My mother, who, unlike my father, was not really a German scholar, had a little German nursery rhyme which she'd recite every time we saw a ladybird. Most English-speaking children, of course, will come out with some variant on this one:Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home!
Your house is on fire and your children alone!
But Vere had a German rhyme. As someone who didn't do German at school, and whose sum knowledge of the language is the vocabulary associated with Christmas carols (sheep, angels, trees, anyone?) I had no idea how to spell many of the words.
For some reason it came back to me just now, and I've spent about half an hour trying to track it down via Google and my Langensheidt Compact German Dictionary. Since it doesn't seem to be anywhere online in the version I know it, I'm quoting it here.
Interestingly, the modern German word for "ladybird" seems to be "Maikäfer" but Vere's word was the more poetic, and probably now archaic, "Johannes Würmchen" which seems to mean something like, "St John's little bug".
Here's Vere's version, anyway:
Johnnes Würmchen, flieg!
Dein Vater ist im Krieg,
Dein Mutter ist im Pomerland,
Und Pomerland ist angebrannt.
(Ladybird, fly away! Your father's off to war, your mother's in Pomerania, and Pomerania is on fire. At least that's what they told me angebrannt meant - it doesn't seem to be in my dictionary, so if you know different ...)
Vere almost certainly learned this from her own mother, Allison Robertson, who had gone to a sort of finishing school in Bad Kreutznach in the latter years of the 19th century when she was a teenager. Alice (as she was usually known) spoke fluent German.
(Ladybird, fly away! Your father's off to war, your mother's in Pomerania, and Pomerania is on fire. At least that's what they told me angebrannt meant - it doesn't seem to be in my dictionary, so if you know different ...)
Vere almost certainly learned this from her own mother, Allison Robertson, who had gone to a sort of finishing school in Bad Kreutznach in the latter years of the 19th century when she was a teenager. Alice (as she was usually known) spoke fluent German.
