6. The Glass Castle

On fairy tales and femininity

In a cottage at the edge of a forest, a poor widow lived with her two daughters. One – fair, quiet and gentle – was named Snow White after the white roses in their small garden. The other, dark haired, lively, loving to ‘skip and dance’, was named Rose Red after the red roses. They each wore a rose in their hair – one red, one white – and walked everywhere together holding hands. Then, one cold winter’s night, a black bear knocked at their door, making their pet lamb bleat; their dove smashed himself against the windows with fear. The bear’s fur was bright with ice. ‘I have not come to hurt you,’ he said in a deep, soft voice. He called them ‘dear children’. They warmed him by the fire, and gently swept the snow from his coat.

Perhaps it was because I was fair, quiet and gentle, my sister dark and lively, that I was enchanted by that fairy tale. It is tale 161 in the Brothers Grimm’s two-volume collection of German stories, Children’s and Household Tales (1812–15), but I knew it in the Ladybird ‘Well-Loved Tales’ Reading Series 606D, retold by Vera Southgate and illustrated by Eric Winter. It seemed more mysterious and uncanny, somehow, than the other stories in the series. Even the ending is strange, when the dwarf is defeated and the bear becomes a prince. The two sisters, it was clear to me, are both in love with him, but Rose Red is palmed off on a faceless ‘brother’. (I wonder if that bear knocking on the door, those girls stroking his fur, influenced The Tiger Who Came to Tea?)

The Ladybird imprint was begun by Henry Wills and William Hepworth in 1915, with Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales. It was intended to produce ‘wholesome and healthy literature for children’. The iconic mini-hardback format we associate with the brand, with 56 pages, roughly 4½″ × 7″, first appeared in 1940 (Bunnikin’s Picnic Party, which naturally included more of those anthropomorphic rabbits). It was a response to wartime restrictions on paper supply, with the format chosen because it allowed an entire book to be printed on one large standard sheet of paper – a quad crown, 40″ × 30″ – then folded and cut to size without any waste. It was economical, enabling the books to retail at a low price which was, for almost thirty years, 2/6d. The distinct aesthetic was also created by a decision not to use children’s illustrators but, instead, established commercial artists. While Ladybird soon became famous for non-fiction and nature titles, it was the ‘Well-Loved Tales’, designed for easy reading, that my generation learnt, stumblingly, to read from. Look and say: ‘Once upon a time …’ Now every picture book section is overrun with retellings of Cinderella and The Three Billy Goats Gruff – pop-up, flap, rhyming, board, textured, modernized, glittering, with sound effects. But for me fairy tales and Ladybirds were synonymous.

My sister’s favourite Ladybird book was a different ‘Well-Loved Tale’ – another deriving from the Brothers Grimm’s collection, The Elves and the Shoemaker, also retold by Vera Southgate, with illustrations by Robert Lumley. She was delighted by the shoes the elves helped make, with their bright leathers – blue, red, yellow, green; the pink, fringed ankle boots – and charmed by the miniaturization: the tiny outfits the shoemaker and his wife stitch for the elves, to say thank you; the absurd stockings laid out next to thimble-sized boots and hats with red feathers. It is a story in which immense powers are used to achieve small domestic goals, making me think of Angela Carter’s lovely summation: ‘A fairy tale is a story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.’

Marina Warner, in her short history of the fairy tale Once Upon a Time, notes that another term for a fairy tale is a ‘wonder tale’, from the German Wundermärchen. The supernatural is another defining characteristic of these stories, an implicit or explicit sense of magic. For a child, to whom life itself is a wonder, the tales reflect their sense of the world’s still-endless possibilities. G. K. Chesterton has written beautifully in his essay ‘The Ethics of Elfland’:

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, ‘charm’, ‘spell’, ‘enchantment’. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched.

However, it should also be noted that fairy tales were not always considered children’s literature. The term ‘fairy tale’ (‘conte de fées’) was first used by Madame d’Aulnoy in the seventeenth century, when such stories circulated amongst intellectuals in the salons of Paris, often disguising critiques of court. Her contemporary Charles Perrault, writer of such famous tales as ‘Cinderella’, ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Puss in Boots’ and ‘Bluebeard’, also attended these salons, and the morals they extract are clearly aimed at a sophisticated adult audience rather than a four-year-old. ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, for example, ends (in Angela Carter’s translation) with the insight that: ‘There are real wolves, with hairy pelts and enormous teeth; but also wolves who seem perfectly charming, sweet-natured and obliging, who pursue young girls in the street and pay them the most flattering attentions.’

