THE say elephants never forget…and neither, it seems, do humans. Even if we don't realise it.
I had a bizarre experience a few months back when I suddenly started singing a song that I didn’t recognise – in Welsh. There was something childlike about it all – but I had no idea where or when I had learnt the words or tune.
All I knew was that the garbled lyrics in my head, phonetically, sounded like this:
Dabana gana wed
Ruby and a fat dog
A feeser and a fed
Adoo ack a die dee
A gravy and a call
Jim Crow crust in
Jim Crow call
Now, if I could speak the Language of My Father, I would have known what the song was all about – and been able to work out when it might have come into my life.
But although I grew up in South Wales and lived there until I was 20; I had absolutely no idea where or when that little ditty got into my head.
Memory
Until the moment I started Dakooing in the shower, it certainly hadn’t been part of my conscious memory. All I wanted to know was from whence the song came – and how early in my life.
My parents are long gone so I asked my sister – who’s 18 months younger than me and now lives in the Middle East. She didn’t recognise the words but was able to confirm that it was neither Arabic nor Hebrew. Very helpful, that.
So I decided to look for the mystery tune on the Internet. Problem was that I had no idea how the words were spelt…so it was a matter of guessing. I actually learnt Welsh for a year when I started grammar school – but, given the alternative of French in Year Two, I jumped bateau.
This of course, was in the days when the British education system was so far behind the times that they thought ‘Duck a l’orange’ meant ‘Get down, they’re chucking fruit’.
It was bad enough that the boffins had the misguided impression that teaching foreign languages to six and seven year olds would only confuse the little sponge-brains.
Meanwhile, European kids barely out of infants school were yapping away in foreign tongues as if they were natives. I personally wasn’t aware of Spanish (which even then was one of the world’s most spoken languages) being on any local school’s curriculum in those days.
But back to Dackoo – and the concocted spelling ‘Dacw mama dywad’ that I Googled into my computer.
Amazement
To my Google-eyed amazement, it came up immediately with a website of ‘Welsh Nursery Rhyme Lyrics’. And there, in both languages, were the full words of 38 kiddies’ favourites taught typically to pre-school toddlers in Wales.
Including those of Dacw Mam yn Dwad or, in English, ‘There’s Mummy Coming’.
As I went through the correct version, more and more of the lyrics came back to me – along with emotion-filled thoughts of my mother, who died in a polio epidemic when I was six.
*Dacw mam yn dwad,
Ar ben y Gamfa Wen,
Rhywbeth yn ei ffedog,
A phiser ar ei phen.
Y fuwch yn y beudy,
Yn brefu am y llo,
A’r llo’r ochor arall,
Yn chware Jim Cro
My mother could not have taught me the Dackoo words because she was English – and although Dad was born in the Rhymney Valley, his virtues did not include patience. Not that I ever heard him speak a word of Welsh, in any case.
Which means I must have learnt it at Greenways, the Cardiff kindergarten I started attending at the age of three.
Memory
The emergence of that hidden memory after well over half-a-century tends to confirm what European educationalists have known for generations, namely that very young children can absorb a second language with no fear of confusion.
And my own experience with Dackoo also demonstrates that our minds retain information for life, even if we are not aware of it.
What I want to know is, why can’t I remember what I did yesterday?
