OF CABBAGES AND KINGS

I have just finished writing a fairly dull piece about an arcane aspect of Europana, enlivened only by a reference to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. I am not sure what my transcontinental readers will make of this. Can one quote Treasure Island in serious articles? I'll have to wait to see my editor's reactions. But she is used at least to my little idiosyncrasies and is usually obliging when it comes to indulging them.

I suspect that fifty years ago there wouldn't have been a problem. Everyone knew Treasure Island - the story was fed into you along with mother's milk, or if not mother's milk exactly then certainly by the time you had graduated to jelly and peanut butter sandwiches.

My mother used to claim that she re-read Treasure Island once a year. I think she exaggerated somewhat. It's easy to do. If someone asked me I would probably say the same thing. Certainly, I read a part of Treasure Island every year even if I don't read all of it, prompted by the half memory of some phrase that breaks loose deep within the subconscious and comes bubbling to the surface.

There are just so many wonderful lines. "Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese, toasted mostly," says the maroon, Ben Gunn. "It was a master-surgeon, him that ampytated me - Latin by the bucket, and what not; but he was hanged like a dog, and sun-dried like the rest, at Corso Castle," says Silver. "Pieces of Eight," shrieks Captain Flint, the parrot. The book is a triumph of language, of characterisation, of adventure.

But these days we seem to have sunk to the depressing belief that all that rests in a book is a story which you can see as well or better on film, with real people, islands, ships, gold. For all its millions, Pirates of the Caribbean is simply dull. The language is missing and so is the imagination and anyway the film characters are plastic and trite.

How many film lines can you remember? When I've done 'Play it, Sam' and 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn,' I'm scratching my head.

Times2 this week carried a report of a survey of parents by MyVoice, which suggested that 40 per cent of parents aged 30 and under with young children can no longer recite a single popular nursery rhyme all the way through. By contrast only 13 per cent of parents over the age of 65 failed the same task. Younger parents have, so the pollster's Mr Ian Davidson told The Times, taken to singing pop songs and television theme tunes instead.

This is all intensely depressing - a sign that the process of de-civilisation is well under way. The Times did not have to wheel out Dr Janine Spencer from Brunel University to tell us that nursery rhymes can help children develop communication, memory, language and reading skills and can also teach a bit of history, though even for the most precocious toddler, the latter is surely stretching a point.

A reader wrote in to say that Humpty Dumpty, which we all thought was some species of egg, was actually a cannon mounted on the ramparts of Colchester by the Royalist Army when the town was besieged by Parliamentarians during the Civil War. The Parliamentarians fired at the wall beneath the cannon apparently and down Humpty Dumpty duly fell, whereupon all the King Charles' horses and all the King's men……well, you get the picture.

Certainly I learnt all my nursery rhymes, before moving rapidly on to the general corpus of Beatrix Potter, AA Milne, and Edward Lear, represented in my ever childlike mind by Squirrel Nutkin, Winnie-the-Pooh and the Pobble who had no toes.

Later there was Lewis Carroll - curiouser and curiouser - and then the hurly-burly of Enid Blyton. My children cut their reading teeth on a similar diet and if either or both of them ever oblige me with the odd grandchild I shall ensure that he or she is similarly launched on the world.

Because what Dr Spencer did not mention in her lament is the commonality that such a corpus of literature gives us. We all need to feel part of society and what better way than by rehearsing what we have all, rich and poor, learnt together as children?

There is not much point in my mentioning Treasure Island if the majority of readers haven't a clue what I am talking about. As we get older we all develop different interests, different sorts of entertainment appeal: books, films, sports and so forth. But as children we are more or less in the same boat. You may have no interest in soft puddings; I may have no interest in cricket or racing - but maybe both of us remember 'Fifteen men on a dead man's chest - yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.'

Once this commonality was provided by religion - at one time we all knew our Bibles. And the people of Shakespeare's day, for instance, were certainly sufficiently familiar with the characters and stories from Greek and Roman legend for him to be able to populate his works with references that today require an extensive footnote followed by a cup of tea and a long delve in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

But all this has long gone and now it seems that children's literature is going the same way. The written word, is being shorn of its references to childhood, like one of Bo Peep's lost flock. It's all rather sad and we - and our children - are the poorer for it.