It was a cold, dark and stormy night, my love was far away. We were huddled around the fireplace to keep warm, my two youngest children, myself and the two house cats. Rain was lashing against the window panes, the wind howling through the gaps and blowing in gusts down the chimney from time to time, filling the room with smoke. I was playing the guitar, feeling kind of dark and distant, I was playing 'The Bows of London' as I sometimes do, when a certain mood takes me.
Only the day before, their mum had warned me to be more careful about discussing dark, adult themes with, or in front of the children. It's something we both do and is sometimes hard to avoid. Kids ask questions. They overhear stuff. They want to know what's going on as much as anyone else does. Even more so, because it's all new to them still. The mysterious ways of the world. Life.
'The Bows of London' is a folk song which dates back to the 1600's. It tells the chilling and gruesome story of two sisters. To begin with, one sister pushes the other sister into the river and she drowns. Her body is later pulled out of the river by a miller's son and then a fiddler comes along...
By this point in the song I noticed that my six year old was paying attention to the words.
'What? Did she drown?' he asks, looking a bit disturbed.
'Why did she push her sister into the river', his big sister asks, confused.
'I don't know.' I reply. 'Maybe she was jealous.'
At this point, the story goes from bad to worse, but by now the children were intrigued and wanted to know what happened next...
What happens is that the fiddler takes the drowned girl's long hair and uses it to make a violin bow. At this, the children are quite horrified. I explain that it's a very old song and that in the olden days they didn't have scary movies. There were no computers or televisions. No special effects. In those days there were hardly even any books and most people couldn't even read. So they told stories and sang songs. Sometimes they were scary stories.
After the fiddler makes his violin bow, he proceeds to make a violin from the poor girl's body parts. It really is a very gruesome story indeed. Probably one of the darkest folk songs I know.
When he's finished making his macabre musical instrument, the fiddler rides to the king's hall where there's a big party going on. The king and queen are there, as well as their daughter - the princess who murdered her sister. He lays the fiddle down on a stone and then it starts playing by itself.
'What? How?' asks the youngest, his eyes wide.
We talk a bit about instrument making. How I make guitars from trees which have usually been killed. How in a way, it brings them back to life.
Then the violin begins to speak...
'Yonder sits my father the king
Yonder sits my father the king
And yonder sits my mother the queen
How she'll weep at my burying
And yonder sits my sister, Anne
She who drownded me in the stream
By the bonnie bonnie bows of London'
It certainly is a very dark tale indeed, but it did give us some good discussion. They learned a bit of history and a few other things besides.
In this world they're growing up into, there is no escaping from dark subjects. Children in America this week are dealing with the aftermath of another school shooting and the prospect of more to come. Sometimes, it's easier to tell a tale from 400 years ago than it is to explain to children what is going on in the world today, in a way they can understand and which make sense to them.
Here is a Wikipedia article about the song and its origins:
Here are father - daughter duo Martin and Eliza Carthy with their version of this 400 year old song:
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