Where have all the vegetables gone?

[nineveh_uk]

My middle school had long assembly three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I quite enjoyed assembly, which wasn't that long even in its long format, and one got to sing. I did not, however, like all the hymns. Top of my "most hated" list was Where Have All the Flowers Gone. To this day I get irritated when hearing pre-pubescent female humans blamed for the first World War.

Nonetheless, when I opened the fridge tonight and discovered that the only green veg I possessed was a couple of leeks, I had to accept that the answer was that I had eaten them. I'm not sure how this happened, as there was a fair amount there on Saturday and I am not the sort of person who considers raw broccoli a delicious snack. But apparently it has. I don't mind leeks. Leeks are OK, particularly baked, but even raw. But I was looking for the courgette that was supposed to be in there.

Comments

[white_hart]

I've always thought that the song suggests a correlation between the girls picking the flowers and the husbands going off to be soldiers, but not that it implies causation.

I'm slightly boggled that nineveh_uk's school considered Pete Seeger songs to be hymns, too!

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I felt the correlation implied an equivalence that I really don't see between a child who ignorantly or thoughtlessly picks too many flowers (and in any case, flowers are wiped out my industrial agriculture, building, and occasionally over-zealous collectors, not a few eight-year olds, or even fifteen-year olds) and the political and other issues behind WWI that really aren't there. If it had been "Where have all the tigers gone, big game hunters have shot them, every one" it might have been different.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

flowers are wiped out my industrial agriculture, building, and occasionally over-zealous collectors, not a few eight-year olds, or even fifteen-year olds

Methinks the lady doth protest too much - were you perchance given a traumatic earwigging for gathering bluebells one spring?

[azdak.livejournal.com]

My own - deeply conventional reading - is that the men going off to war and dying was the cause and the girls picking flowers to put on their graves was the effect. Although I suppose the causality might run in reverse and the whole thing is being orchestrated by the flowers, who seem in the final verse to be doing rather well out of the war.

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

I thought the young girls gave them to the men going off to war in the first verse though even so it's still not "Where have all the snowy owls gone? Girls plucked their feathers every one."

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I alwas assumed it worked on a circular principle of "Where are the flowers? - Look where the girls are - Where are the girls? - Look where the men are - Where are the men? - Oh, look, that's where the flowers are (in fact, that's where everybody is, girls included)" so I never thought of the flowers as being given to the men to encourage them to fight. It was more that the men dragged everything else after them. But I think the intention was probably to evoke as many flower/war resonances as possible (rather than, pace nineveh_uk, to scold the young for profligate picking of daisies).

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

"Will no-one think of the snowy owls?"

But anyone who had to sing "Who can, what can, we can, you can?"* at primary school was primed to be insulted.

*To the worst tune imaginable: Who can, what can, we can, you can?
Who can, what can, we can, you can?
Who can, what can, we can, you can?
We can serve the Lord!

Haven't got much money
Haven't got much talent
But the things we have got, we shall give to him!

(Repeat first stanza)

We did not have much money, being pocket-money dependent. But we disagreed re. talent and didn't see why we should bother serving the Lord, since he clearly didn't think much of us. Also, J's mother was a Socialist Worker.

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

Obviously the bald owls once the young girls had plucked their feathers to give to the young men who declined to go to war.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I am not sure that I see a snowy owl being held down long enough to be plucked.

[white_hart]

Ah, that seems like an extremely logical reading!

[azdak.livejournal.com]

It does end with flowers on graves, so at least it's an economical reading.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

That the flowers were being put on the graves had literally* never occured to me as an explanation until you said it in this comment. But we did get an awful lot of "People are destroying the environment AND IT IS ALL YOUR FAULT" that was palpable bollocks and clearly ran deep, so assuming that picking flowers was the moral equivalent felt entirely correct at the time.

*And I literally mean literally.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

The most popular way of dealing with environmental crises is still to teach the next generation to "care" rather than obliging the current generation to take action.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

No doubt even today there are hysterical 6 year olds who think that having the radiator on in their bedroom* is destroying the planet.

*I did not think this.

[antisoppist.livejournal.com]

They have just started a campaign to make all the ten year-olds draw posters for their parents to stick next to all the light switches. It is like the 1970s all over again. And naturally my resident rule-bound obsessive is overdoing it and we are all fumbling around in gloom and tripping over things because she has turned all the lights off when we only left the room for two seconds.

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

My own - deeply conventional reading - is that the men going off to war and dying was the cause and the girls picking flowers to put on their graves was the effect.

I would concur with this reading (at least of the last verse; the first verse strikes me as more of a standard meditation on the brevity and transience of youth, with no particular blame being attached to the girls).

I'd also add that, as it was written in 1955 (and by an American), I doubt that the war in question is meant to be World War I.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I don't think that Cookridge in 1985 had heard of Vietnam.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

We also had "The Family of Man" and "Streets of London", though also a good helping of regular wedding hymns (in fact, much more of the latter than my sisters who went to the CofE school and had assembly every day. Mind you, they both left at 11 because it was so boring, so possibly they slept through them).

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

Oh, we had Streets of London, too.

[tree_and_leaf]

So did mine, though we didn't sing that one. "Last night I dreamed the strangest dream" was a regular "favourite" though.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Mine too (that is, we had to sing it, not that it was my favourite (or indeed "favourite" - I didn't really mind it. (These brackets are getting out of hand)))- also 'Little Boxes', 'The Ink Is Black' and (less politically) 'Puppet On A String'. And for singing when not in Assembly (e.g. sort of music lesson-y things or singing to parents), 'Yesterday', 'When I'm 64' and 'Obladi Oblada'.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

The Ink Is Black was my second-worst hymn. The tune was bloody awful, the lyrics had the subtlty of a sledge-hammer, and I'm sure it made the one non-white child in the whole school just great.

[antisoppist.livejournal.com]

Again, I seem to only know the first two lines and until I just googled it had gone through life assuming it was a song about literacy.

Your school had an extremely wide definition of hymns.