Modern Fairy Fail

Modern Fairy Fail
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 17, 2015

The closet under our stairs is home to a pair of battered suitcases, a retired floor mop topped with a shrivelled toupee of sponge and at least two generations of Daddy Long Leg spiders. I quite like spiders-on-stilts as a rule, but not when they come charging three abreast from the dark recesses of my scariest cupboard. Spring cleaning can be bloodthirsty work.

With my vacuum cleaner, I sucked them into the vortex of Hurricane Hoover and continued nosing deeper and deeper into the cupboard. And that’s when I struck an unfamiliar object. It was a mouldering cardboard box. I sliced open the packing tape with a knife. Inside was an antiquated collection of Brothers Grimm fairy tale books. They’d belonged to my mother as a girl and she, in turn, had entrusted them to my childhood.

I shuffled through the box, surprised and delighted to find these yellowing relics. Here were my favourite fairy tales – Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, Rumplestiltskin and Rapunzel. I teased open the fraying cloth cover of Hansel & Gretel and fell down a wormhole, hurtling back to my grandmother’s house and the bare boards of my bedroom, aged nine.

I remembered the story of Hansel & Gretel being a thrilling, if uncomfortable read: two children deserted by their new step-mother in the woods; captured by a cannibalistic witch who plans to barbecue her small prisoners. When at last, the witch gets her comeuppance, I reveled in the punitive gore of the hag being pushed alive into her own oven.

That witch deserved what she got. But I thought hard about what kind of father could be talked into discarding his children. He was a coward, I decided and I resolved never to get involved with one of those. But I was soon to acquire a step-father of my own. Not convinced of the benefits, I was already wary of being displaced in my mother’s affections. Hansel & Gretel became a touchstone for my own fears of abandonment.

Back beside the staircase, I discovered at the bottom of the box, a copy of The Juniper Tree – surely the most brutal of Grimms’ folk tales. As I turned the brittle pages for the first time in nearly forty years, the grisly illustrations loosened another panoply of childhood memories. In what cerebral crevice had they been hibernating?

Here was yet another hateful stepmother. This one beheads her stepson to allow her daughter to inherit the family fortune. The stepmother cooks the boy’s head in a stew and feeds it to his unwitting father, who remarks: ‘Delicious!’

I’d remembered few of the macabre and gory details – only a 9-year-old’s outrage that the villainous wife might get away with her crime. How relieved I’d been when she was crushed by a millstone.

Was my childish mind traumatized by such violent storytelling? Not me! I was far more terrified of the monster under my bed. Fairy tales were instructive: they cautioned me to trust my instincts. They helped me calibrate my moral compass.

Those old stories gave graphic expression to what every parent knows – that people get angry and even violent; and that these darker sides of human nature can be explored for entertainment rather than being repressed and denied.

My children have only ever seen the saccharine Disney versions of these fairytales – bowdlerized almost beyond recognition. In 21st century Hollywood, villains find themselves transformed or absolved. Good triumphs over evil and all mistakes can be rectified. Nice things happen to nice people.

Should we be sanitising fairy tales for today’s kids? In my mother’s 1940’s edition of Snow White, the evil queen must wear red-hot iron shoes at Snow White’s wedding, and dances herself to death. Cinderella’s horrible step-sisters have their eyes pecked out. Revenge was a fitting punishment. The awfulness those endings rankled in my mind, but I lapped them up, enjoying my darker fantasies.

Last night, I decided to test the delicacy of my five year old’s constitution. At bedtime, I produced my antique, unexpurgated copy of Cinderella and we settled down to read. On page 12, I remembered – nervously – what was coming. Cinderella’s stepsisters failed to fit the golden slipper. “Here’s a knife,” their mother urges. “If the slipper is still too tight for you, then cut off a piece of your foot. It will hurt a bit. But what does that matter?” So they slice off some toes.

I paused to gauge my five-year-old’s reaction, fearing I might have created a new monster for bedtime. But she turned to me and giggled.

“That was a dumb idea!” she said, whipping one foot out from under the covers. “They should’ve scrunched up their toes up like this.”

And with that practical advice, we went to the ball, met our Prince and lived happily ever after.

Closed Book

Closed Book
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday September 26, 2015

My teenage son’s dislike of reading is a pall between us. I am alternately saddened and infuriated by his sudden rejection of books. A pile of them sit idly on his bedside table, attracting dust. Their spines are stacked to face his pillow, the titles shouting to his deaf ears.

Every few weeks, I add another book to the pile, hoping it will ignite some glimmer of interest. I encourage, I cajole, I coerce. I paint him word-pictures of his smaller self, bewitched by the favourite stories of his childhood. I remind him how he had always been a rapacious reader; his books as precious as his Lego. I pull the Roald Dahls from his bookcase. We had bedded down with them night after night, the pair of us in raptures. I leave them lying around to serve as small mnemonics of the delights of reading. He is unmoved.

I lose my patience. I rant. I thrust books into his hands. “How can you not want to read?” I demand. “You’re so good at it. You’ve always loved reading. He shrugs: “Not any more.”

Later, to mollify me, he flops on the sofa and makes a pretence of being bookish with Stephen Fry. But I can see his heart’s not in it: he cannot find the stillness required to slip into another’s skin, to listen to another’s voice. Instead, he monitors the clock so he dare not read a minute more than the 30 minutes he’s promised me.

That night, sensing my exasperation has expired, he fronts me in the kitchen. “You’ve gotta let go, Mum,” he says, gently. “Reading’s not my thing, ok?”

I carry his words to my desk and remember the narrow-mindedness of being 15. He must discover for himself what the rest of us already know: that reading will give him a safe place to go. Reading will teach him what it’s like to be someone else. Reading will make him forget himself.

As an only child, I escaped to books early. Aged 12, my library card became a precious ticket for transporting me elsewhere. Our local library had soft carpet and high ceilings and a knack for absorbing my Saturday mornings.

The silence was mesmerising. If I tuned my ear, I could detect the low whispers of conversation at the front desk, the thud of a dropped book or a series of metallic thumps as the librarian stamped a stack of borrowings. The shrill voice of a child would shatter the stillness, followed by an urgent “shh!” from a parent. And then the quietness would envelop me again. Against a warm window overlooking the park, I retreated into my book, only to emerge an hour later, elated but mentally exhausted.

My favourite librarian was a flamboyant gent with a halo of wild silvery hair who’d stop by my desk each Saturday and mime his request to see what I was reading. I’d flip shut my book to show him the cover. He’d nod his approval before sweeping away with his armful of books. In a library, all readers are created equal.

A new book still delivers me its own small thrill. Perhaps it’s the promise of deep reading: slow and immersive. I hanker after that meditative state induced by concentration. With a book, I can sink beneath the everyday. I become oblivious even to the mechanics of reading – the gentle turning of pages -propelling me through a gripping story.

Books have left me euphoric but withered by tiredness; I have fought sleep to stay with their characters long past midnight. I have woken, bleary-eyed after a reading marathon, desperate to begin again.

Is it just me, or is online reading somehow less engaging? Less satisfying? I find myself repeatedly sidetracked by banner ads and neon signage. Click this link? Close that window? Visit that site? My brain splinters. I need the speed limits of ink on paper.

Perhaps my son’s boredom with books is not from lack of reading skills, but his inability to focus his attention. Reading for pleasure takes discipline and practice. It requires a stillness of mind. In his world, no book can compete with the endless frivolity of the internet. I tell him books will be his most constant of friends. He sighs and rolls his eyes.

I am not alone in my disappointment. I hear the despair from other mums whose teenage sons have shunned the pleasures of reading. “Where did I go wrong?” I ask a friend over coffee. She shakes her head: “You didn’t. He did. But it’s your job to fix it before it’s too late.”

“How? I’ve tried everything,” I reply, deflated.

I stop in at the book shop for counselling. “Try these,” says the bright young assistant. “Find the right book and he’ll read again.”

I leave $100 poorer but full of hope. Wish me luck.

Not Yet Booked Out

Not Yet Booked Out
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday September 13, 2014

The sight of so many books made my heart skip. Thousands of them sat pressed together on tables, a sea of spines, filling the University of WA’s Winthrop Hall. A smiling fellow with a silvery moustache stood by the door in a black apron. “Half price today,” he said. “We’re open ‘til 9.30 tonight.”

A hushed crowd inched along the tables, heads bowed over the vast array of titles. I could hear the gentle fluttering of pages, the murmurs of quiet conversations, an occasional soft thud as a heavy book was shut. The ceiling fans circled lazily.

I wandered over to a table piled with old tomes. I prised free a mottled-green volume. It was a book of Robert Browning’s poetry, printed in 1908. I ran a finger over the embossed gold lettering and opened the cover, inhaling the musty sweetness of its ageing paper. The flyleaf was inscribed with a beautiful handwritten cursive, all graceful loops and flourishes: ‘Mary – Ad finem fidelis – George’

The kindly doorman in the black apron happened to be standing behind me and craned over my shoulder. ‘Faithful to the end’, he said quietly. I smiled my ignorant thanks and admired George’s penmanship anew.

The pages of Robert Browning’s verse felt thick and coarse. They were handcut, some snipped a centimetre shorter than their neighbours. As I fanned through them, a rose petal slipped from between two pages and fluttered to the floor. Featherlight in my palm, the petal had once been crimson, but was now yellowed with age and puckered from the weight of a hundred pages. It had been pressed against a poem on page 138, ‘The Last Ride Together.’ I was intrigued.

…What if we still ride on, we two

With life for ever old yet new,

Changed not in kind but in degree,

The instant made eternity, — ”

Had the petal been pressed by George or by Mary? Or by some later owner? Did this gift mark the beginning of a love story or a reconciliation? I decided good books don’t give up all their secrets at once, and tucked Browning under my arm to ward off other browsers.

Standing to my left was a matron who’d picked up a scuffed leather-bound book with loose joints and torn hinges. She was elbowing her husband and tittering. Her husband was feigning interest but he himself was absorbed in a book about submarines (fancifully titled Up Periscope).

Tired of trying to hold his attention, she caught mine instead and proffered the ragged book. “Have a look at this!” she said. “It’s priceless!” I read the cover: The Witches Broomstick Manual. On the frontispiece, the illustrator had attempted a flattering portrait of a hag astride her broomstick, silhouetted against a full moon. The subtitle read: The Construction, Care and Use of the Witches’ Broom; Complete with a Course of Flight Instruction.

“Just what I need!” I replied. “The broom I’ve got at home is useless!”

I flicked through the soiled and spotted pages, stopping at a chapter on “Air Safety.” I read aloud to her: “Only fly at night. Avoid areas of military or political sensitivity. Study the stars and learn to guide by them. A small flashlight will be of immense value aloft. Your speed and height are limited only by atmospheric pressure and the prevailing weather. Be warned: daytime flying will cause trouble.”

“No kidding,” she said and we both giggled. The next paragraph concerned seatbelts: “A strong belt or rope tied around your waist should be fastened to the Besom (broom), so that you may be rescued after a possible separation. It may seem undignified to come in for a landing dangling at the end of a rope, but pride is no substitute for safety.”

“Marvellous!” she said. Her husband turned to me and sighed: “Please don’t let that book come home with us!”

I wedged it carefully back into the pile and the couple drifted to another table. All around the hall, people were moving in slow rotations, engrossed in the quiet pleasure of book inspections. Most had a selection concertinaed along one arm. Those with too many to carry were offloading books into boxes, stacked in clumsy pagodas against the wall.

Perhaps, despite our gadgetry, we will always turn to books for comfort? For consolation, or stimulation or escape. Maybe books are the only true magic? I headed for the exit and handed over the book of poetry wedged in my armpit.

“Aah Robert Browning!” said the woman at the counter. She admired the cover, then gently opened it to find the price. The book fell open at George’s Latin inscription to Mary and she looked at me quizzically. “Faithful to the end,” I said. “How lovely,” she said. “That’ll be $6 please.”