A lifetime's journey: the Opies and the folklore of childhood

“In this book,” Iona Opie writes in her “Preface” to Children’s Games with Things, published in 1997, “I am presenting the rest—and the last—of the material from our surveys of the 1950s and 1960s, thus completing the picture of the joys and entertainments of the mid-twentieth century schoolchild” (v). Peter died in 1982, before the huge Opie journey through the folklore of childhood was complete. But his notes were there; the books that lay ahead had been planned and discussed in detail, and during the years that followed Iona carried on with the work that had begun in 1944. The Singing Game, half-finished when he died, came out in 1985. Seven years was the traditional time the Opies allowed for a book to brew; Iona dated her preface to Children’s Games with Things “1989–96,” and concludes: “And here is, probably, the final book by ‘Iona and Peter Opie,’ for it is the last book that will contain a substantial amount of Peter’s writing on children’s lore” (vi).

It was published in tandem with a second edition of their first book, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, (ODNR), which, though constantly reissued, had never been revised since its original appearance in 1951. This is an amazing book on many counts, a pioneer book on a subject for which there was not previous model, undertaken by young novices with no experience of research. For both of them, formal education had finished with school; neither began with any academic expertise—all this had to be self-taught. Peter considered this an advantage; they were, he said proudly many years later, “two of the very last persons following the tradition of the private scholar” (Cott 252). Neither of them had expected their careers to move in the direction it did. They had married in 1943 when he was twenty-four and she was nineteen. Peter, who had been invalided out of the army, was then working with a small publishing firm and was already an author. I Want to be a Success, an account of his childhood in India and his schooldays at Eton, was written when he was eighteen; two more books based on subsequent experiences were to follow in 1945 and 1946. In 1943, Iona was a sergeant in the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) and her plans were for university, not marriage. Iona explained, “If I had thought (and in wartime people did not often think much beyond the present) I would have assumed that we would go on just as we were until, when the war ended, I would go to London University . . . I was going to Bedford College to read botany and be a plant pathologist. . . . However, Peter needed a wife; and he proposed marriage” (Opie, “Opie” 207).

By April 1944, she was pregnant and had been discharged from the WAAF. Their first child was to be born on her twenty-first birthday. Peter’s publishing company had been evacuated to the country.

It was when we were walking along the path beside a nearly ripe field of corn that our future was decided by a ladybird. Idly one of us picked it up, put it on his finger (was it Peter? I don’t remember) and said to it: ‘Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home/ Your house is on fire and your children all gone.’ The ladybird obeyed, as they always do—and yet it always seems like magic; and we were left wondering about this rhyme we had known since childhood and had never questioned until now. What did it mean? Where did it come from? Who wrote it?

(Opie, “Opie” 208)

Peter told Jonathan Cott in 1981, “The story about wondering about the ladybird rhyme is the superficial level. The deep level is that we...