Foreword to The Tree House and other poems for children

Some years ago I was working as a teacher at a school in the Hutt Valley. The ages of the children in my class ranged from seven to nine, or thereabouts; and while they were lively, sociable children, patiently ready to instruct any adult in the art of living, they were not so patient with my own attempts to instruct them in other matters. My sympathy lay with them; but there were ‘problems of control’ – those tensions which make teachers wish they had stayed pushing a pen or shovelling coke at the gasworks. Some answer had to be found; and these jingles, rhymes, poems made to be spoken, were part of a possible answer.

Thus the poems were not only made for children, in the sense that I had children in mind when I wrote them. They had also to satisfy the demands of children, keep them moving, catch and hold their attention; or else they would have been useless to me as a teacher, and probably to those for whom I made them. If I had been following my own wishes, the poems might well have been smoother, more symmetrical, ‘better poetry’, made in part to suit the adult critic inside myself. But the children required direct speech, simple words, plain rhymes, and plenty of action. Some of the poems were action poems, made for them to chant with appropriate movements; two at least were made for boys and girls to chant alternately; some were made forpage 746 younger children who had not yet forgotten nursery rhymes, and some for the older children who had read more widely.

The poems bridge a gap, I think; for when I was teaching I found that there was much verse for infants and some verse for children over nine or ten – when they are at least able to listen to ballads with satisfaction – but nothing for the in-betweeners, the ones who are neither infants nor fully literate. If poems by other writers had been available for this age group, I might, being a lazy man, have used these and written none of my own; but I searched and could find literally nothing for the in-betweeners.

The themes sprang up in part from the children’s conversation – about animals, boats, railways trains, houses on fire, conditions of weather – and in part from my own memories of childhood. It was necessary to write mainly about things they knew, or imagined they knew. A few of the poems were constructed as an aid for speech training. When I stopped being a teacher, I set the poems aside, partly because I had no more need for them, and partly because they were not ‘literary works’ – were, in a sense, never designed as literature. I did not in fact retain copies of all of them.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Mr J.C. Ward, who was headmaster of the school in which I made the poems – for he encouraged me to make them and use them in the first place, and kept copies of them himself, and later brought them to the notice of publishers, and urged me to have them made into a book. And when I looked at them again, it seemed to me that they might well be heard and read and learnt by other children, now that the ones for whom they were written are burly teen-agers, and that such a book might be more enlivening than a great deal of the solemn rubbish that passes as children’s verse. This, then, is a book of poems for children.

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