It was the Victorians, Marina Warner notes, who ‘nudged the material into the nursery’. In 1823 when the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales were first published in England in translation, the caricaturist George Cruikshank’s frontispiece showed a laughing grandad and a granny reading to little ones. His other pictures conjured, in Warner’s words: ‘sweet-faced heroines, plucky lads and dancing elves. The magical animals are comical and endearing, the giants are goofy, their rage is absurd and easily managed.’ The lightness was teased out; the darker shadows ignored. They were illustrations to bait the children and soothe their parents, beginning the process of turning fairy tales into picture book fodder.

These tales of bewitchment also suited Victorian nannies as they still asserted a kind of morality – if we pay attention, we notice that magic is always depicted as the consequence of a human action. Chesterton writes:

For the pleasure of pedantry I will call it the Doctrine of Conditional Joy. Touchstone talked of much virtue in an ‘if’; according to elfin ethics all virtue is in an ‘if’. The note of the fairy utterance always is, ‘You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word “cow”’; or, ‘You may live happily with the King’s daughter, if you do not show her an onion.’ The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld.

And what is this if not also a description of the ethics of grown-ups? How rarely, after all, adults really explain to their children why they must or must not do something. Instead, enchantments depend upon routine chores. If you eat that cabbage you can have an ice cream. If you get in the pram I’ll fetch your teddy. If you poo in the potty you can have that story you love about Rumpelstiltskin. If you go to sleep, the fairy will come and swap your milk tooth for a coin.

My father’s favourite story as a child was, by one of those strange coincidences that happen when you are in love, the same as my mother’s. It was in a 1950s Collins anthology, My Book of Elves and Fairies, and told of Griselda, who, every time she cleaned the windows, found the rain fairies sliding down them in their muddy boots.

He liked to tell me stories about fairies too. When I was small my father told me on a couple of occasions about the Cottingley Fairies. In 1917, in Cottingley in Yorkshire, nine-year-old Frances Griffiths was staying in the home of her cousin, sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright. To their mothers’ irritation, they often played together by the beck at the bottom of the garden and came back with sodden feet and clothes. They had to go to the beck though, they explained, in order to visit the fairies. Elsie borrowed her father’s camera to take a photograph that would prove it.

When he saw the image of Frances with four dancing fairies, Arthur Wright, a keen amateur photographer who had given his daughter some lessons, dismissed it as a ‘prank’. But Elsie’s mother, Polly, believed. It was after attending a lecture at the Theosophical Society in Bradford in 1919 on ‘Fairy Life’ that Polly Wright showed others the photograph, along with another Elsie had taken of a gnome. All things supernatural were in fashion amongst a public exhausted by war and looking for escape. When the photos came to the attention of a leading member of the society, Edward Gardner, he was ecstatic, claiming that: ‘the fact that two young girls had not only been able to see fairies, which others had done, but had actually for the first time ever been able to materialize them at a density sufficient for their images to be recorded on a photographic plate, meant that it was possible that the next cycle of evolution was underway.’ The two girls spoke to Gardner about how they would ‘tice the fairies, as they called their way of attracting them’. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – doctor, cricketer, inventor of Sherlock Holmes and keen spiritualist – became involved, asking to print the images alongside an article he was writing for The Strand Magazine. More photographs appeared in 1920: ‘Frances and the Leaping Fairy’, ‘Fairy Offering Posy of Harebells to Elsie’, ‘Fairies and their Sun-Bath’. Doyle wrote a book entitled The Coming of the Fairies (1922), in which he claimed: ‘To the objections of photographers that the fairy figures show quite different shadows to those of the human our answer is that ectoplasm, as the etheric protoplasm has been named, has a faint luminosity of its own, which would largely modify shadows.’ He believed that: ‘The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life.’

