the climatic reasons, birds and worms are part and parcel of English family life and no child ought to grow up without watching transfixed as the early bird catches the worm.

Not so the Swede. At least not in the eastern parts around Stockholm which I frequent. There you are looking out at the bird table on the flat rock overlooking the sharp ten-foot drop into the lake. Or perhaps you will be watching the small birds darting into the pine needle covered clearing collecting hundreds of flies in their beaks as they swoop and skim between the fir trees.

Worms there must be. And where there are worms to eat, there must be birds to eat them. But it is not a memory I have of Sweden. Perhaps that is because I never grew up there and do not spend my summers in Småland or even further south in Blekinge or Skåne.

But there is something else. From my experience, the Swedes seem to be an energetic bunch. Always chopping wood. Or lighting saunas. Or cutting holes in the ice. The idea of a Swede sitting in an armchair and gazing through the window at the birds on the lawn seems almost unnatural.

And then there is this English thing about gardens. Swedes do not share this. In fact nobody else does. J.B.Priestley put his finger on it when he wrote in his English Journey in 1930 that:

'If you give the English even a foot or two of earth then they will grow flowers in it. They do not willingly let go of the country,' he said, 'not as the foreign people do, once they have settled in a town. The English are all gardeners, perhaps country gentlemen at heart.'

He had some more to say on this.

'Abroad the town, even though it is really only a small village, nearly always starts abruptly, brutally, at once cutting itself off from the country and putting on the dusty and flowerless look of a city. In England the people take leave of the country reluctantly and with infinite gradations, from the glory of rose beds and the full parade of hollyhocks to the last outposts, among grimy privet and grass where perhaps a sooty aster still lingers.'

So all in all, it is hardly surprising to find that where the English will tell their children that the early bird catches the worm as an encouragement to them to put their skates on and go for it, the Swede instead uses the expression: 'Först till kvarn for måla' which means 'First to the mill, gets to grind corn.' So practical the Swedes. Perhaps the French have a compromise expression that talks of snails instead of worms or corn!

Den som gapar efter mycket mister ofta hela stycket. There is not a Swede alive who has not heard that from his grandmother at some time in his life. Even if you do not speak Swedish you will soon recognise the sentiment if I give you the little words that make any language a secret closely guarded against the uninitiated.

Den som gapar-he which gapes; efter mycket-after much; mister ofta-misses often; hela stycket-the whole schtick. Now are you convinced that Swedish is not as hard as you supposed? He who gapes after much misses often the whole bit. Got it now? Yes, it is the old familiar English saying: Don't bite off more than you can chew.

Now notice that both the English and the Swedish are using the same basic metaphor about food and eating. But notice too that the Swede is just a little bit more specific than the Englishman. He tells you what will happen. The English leave more to the imagination. There is also much more of an authoritarian streak to the English, so the freedom of thought given out with the one hand is clawed back with the control of action with the other hand.

The Swede says: 'Do that and this is what is likely to happen, so take your pick. Make your choice but do not say you were not warned.' The English say: 'Do not do that! Because I told you so! Figure out the reason for yourself! But God help you if you ignore my orders and get yourself in trouble! Don't come crying to me for help!'

I have this thing about the demasculation of English culture and I am looking to the Vikings to help us out. I could claim that this proves my point. Observe a father and a mother in similar situations. The mother says: 'Be careful, you might fall. Come down!' The father says: 'Great climbing! Can you reach the next branch?'

Theoretically the Swedes have half picked up on this problem. At least they try to get as many men as women to become school teachers. But schooling itself is a demasculating device. What is really required is Father Education. But that needs a different social structure. Finishing schooling at twelve and so on. This is for the boys anyway. In practice, divorce may be doing a much better job in sorting out the problem. Time will tell.

You should notice too that there is the idea of moderation in all things that has crept in. The proverb is pointing out that it is a mistake to take on too much. It is encouraging a sense of proportion. Suggesting something between the mother's 'Come down this minute!' and the father's 'See how high you can go!' Did you really think it was an accident that Nature has born us into a gendered society?

One of the greatest of our twentieth century poets is the Liverpool Troubadour John Lennon. One of his best one-liners is the one that says: 'Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.' Somehow I have always hoped that this would find its way into our folk wisdom a thousand years from now.

And on that thought I will leave you. And if you were in Dublin a thousand years ago and had the good fortune to hear that famous Norwegian troubadour Johan Taube singing: 'Den som gapar efter mycket mister ofta hela stycket' from the dream musical 'Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries'...please write in and tell us.

You may hear an Englishman say that: You can't have your cake and eat it too. And you may have wondered just what he meant by it. Well, he means that You can't keep your cake and eat it too. But why he has to confuse the issue by using the word have in this ambiguous fashion is beyond me. Have a piece of cake, proposed quietly over afternoon tea, you see, would normally be taken as an instruction to eat it. But that is English for you.

