From the Forest Read online

  Similarly, the sister in ‘The Seven Swans’9 is bound to silence for seven years in order to save her brothers from enchantment. Without this condition there would be no second half to the story – she would get on with her complicated sewing task (she has to make each of them a shirt out of starwort – a forest flower interestingly also known as stitchwort), liberate her brothers, and nothing much else would have happened. Unable to speak, however, she becomes involved in a long and rather horrible ‘adventure’ in which she sacrifices her own children for her brothers’ redemption and which ends with her on the witch’s pyre. Her brothers rescue her at the last moment – the silence and secrecy has allowed seven years to pass, her sewing is finished (almost: one of the most touching things about this story, perhaps my very favourite of the Grimms’ tales, is that she does not quite complete one sleeve of one shirt, so her youngest brother has to go through life with a trailing swan’s wing instead of an arm), and everyone can live happily ever after – even her children are restored to her.

  These stories run alarmingly parallel to the more modern narrative of childhood sexual abuse – especially in the tragic mixture of fear and guilt which is used to keep the victim silenced. The maid in ‘The Goosegirl’ is obviously female, but otherwise fits sinisterly into the role of abuser – a trusted person (the princess’s mother is not negligent) known to the princess changes abruptly when the child is in her care alone; she bullies the girl into a promise of silence. Moreover, in the original version of the story the ‘good’ mother gives her daughter a strange parting gift – a white cloth with three drops of her own blood on it. This protects the true princess until she accidentally loses it. There is no explanation of this gift in the tale, and it is never restored or found – it is a secret within the secrecy of the story, but it is very hard not to read some symbol of virginity or menstruation into it; later on in this story, there is a peculiar, superficially pointless passage about the girl’s terror over the sexual advances of a perfectly innocent young man.

  The brothers in ‘The Seven Swans’ are banished and turned into swans explicitly because their father wants the daughter for himself. Is he banishing witnesses, natural protectors or potential competition? We do not know, but later the girl withdraws into the forest herself and will not speak. There is one story – ‘All Fur’ (or, in older translations, Allerleirauh) – that is explicitly about father-daughter sexual abuse; here the daughter is so horrified at her father’s proposal that she runs away and hides in the forest wearing a cloak made from the fur of every kind of wild animal. She is found there, asleep in a hollow tree, by a king out hunting, and carried back to the castle – where she is put to work in the kitchens. Of course she is eventually revealed as a princess and marries the king, but her evasions and determination to keep her true identity hidden are extreme. She seems to be experiencing a powerful conflict between shame and her desire for restoration. Stories like ‘All Fur’ and other more oblique secrecy tales raise dark questions about all this silencing of young women that is treated as an oddly normal plot device.

  Several years ago I led a creative writing residential weekend exploring modern approaches to fairy stories. One of the women on the course wrote a version of ‘Snow White’. In her darkly resonant tale, the ‘magic mirror’ that truthfully revealed which woman was ‘the fairest of all’ was the King’s eyes: looking into them, the ‘wicked’ Queen could always tell whether the King desired her or his own daughter. The stepmother’s complex responses of jealousy and protectiveness become the motivation that drives the story.10

  In many of the tales, however, the secrets are lighter hearted. In ‘Rumplestiltskin’ it is the heroine who has to find out the secret name of the ‘ridiculous little man’ (he is only that in the original – neither a gnome nor a devil) in order to keep her child safe. The morality of this particular story is extremely odd: the young woman is in a tricky situation because her father ‘in order to make himself seem important’ has told the King his daughter can spin straw into gold. The King only marries her because he is greedy:‘You must spin all this straw into gold tonight. If you succeed you shall become my wife.’ To himself he thought, ‘Even though she’s just a miller’s daughter I’ll never find a richer woman anywhere in the world.’

  And, uniquely, the woman is let off a vow she took freely and does in fact get her child back, and the little man is punished – one might think rather unfairly. But at the heart of the story is the secret identity of the little man, which has to be uncovered.

  Or, in ‘The Twelve Huntsmen’, a dozen young women disguise themselves as men in order to win back the love of a prince, who has forgotten his promises to one of them. He is warned that they are female, but they outwit the traps he lays for them (stamping firmly on some dried peas so they are crushed instead of rolling about, and remembering not even to glance at some unusually attractive spinning wheels he lays out for them). Nonetheless, he finds himself more and more attracted to the chief huntsman – until one day, while he is out hunting in the forest, a messenger announces that the ‘false bride’ is approaching. The girl lover faints, and attempting to revive her, the prince pulls off her glove and sees his own ring on her finger. He immediately falls back in love with her and all ends happily. But although there is nothing at all sinister in this story, the disguise that seems so central is in fact rather pointless – she could just have arrived in her real persona and, if necessary, shown him the ring. The unwinding of the secret is the real purpose of the story.

