Snakes and snails and puppy-dog tales

Two kindred spirits made it their lives’ work to collect the smallest great poems of the world’s literature’, preserving for children the nursery rhymes, games and fairy tales no longer handed down by their mothers

- Matthew Dennison

THE kaleidoscopic vitality of the eager, laughing, shouting, devilmay-care people in the playground' inspired folklorists Peter and Iona Opie: husband and wife pioneered the study of British childhood culture, past and present. Together, they collected more than 20,000 works of historic children's literature-Iona once suggested that she was prevented from writing encouraging slogans on the walls of their house in Hampshire by the absence of any space between bookshelves. Beginning in 1947, they wrote a series of books acclaimed by academics and general readers alike. Theirs was a labour of love. 'We never earned more, between us, than a London police constable,' remembered Iona, although they worked 'all day, almost every day' during the four decades of their marriage before Peter's death in 1982. Staying at home, without a car or television, they sat at desks in adjoining rooms where each 'plod, plod, plodded along, sometimes eating nettles in place of costlier vegetables.

Both husband's and wife's was an accidental calling. In 1944, married for less than a year, the couple were expecting their first child and went for a walk alongside a field of ripening corn. 'Our future was decided by a ladybird,' Iona wrote in 1988. 'Idly one of us picked it up, put it on his finger... 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?"