Of all the metaphors to choose, cake is a peculiar choice. The other cake connection that readily springs to mind has strong republican overtones. It was attributed to a high-ranking member of the French aristocracy...shortly before she lost her head. In response to the information that bread was no longer to be found in Paris for love or money, Marie Antoinette suggested that cake should be eaten instead. It loses something in translation but the remark was quite sensible. Bread and cake are made from different grain.

The Swedes avoid the cake. Instead they refer back to their trusty old chicken. And who does know what came first, the chicken or the egg? Or even more obscurely, is the egg a clever device by which a chicken makes another chicken? Or double subtlety. Ingenuity upon outrageous invention. Is a chicken merely the egg's way of making another egg?

There won't be any chickens once you've boiled the egg, says the Swede. Av kokta ägg blir inga kycklingar. It could of course be seen as further evidence for the demasculating of English society. The Swedish proverb is out in the farmyard among the chickens, while the English proverb is in the home, the woman's domain - in that holiest of holy feminine domains, the kitchen. But it is far from clear as to where the private home, the woman's domain, stops and the public house, the man's domain, begins. Farmyards and gardens seem to be a sort of no-man's land, which may explain why it is the children who usually had the job of collecting the eggs.

I raise this point because it is not without significance. This proverb, be it on cakes or chickens, is fundamental to economic life. Guns or butter, say the economists most obtusely. Sufficient unto the day be the evil thereof, counsels Jesus in The Sermon on the Mount.

We live from day to day and should give no thought for the morrow. Take seven today when another man has none and you have done wrong. In his preface to his play, Androcles and the Lion, Bernard Shaw derives from the teaching of the man he called a first rate political economist the moral basis for Distribution Socialism. Socialism, he explained, is equal money.

Not that this should worry us. That's where the almighty tussles should be. We should get worried when the factory farms remove these problems from our grasp and give us salmonella in return. We might get the quantity, but where's the quality? We do not need to look much further. There's no such thing as a free lunch. And you can't have your cake and eat it too.

My daughter has the good fortune to speak English and Swedish fluently. She is what the Swedish call two-languaged on Monday and Wednesday, and half-languaged on Tuesday and Thursday. In fact her Swedish slang comes from Gottsunda and has more Romany than Uppsala in it, and her English comes as much from Roxbury and Bow as from Cambridge and Canterbury. But I needed her help on this one.

The grass is always greener on the other side is the end, and not the beginning of the story. We started off with a Swedish proverb - Man skall into gå över ån för vatten. This translates well into English. Almost too well. One shall not go over the stream for water. Or in good English prose: Don't cross the river to fetch your water!

But what does it mean? And just what is the moral of the story? At first I thought it was quite obvious. Don't make something complicated out of something simple and straightforward. The English, I argued, would explain this visually rather than verbally. Instead of reaching up to their left ear-lobe with their left hand, they would stretch the right hand stiffly across the top of their head and descend upon the aforementioned left ear-lobe from a most unexpected angle of dangle. This would make the point in the most memorable fashion. It has been said, after all, that what matters about a conversation is not what was said, but what is remembered.

I did not know of an English proverb for this sensible idea other than 'Keep it simple!' and this seemed insufficiently proverbial to count. So I consulted my daughter. Instead of helping me out, she confounded me in my confusion by telling me that I had not understood the Swedish, which meant that the grass is always greener on the other side. At which point she broke into Swedish in that annoying manner of hers and to emphasise the point said that: Man skall inte gå över ån för vatten.

'Oh!' says I, 'So you mean it's like: Borta bra men hemma bäst - it's good to get away but home is best. Or, as they say in Texas: 'There's no place like home.'

'No!' says she. 'The whole point is that people should be satisfied with what they have and not be always looking somewhere else for their fulfilment. The water is exactly the same. It is the same stream. So there is no reason to go across to the opposite bank of the stream to take your water. You might just as well save yourself all that trouble and draw up your water from the side you are already on.'

'Ah-ha!' I says. 'So it was like when we lived at 72 The Ryde in Hatfield and were amused that all the Hatfield mothers were sending their children to the school in Welwyn Garden City 'because it was better', at the same time as all the Welwyn mothers were sending their children to the school in Hatfield...'because that was better'.

'You've got it!' says she.

'Hmm! says I. 'Well, I suppose the world and the grass would be greener if all those cars stopped driving there and back each morning and afternoon. On the other hand I would want to know some more about the sewerage discharges into the stream before deciding where to draw my water.'

'Ha! Ha! Very witty, Daddy!'Now have another go at translating Bob Marley. Here's an easy one to start with.'

'No problem, man! Reggae is suffering! Sock it to me!'

'No worries!' says daughter. 'Here it is. No woman! No Cry!'

'Well how about 'gråta inte lilla mamma.' Uh-uh!.