I loved this story, so much so that, when I was five, I claimed that I saw a fairy in a bush. I’m fairly sure I made it up, but I wanted it to be true so much, I convinced myself. I can still see my fib so vividly: the little, rustling fairy in the shadows with her dark hair and dress the colour of a blackberry stain. Did I make it up to impress my father; to be like Elsie? Did I need, even then, to escape the muddy rut of the everyday, to believe in mystery?

Even as my father told me the story of the Cottingley Fairies though, I realize now, he must have known they were faked. After all, what could have prompted his telling but the fact that in 1983 the cousins admitted in the magazine The Unexplained that the pictures were staged? Elsie confessed that she had copied the pictures from a children’s book – a popular illustrated anthology called Princess Mary’s Gift Book. But my dad let me believe.

Frances said: ‘I can’t understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in.’

Another influence on my vision was, certainly, the Flower Fairy books written and illustrated by Cicely Mary Barker. The first of these, Flower Fairies of the Spring (1923), came out just a year after Doyle’s The Coming of Fairies, and benefited from the same wave of enthusiasm for ‘little people’. In 1983 they too resurfaced in the public’s consciousness, when the Hornby Flower Fairy Dolls were released. There was a gift shop in our village called The Bow Window, which had jewellery and wrapping paper, and a children’s area upstairs, and I began collecting the reissued Flower Fairy books from there. I remember being bribed with them (‘If you try and ride your bike without stabilizers, you can have Flower Fairies of the Summer’). I remember getting a flower press at the same time and squashing red campion and cowslip; being allowed my own little patch of garden and planting candytuft. For my birthday I asked for the 7″ plastic dolls with stiff floral skirts: Heliotrope, Narcissus, Sweet Pea. We had the petal shower; a secret garden with a swing and a dew-drop pond. Flower Fairies of the Winter was published posthumously in 1985, and I raided my (Beatrix Potter) money bank for a copy straight away.

Cicely Mary Barker was the daughter of a seed-merchant who died at forty-three from a virus contracted from contaminated corn. Along with her sister, Dorothy, she had to make her own living, and began to illustrate cards. Barker was largely self-taught – like Edward Lear she suffered from epilepsy which made her an outsider, unable to attend school – although she took correspondence courses and briefly attended the Croydon School of Art. She claimed to draw ‘without any real thought or attention to artistic theories’, but she was also meticulous, always making careful preparatory sketches of flowers from life, and even obtaining cuttings of less common botanical specimens from Kew Gardens. Barker had her own studio in her garden where she kept a trunk of Flower Fairy costumes she had made by hand, along with wings assembled from gauze and twigs. As models for her fairies, she used real children from the kindergarten school her sister started. Gladys Tidy, an eight-year-old girl who came to her house every Saturday to do household work like black-leading the stove for a shilling, also posed for Barker. Later Tidy recalled she had to go through the below-stairs back door on Saturdays, but was allowed through the front door when she was the ‘Primrose Fairy’.

The tension between accuracy and fantasy, experience and innocence, is the appeal of the pictures, although Barker was scrupulous even in her introductions, telling the readers in the introduction to Flower Fairies of the Wayside:

Let me say quite plainly, that I have drawn all the plants and flowers very carefully, from real ones; and everything I have said about them is as true as I could make it. But I have never seen a fairy; the fairies and all about them are just ‘pretend’ (it’s nice to pretend about fairies).

I, like many children, knew the truth of this last aside, and still get a shiver, as if in the presence of sorcery, to hear ‘The Song of the Daisy Fairy’:

Come to me and play with me,

I’m the babies’ flower;

Make a necklace gay with me,

Spend the whole long day with me,

Till the sunset hour.

Anyway, Barker never said fairies didn’t exist, only that she hadn’t seen them, and it was safer (I thought) to bet on their existence, given that, as J. M. Barrie pointed out: ‘every time a child says “I don’t believe in fairies” there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.’

Magic is the refuge of the powerless. The dream that the grim everyday might burst its banks: a bare cooking pot pour out endless porridge; a broom become a means of escape; a wish a weapon.

Girls perhaps most of all have historically felt powerless, and the appeal of magic has been strong. Alison Uttley, in her novel The Country Child, evokes a world in which ‘Jinny Green-teeth’ lives under the green scum of the mill pond and drags down little children; where wishes can be made on oxlips, stars, clover, ‘the new moon, white bluebells, the first cuckoo’. Even I, my childhood sunny with second-wave feminism, longed desperately for supernatural power. Just as I hallucinated fairies, so I would stare at the bathroom light bulb until my retinas were spangled in the hope it would turn me into Supergirl; would spend hours making spells: whispering made-up incantations, stirring up a potion of dandelion and stone. I loved all the beginner’s modes of prophecy – he loves me not, black cats, spat cherry stones: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor … I remember, from infants all the way up to high school my friends and I would spend hours trying to regress into past lives (I was always some kind of maudlin Victorian orphan) or levitate.

There is a distinction, though, between the model of femininity offered by fairies and that offered by witches. The desire for fairies is for a world beneath or within this one. A secret, more beautiful world we might discover in our ordinary domestic lives if we are just attentive enough. It is a world that will be revealed to girls who are heedful and quiet, one that picture books populate with small, delicate, pretty creatures who sip droplets of dew and take very small bites off petal plates. Witches are different. They take domestic items (cooking pots, brooms) and use them to subvert and escape. They cackle, they curse, they make stuff happen, they terrify people. I wanted to see a fairy, but I wanted to be a witch.

I’m not entirely sure why, as the only witch I recall seeing in my preschool years was the rather useless Meg. (This is despite trips every Halloween to nearby Pendle Hill, site of the famous witch-hunt, during which my father would encourage us to spot witches as we drove along.) Meg and Mog and Owl first appeared in Meg and Mog in 1972, in the series written by Helen Nicoll. It was illustrated by Jan Pieńkowski who has spoken of his early memories of growing up on a farm in Poland, a ‘tiny medieval world’ where they raised baby deer and pet fox cubs. The coachman’s wife would persuade him to drink his boiled milk by telling him tales about a witch, each of which ended on a cliff-hanger. He has said: ‘I used to have terrible dreams, nightmares, of this witch, always chasing me and trying to put me in a pot.’ Baba Jaga’s house was perched on a chicken’s foot.

He was three when Poland was invaded. His family were soon moving around the continent to Austria, Germany and Italy, before settling in Herefordshire in 1946. In the early seventies, Pieńkowski met Helen Nicoll while they were both working for the BBC. She had an idea about a witch and her cat, and Judith Elliott at Heinemann commissioned two books. As Nicoll lived near Marlborough in Wiltshire and Pieńkowski lived in London, they established the routine of meeting to work at the Membury service station on the M4. (Pieńkowski, in his moving obituary for Nicoll in The Guardian in 2012, noted: ‘I always brought a little bunch of flowers to put on our table.’)

Meg and Mog begins with Meg waking up, getting dressed, stepping on Mog (MEEEOW) and making breakfast in her cauldron, like a spell for stomach ache, out of three eggs, bread, cocoa, milk, jam and a kipper. Pieńkowski’s childhood nightmares have been sublimated into a cheerful palette of primary colours, inspired by traditional Polish embroidery. The ordinary routine becomes a zany comic strip. Later, a Halloween ritual goes wrong and she turns her friends Bess, Jess, Tess and Cress into mice. This is typical – Pieńkowski claims that he made one condition at the start of the series that ‘if the witch were to make a spell, it must never work’ – as is her shrugged response: ‘I’ll have to change them back, next Halloween.’ Witchcraft is a fantasy of power over matter, but Meg’s power is completely uncontrollable. It can make something happen, but the what is almost always a surprise to Meg herself. Abracadabra unleashes anarchy, a series of random events during which nothing will be learnt. It is dangerous fun, like a child repeating a swear word – gleefully observing its strange effects without understanding how exactly it works (‘I must have put in too much bacon,’ she notes in Meg’s Eggs).

Or perhaps Meg is more like a mother. She tries to provide – food, holidays, a car – but things always go wrong in an onslaught of onomatopoeia (CLANG, CRUNCH, SQUAWK, EEEEE, SPLAT). Her authority, the adult knowledge supposedly contained within her spells, is time after time exposed as negligible, just bluff and error, but her family unit muddle through – a fact that is, in its way, empowering.

I, too, had a magical parent whose powers were unreliable.