  So profound a narrative device does this secrecy become that in some of the stories there is absolutely no logical reason whatsoever for it, but it is there simply to hold the plot together. ‘Cinderella’ is a fascinating case in point. It is one of the stories that has become most distorted in its popular development, while at the same time it is probably the most successful and widely known of all the tales. But the version we know has surprisingly little in common even with the last Grimms’ redacted tale, and the changes are instructive. In the first place, the ‘ugly’ stepsisters are not ugly, as I explained earlier – they are ‘beautiful and fair of face, but vile and black of heart’; their true natures are hidden by their pretty faces. More importantly, there is no Fairy Godmother. Instead, the plot develops somewhat differently: one day, the father is going to the fair and asks his daughters what they would like him to bring them back. ‘Beautiful dresses, pearls and jewels,’ say the stepsisters. ‘The first branch which knocks against your hat on your way home,’ says Cinderella – a passing reference to the fact that he will travel through a wood on his journey. Unusually for a father in a fairy story, he does not forget or blunder and comes home with the promised goods. Cinderella takes the hazel branch and plants it on her birth mother’s grave. It grows into a ‘handsome tree’ and Cinderella visits it three times a day. A little white bird lives in the tree and ‘if Cinderella expressed a wish, the bird threw down to her what she had wished for’. When the Prince’s ball is announced, Cinderella wants to go and her stepmother sets her the impossible challenge of sorting lentils from ashes to see if she is worthy. Cinderella calls on some birds, though not apparently the bird of her tree, to help her and is thus successful. However, her stepmother reneges on her promise and she and the stepsisters go off the ball. Cinderella’s response is prompt – no sitting by the fire and weeping in this earlier version. She goes ‘at once’ to the tree and gets a pretty frock which she puts on ‘with all speed’ and hastens to the party. Now everything proceeds as in the version we know, except, of course, that it is Cinderella’s free choice – rather than a restriction imposed upon her by the Fairy Godmother – to leave the ball and keep her identity secret. She repeats this sequence for the traditional three evenings, but far from being so stupid as to drop her slipper, it transpires that the Prince has cunningly covered the staircase with pitch so that the slipper sticks to it; she cannot stop to pick it up because he is pursuing her – and she has to hide in the dovecot.

  I
n the original tale the slipper is not glass but simply ‘small and dainty and all golden’. The slipper became glass at a double remove: Perrault, in his version, made it a ‘fur slipper’; the French words for ‘fur’ is ‘ver’, and the French word for ‘glass’ is ‘verre’. In a moment of erroneous inspiration, the English translator got it wrong – or rather, deeply, though accidentally, right.

  Interestingly, the original involves a much less passive and more energetic Cinderella forging her own destiny, but it also does not make much sense. Since the tree will give her what she wants just for the asking, why is she still slaving for her stepmother? More crucially though, why does she choose to leave the ball repeatedly, run away and hide, and above all conceal her identity – right up to the very end? The assumption that a story needs a secret has, in this instance, overwhelmed the requirements of plot, motivation and character. So, although we lose an unusually active heroine, the present popular version makes a much better story. (We also lose the hideous but clever symmetrical choreography of the wedding, where Cinderella goes into the church accompanied by her stepsisters and two birds fly down and sit on the outside shoulder of each stepsister to peck one of their eyes out each; when the three come out of the church, the birds repeat this procedure, but since they are now walking the other way, the stepsisters both lose both eyes, right and left.).

  There is an argument that there is good psychological sense in the Grimms’ version of this story: Cinderella needs to test not herself but the Prince. She does not, following the betrayal of her father, who behaves rather worse in the original, dare to risk a ‘one-night stand’. It is the Prince who has to prove his worthiness by searching for and finding the ‘true bride’. But if that was the underlying message of the story, it is much obscured – partly by the Prince being bizarrely easy to deceive. He carries off each of the stepsisters in turn, and Cinderella’s birds have to point out to him that their feet are bleeding where they sliced off pieces of toe or heel to make the slipper fit. In any event, no comment is passed on Cinderella’s motives or intentions – this is a fairy story, a narrative form where things are surprising and secret but need no explanation of the modern causal kind.

  Perhaps the new woods pushing their way onto land in South London that was claimed from them and then abandoned will similarly make ‘much better woods’ one day. We do not know. The point is that the woods are still trying, in little secret ways.

  In these stories the women know their true identity and keep it secret – just as the dancing princesses conceal the secret palace where they go to dance their slippers into shreds. The forest is about concealment and appearances are not to be trusted. Things are not necessarily what they seem and can be dangerously deceptive. Snow White’s murderous stepmother is truly ‘the fairest of all’. The wolf can disguise himself as a sweet old granny. The forest hides things; it does not open them out but closes them off. Trees hide the sunshine; and life goes on under the trees, in the thickets and tanglewood. Forests are full of secrets and silences. It is not strange that the fairy stories that come out of the forest are stories about hidden identities, both good and bad.

