LOGO : Site title

A boy and his trains (photo by Mimi Choi)

B ecause those troublesome trucks will get the engines every time

Troublesome trucks will run the engines off the line

They don’t care how big they are, to them it’s just a game

Those troublesome trucks will get them all the same

If you have a child enamoured of Thomas the Tank Engine and his seemingly unlimited number of train companions, you may have just groaned when a tune popped unbidden into your head as you read the little verse above. I apologize for your aural hallucination, but I think such reactions bind us as parents in sympathy. Rebecca Eckler complains of the numerous times she has read Goodnight Moon to her daughter at bedtime. All I can say is, Rebecca, you got off easy. At least for your pains you are rewarded with a child on her way to slumber. Oliver’s obsession with “Troublesome Trucks” means that it has become the soundtrack for our waking hours. And I know I have had dreams where I can hear the song.

Or, as Oliver refers to it, “the sonnngg.”

Almost every day for the past few months, Oliver has been in thrall to Thomas and the Really Brave Engines, which I bought mostly because it features a story called “Oliver the Snow Engine.” However, his attention has, from the start, mainly been drawn to the musical feature on the disc, titled “Troublesome Trucks.”

Several times a day, from first thing in the morning (sometimes I hear it as I enter and then exit the shower and wonder how many iterations have already passed) to after coming home from daycare to after dinner, or all of those times (plus weekends), Oliver will ask me or Mimi, “Shwee watch the sonnnggg?” It’s a rhetorical question, really: he’s not willing to take “No” or “Oliver, can we watch Jeopardy?” for an answer, judging by his usual distraught or imperious reaction.

T he curious thing is that despite regular and repeated exposure to this piece of music, neither Mimi nor I have more than a partial acquaintance with the words. Its jaunty, cheerful hooks, apparently sung by a choir of British schoolkids (Mimi says she imagines the singers to be the same schoolchildren who accompanied Pink Floyd on “Another Brick in the Wall”) elude our possibly Alzheimer-bound brains. While we grasp that it’s about the inconvenience and destruction caused by sneaky giggling freight cars to hapless engines, the theme underscored with a montage of steam engines, and even the devious Diesel, being derailed and induced to crash in various ways through their trickery, we have difficulty summoning up the necessary lyrics when Oliver requests them in the car. I don’t know if it’s because my mind is also on negotiating traffic, but the first verse always seems to takes a little more effort to recall:

The engines always think they are so clever

And so they like to bump the trucks around

They bump them in the siding, they bump them in the yard

They’d better beware, they’d better take care, they’d better be on their guard

The first line came easily because Oliver insisted for a long time that the last word was actually “sebba,” but I can never remember the order of the sites of bumping. (Anticipating Oliver's next in-car request, I actually Googled the lyrics to be prepared. There's a staggering volume of Thomasiana out there, and maybe I'll follow it up sometime -- after Oliver leaves for university, probably.) There’s another verse concerning Diesel and then the final one, which outlines the futility of the engines’ resistance to the freight trucks’ antics:

The engines all try hard to make a stand

which Oliver has decided is actually “hocken maken stanch.”

I think there must be a paradox inherent in most music designed for children, in that children want to hear it repeatedly, either in recorded form or performed by a parent, but only the music seems to get stuck in parents’ memories, not the words. If the whole thing does happen to be retained by a parent’s mind, the child will in fact not ask to hear it and the song will play repeatedly on the parent’s internal jukebox instead. This happened to me with the theme to Wonder Pets. Mimi tells me she disagrees that this phenomenon is limited to children’s music only and cites “Pinball Wizard” as an example of a song with a distinctive melody and lyrics that are not easy to decipher. I must admit that I couldn’t discern “Bally table king” in the song when it recently played on the car radio until her helpful clarification. I look forward to testing out this theory when Oliver graduates to classic rock.

We’ve probably all had some experience with wanting to hear something over and over, such as a new favourite song (I was once obsessed with the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine,” particularly that cool buzzy feedback that opens the song), because there is something novel about it that we can’t get enough of. But when we have little or no choice in what we hear, we also don’t have control of what we retain. On the other hand, Mimi and I have both reached a point where we can tune out “the sonnggg” and let the visuals wash by. In our more alert viewings, we discuss the subtext of the oddly destructive and vengeful nature of the characters in the Rev. W. Awdry’s railway universe. Because the behaviour of the trains seem so oddly different than the simply didactic pedagogy pervasive in children’s TV shows currently, we’re a bit stumped about the narrative agenda in Thomas. In our more paranoid moments, we wonder what impact it will have on Oliver. And then we usually return to the book or newspaper we read as Oliver starts singing along: “They bump them in the siding, they bump them in the yard/ Oh, they better be aware, they better take care, they better be on their gua-a-ard.”