I learnt a poem at school: “Tell-tale tit, / Your tongue shall be slit / And all the little puppy-dogs / Will have a little bit.” It seems to me a pretty good poem, akin to a fragment from some Jacobean tragedy. The repetition of “little” might be a flaw, but occurs for the sake of the metre, I suppose.

People often write in the press about the benefits of children learning poetry at school. Stays with them for life. True enough. But the kind of poetry they mean is exemplified by Molesworth as: “Har fleag har fleag har fleag onward / Into the er rode the 600.” Or today it’s more likely Sylvia Plath: “We are shelves, we are / Tables, we are meek, / We are edible.” Mushrooms. Not bad.

The poem I learnt, aged six, was written by no one. Not by me or my classmates, certainly not by an adult. It was labelled a nursery rhyme, in more robust times, by the collector James Orchard Halliwell.