  And in many of the tales, someone’s true identity is not known to anyone, even the protagonist – it is eventually revealed by events. There is no way the proud little princess could have guessed that her frog was a prince – it is hard to blame her for not wanting to take it to bed or kiss it; her father makes her do so because she has promised to and must keep her word.11 There are a great number of stories in this vein. Inside each person, regardless of beauty or situation, there is a true self – someone is a ‘natural’ princess or prince or king. Their conduct in the forest, in the dangerous secret places, will test their integrity and reveal that self. Proud princesses will be taught that the despised suitor is the real prince, the proper bridegroom, the future king. Fathers and kings must be taught that the third son, the stupid one, or the beggar at the gate whom they have scorned and mocked, is really the hero of this story. Mothers need to learn that their favourite child is not necessarily the most deserving one. The neglected child will go out into the forest and come home with treasure, while the favoured child, spoiled and selfish, will be revealed as mean and ugly-spirited. Everyone should be cautious about the people they meet – they should be careful about trusting them, and careful about revealing too much of themselves too soon.

  Perhaps this is why the most evocative things on our walk were the railway tunnels. Essentially, much of our route (more or less) followed the old railway line from Forest Hill to Norwood. Sometimes, as at the start, we were in or beside the railway cutting. Sometimes we diverted and lost the railway, but sometimes it deliberately hid itself, plunging underground and vanishing from sight. These tunnel entrances and exits have been boarded up of course, and it is impossible to follow them into the darkness. Around the mouths of the tunnels the re-awakening woods seem to be trying to create deeper veils – thick, spooky-feeling, tangled undergrowth; in one case a derelict tennis court – and then emerge somewhere else. For me, this vanishing path through places where ancient woodland and human habitation meet – a ruined past and a lively present – felt like a potent and moving image of fairy stories themselves.

  Little Goosegirl

  Once upon a time there was a wise old king who was troubled in his mind.

  Something . . . something was awry, he felt, and he could not work out what it was. There was an uneasiness, something rotten at the core. He could not put his finger on it.

  ‘My dear,’ he said to his wife, the Queen, ‘I feel that a cold shadow has fallen on our castle and something is not as it should be. There are bad secrets in the air.’

  His wife, the Queen, who was trimming his moustache at that moment with a small pair of scissors – a tender little task she always did herself because it amused her – told him to be quiet or she would nip his tongue. But later, while he was doing up the buttons down the back of her dress – a tender little task he always did himself because he loved the soft skin at the nape of her neck – she asked him what he thought of their son’s new wife. They had been married a long and happy time, so they understood each other’s thought processes.

  ‘The boy seems happy enough,’ the King said.

  ‘She must be good in bed,’ said the Queen dryly. ‘Sometimes I do wonder if we are sensible to put all that effort into keeping the princes chaste – it just means that they muddle up love and sex.’

  ‘But the succession . . . a proper royal heir,’ he protested.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said the Queen, ‘there is always that. And there’s no use crying over spilled milk. I believe,’ she added, ‘that some families nowadays let them choose their own brides – for love, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t choose you,’ said the King, kissing the very place where the soft skin was replaced by her soft hair, ‘and there is plenty of love. On my side anyway . . .’ He nibbled a small question below her ear and she giggled like a teenager. Then they got slightly diverted from their serious conversation and, indeed, were very nearly late for dinner.

  But later, after he had undone her dress buttons and loosened her stay-cords and tied her nightdress ribbon – three tender little tasks he always did himself because he loved the soft skin at the nape of her neck – and she had climbed into bed, he found he was restless and could not sleep. He did not like the new princess. He sensed something mean and dark in her, something wrong. But he could hardly write to her mother, his old friend, childhood playmate and distant relative on the distaff side, and complain that he did not much like her daughter. She was old and widowed and suffered terribly from arthritis, so that she could not even travel to the wedding for pain. The children had been affianced since very soon after their births; it had been settled in the usual way. There was nothing he could do. He was getting old, he thought irritably. He re-tied his pyjama string and joined his sleeping wife in the royal bed.

  One morning, about a week later, his Chancellor handed him h
is daily list and he saw that the goose herd had asked for a meeting. He tried to manage an orderly chain of command, but he also believed that anyone who worked for him should be allowed to meet him whenever they wanted. He knew a number of his colleagues thought this hopelessly old-fashioned and believed that a king should hold to his dignity and not meet face to face with every Tom, Dick and Sally who fancied it.

  ‘Prim us inter pares,’ he had said to the stuck-up young king from next door. And then, because he was actually quite kindly and did not want to rub the lad’s face in the fact that he knew no Latin, he added, ‘First among equals. That’s what a king is.’

  ‘Oh nonsense, Your Majesty,’ said the younger man. ‘That went out with the Conquest.’

  The King wondered how the young king made ‘Your Majesty’ sound as contemptuous as ‘Grandad’. Nonetheless, he stuck to his old practice.

  So now, at 10.15 a.m., the goose herd, whose name was Conrad, was shown in. The King liked the boy; he was not the sharpest knife in the box, but he was a good open-hearted lad and his family worked their fields well and he played fiddle in the village band. Perhaps young Conrad felt ready for promotion, in which case . . . the King thought quickly. But Conrad seemed oddly awkward, unable to get to the point. The King was puzzled but persisted gently. There was obviously something he wanted to say. And finally, blushing slightly, he blurted out: