Song lyrics

 Did you ever have a problem with song lyrics when you were a child? Or now, even? I mean, you knew what you were hearing couldn't be right but that was what it sounded like to you.

The first time I can remember this happening to me was with the Christmas carol, Good King Wenceslas.

You may recall that the king in question was looking out of the window, and called his page to come and stand beside him to identify a peasant he'd spotted gathering sticks for his fire. The part of the song that unfolds that section in the story goes like this:

Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen
When the snow lay round about
Deep and crisp and even
Brightly shone the moon that night
Though the frost was cruel
When a poor man came in sight
Gathering winter fuel

Hither, page, and stand by me,
If thou knowst it, telling
Yonder peasant, who is he?
Where and what his dwelling?
Sire, he lives a good league hence,
Underneath the mountain
Right against the forest fence
By Saint Agnes fountain.

Bring me flesh and bring me wine
Bring me pine logs hither
Thou and I shall see him dine
When we bear them thither.
Page and monarch, forth they went
Forth they went together
Through the rude winds wild lament
And the bitter weather

I was a fairly young child when first I heard this carol, not very used to church but very familiar with the brothers Grimm and their fairy tales. I knew all about the witch in Sleeping Beauty who demanded a peasant's firstborn or his life, because he crept into her garden at night and took her lettuce. I had learned at school about the hardships of life caused by all the deer in England belonging to the king, and poaching rabbits being a felony, and how people weren't even allowed to take sticks from the hedgerow. I had Roger Lancelyn Green's book, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and knew the loathly lady story about Sir Gawain, so well told in later years by Steeleye Span in their folk song on the album Below the Salt (lyrics here). And I was acquainted with the phrase "Good King Henry". So I misunderstood the intentions of Good King Wenceslas.

I thought he was requiring his page to get a the fire stoked up ready to cook supper, and that it was the peasant he was planning to eat for tea. The entire adult world was incomprehensible to me, and I accepted without question that a hymn in church should approve the inevitability of cannibalising someone who'd had the temerity to steal sticks from the hedge. It was not unusual, after all, for people to be roasted for failing to acquiesce with the church. Why not this?

But this morning another song I misunderstood as a child came drifting back into my mind. You might remember if you've read here a long time that my father travelled the world and used to bring home vinyl discs of songs popular in the countries he visited — so, many of the songs we had at home to play on our gramophone (that he made from a kit and a bathroom stool and an old blue Aertex shirt) were in foreign languages. One of them was Françoise Hardy singing Tous les garçons et les filles, which came out in 1962 when I was five. The lyrics are here. I loved it, and I used to try and sing along to it even though I didn't know any French.

In particular I was taken by the bony gassoons she was singing about. I knew the poems of Edward Lear, and that seemed reasonable. Now I am grown up and have the internet, I can look it up and see it says "comme les garçons", but it surely didn't sound like that to me when I was five. 

As I got older – perhaps about eleven or twelve — and began to learn French at school, I still listened to and loved that song, and started to try and discern what it was saying. I got completely the wrong end of the stick.

I understood that she was making the initial point about all the girls and boys of her age walking hand in hand, in love with each other, but then I misunderstood the next part. Where she says, "ils s'en vont amoureux, sans peur de lendemain", I thought she was saying, "ils s'en vont — amoureux sont perdu lendemain". That might be rubbish French (I have no idea), but I understood her to mean that these lovers were all very happy now, but (unlike her) they had lost their tomorrow; ie they were all stitched up in a relationship and had lost the freedom she retained.

The song goes on to say, "Oui, mais moi, je vais seule . . ." (and essentially here there is a line break in which she draws breath) ". . . par les rues, l'âme en peine." Which obviously means, "Yeah, but me, I walk the streets alone, my soul in pain."

However, I'd misconstrued it to be, "Oui, mais moi, je vais seule — pas les rues, la montagne." ("Yeah, but I walk alone, eschewing the streets in favour of the mountain") The next line, "car personne ne m'aime" (because no one loves me) I thought was saying "car personne m'ennuie" (because no one annoys me).

So I thought the song was making the case for remaining single — saying that all the other boys and girls spent their time mooning around the urban streets holding hands and gazing into each other's eyes, trading the freedom of all their tomorrows for the fleeting pleasure of romance now; whereas she shunned the town in favour of wandering the mountain tracks where nobody could annoy her.

And I carried on thinking that was the basis of the song until this very day.

The reason I started thinking about it and looked it up is that on Wednesday mornings Tony goes out to a café with his French conversation group, and extends an ongoing invitation to me to join them if I wish. It's so kind of him, and I do love French, but the prospect also seemed more than a little stressful, and set me thinking of how I can speak French, yes, but not very well and I often misunderstand it (and translating what I want to say into French is more than a little approximate).

So it got me thinking about that song and the bony gassoons, and I thought I'd write about it for you, so I looked it up, and the lyrics in full — discovering, to my complete astonishment, that all the time Françoise Hardy had been miserable and wishing she had a boyfriend too.

Obviously I had already worked out that King Wenceslas only wanted to help the peasant.