Perhaps the time has come to write about my father’s psychic abilities, which were a huge part of my childhood. I have held back over many years because I do not want to expose these powers to real, adult scrutiny. I know they cannot have been true, yet I sincerely believe them to be true. I am reminded of a phrase by Emily Dickinson: ‘we both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.’ Of course all adults dissemble about magic – about the Sandman and the Easter Bunny and Christ’s miracles – but belief, in my home, was a particularly nimble thing. On our bookshelf was a guide to bending spoons; on a clear night my dad would watch out over the reservoir for UFOs.

Where do I begin? Before my dad was born perhaps. He told us that he had somehow retained all the memories of both my Grandad and Granny Pollard up until the moment of his conception. My father was usually boastful in a forgivable, boyish, bursting-with-pride kind of way, but about this supernatural power he was strangely muted. It wasn’t pleasant, to know these things: to recall all their small discomforts and sorrows.

When my dad was a child, he heard his father claim that during the war, while posted in India, he had seen a tiger. ‘No you didn’t,’ my dad supposedly said. ‘You were too scared, you stayed in the tent.’

In this telling my grandad turned white at his small child’s uncanny knowledge.

My dad had other fragments of my grandad’s memories from India too: an awkward gay encounter; a visit to a Taj Mahal filthy and stinking with neglect. Of his mother’s memories, he only said that he remembered her wedding night. She felt disgusted.

The idea of genetic memory has always seemed to me an argument against having children. How terrifying, to think your sleeping babe has suckled on your darkest thoughts; all that filthy mess you want to protect them from. That they can judge you like God. What better revenge could there be against inadequate parents than knowing who they are? It’s the set-up for a horror film.

Were the memories inherited, though? There was a blurry area, because my dad could also read people’s minds, although he generally chose not to – he didn’t like what he saw. (For example, there was that time, verified by my Uncle John, when he went into a pub and said to a man at the bar, ‘You didn’t get on with your father, did you?’ and the man replied, shaken, ‘How did you know?’ It later transpired that he had murdered him.)

So many other tales, too, imbued my childhood with a sense of larger powers; unseen forces. My dad had slept in a haunted house riddled with cold spots; encountered a panther in a bush by the reservoir; seen a glimmering aura on my cousin Sally. Once, he constructed a voodoo doll of someone hateful he worked with at school, stuck pins into it in our garage, then stopped (with fear and guilt) when that person was hospitalized. Most commonly, though, there were premonitions. My dad was perpetually getting feelings about the future, especially the outcomes of horse races (steeplechase only). Once he knew not to drive his car on an icy night, less than twenty-four hours before the brakes failed. When he met my mother at a dance at teacher-training college in Poulton, legend has it he went straight to his friend and said: ‘That’s the woman I’m going to marry.’

For a while, he hoped I might have psychic abilities too. It was I, not Mary, who was lined up to take after him. There was an occasion when I was about three when I spent all day demanding my Muppet annual. My mum repeatedly told me I didn’t have one, until my dad came home from teaching at school brandishing a find from the jumble sale: ‘Look what I’ve got you, Clare – a Muppet annual!’ When I finally got to Junior 2 and he was my teacher (I’d call him ‘sir’ at the dinner table) we did mind-reading in class and I guessed all of his numbers correctly.

But in the end, my intuition failed me. When he first became ill, I was so certain it wasn’t cancer. I knew. I had a feeling. But it was still cancer.

Now that he’s dead, I’ll never know for sure how much he believed in his own powers or made them up; what was amusement and what was serious. What really went on in my dad’s head? I haven’t inherited that knowledge. But although I don’t believe him I still believe him. I want to live in the world that he told me I lived in, with its ‘glamour and mystery’. I want to be taken in.

Pieńkowski’s bold, black line illustrations are memorable for me in a way that only Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Men and Little Miss books can parallel. As Charlie Brooker has written in The Guardian, ‘The way Roger Hargreaves drew a shoe is still the way a shoe looks when I picture it. Same with a house. Or a hat. Or a butcher. Or a wizard. Or a cloud.’ The series began in 1971 with Mr Tickle, inspired by Hargreaves’ son, Adam, asking what a tickle looked like. The answer was round and orange, with very long arms. Hargreaves always wrote stories that would take less than five minutes to read, calling them ‘bedtime stories for weary daddies’. He drew in Magic Marker, his strong lines masking the way colour spread across the page in the days before bleed-proof paper. He liked to draw the smiles in last, to bring the characters to life.

The Mr Men books also frequently use fairy tale, magic and myth – Misterland is a world of kings, giants, shrinking spells, wishing wells, goblins, tiny doors in trees, and, frequently, wizards (Adam Hargreaves has noted that when his dad ran out of plot ideas he would always introduce a wizard). Mr Strong, when he fills an upside-down barn with the river to put out a ‘blazing cornfield’, nods to the Fifth Labour of Hercules: diverted rivers cleaning the Augean Stables. Miss Bossy’s relentless magic boots allude to the red-hot iron shoes put on the wicked stepmother at the end of Snow White’s wedding or Hans Christian Andersen’s monstrous red shoes. There is another way in which they nod to old tales too – in the oral markers which draw attention to the teller. As Philip Pullman has noted, ‘a fairy tale is not a text’, it should have a living connection to voice, and the Mr Men books frequently break the fourth wall and draw attention to the listener, still up in bed. Questions are asked (‘Can you giggle and eat cornflakes at the same time?’); gossipy advice is given. Mr Tickle’s hand is perhaps ‘already creeping to the door of this room’. Hargreaves even appears in Mr Small and Little Miss Star, in the kind of metatextual gesture that seemed so fresh and bold to me as a child that it primed me to get excited about Martin Amis years later.

Certain things still seem to me to be delightful about the Mr Men and Little Miss books. The meals, for example, whether scaled to bizarrely differing appetites (sixty-six sausages vs half a pea, one crumb and a drop of lemonade), or just ridiculous (‘a nice hot cup of cake’). The practical jokes (toothpaste in a cake! A bedful of jam!). The sheer number of lands too, each with its own strange laws – Loudland where mice roar; Happyland where daisies grin; Miseryland where the birds wake up and weep; Muddleland where worms live in trees; Nonsenseland, with its blue grass and pink trees and yellow snow. Fatland, Cleverland, Sleepyland, Coldland. Like the fifty-five fictitious cities described by Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (published in 1972, just a year after the first Mr Men book, Mr Tickle) which each say something about Venice, every time Hargreaves describes a land he is saying something about human nature.

But perhaps we should look a little closer at what Hargreaves is actually saying. I have read the entire Mr Men and Little Miss box sets, in order, so that you don’t have to, and the effect is similar to the time I read the King James Bible in order – you realize there is actually no coherent moral system there at all. The hierarchy of sins is utterly random. Wondering what’s happening behind a wall is punishable (Mr Nosey) but physical contact without consent (tickling random strangers, hugging people who don’t want to be hugged) is apparently fine (Mr Tickle, Little Miss Hug). Being slow or lazy evokes sympathy but Mr Greedy is force-fed sausages the size of pillows until he feels ill, like a child with a bullying father. Wanting to be a star is acceptable, but the clever or talkative need humiliating. Saving money is reprehensible, you have to spend your money on repairing your roof and buying pictures for your walls (Mr Mean). On the other hand, when Mr Tall leaves Mr Small at the beach and it takes him a year to walk back, this is hilarious.

Magic in these books is used for instrumental, punitive means, to reduce and not expand. An eye for an eye, aka a ‘taste of your own medicine’, is frequently dispensed. In Charlie Brooker’s neat precis:

In each story Mr Titular wakes up, has breakfast (usually eggs, consumed in a manner that vividly illustrates his character), goes for a walk, encounters a worm or a wizard or a shopkeeper, learns a harsh moral lesson and then crawls home, a changed man, hopelessly broken by experience.

In making his characters personifications of abstract nouns, Hargreaves is drawing on the tradition of the medieval morality play in which Everyman would meet Strength, Justice, Sloth and Pity. Virtue becomes Mr Good, Gluttony turns into Mr Greedy. But these qualities are then judged in the absence of God: there is no heaven to aspire to, only acceptance within the Misterland community. An Amazon reviewer of Mr Messy, Hamilton Richardson, wrote rather wonderfully:

If Nineteen Eighty-Four or The Trial had been a children’s book, Mr Messy would be it. No literary character has ever been so fully and categorically obliterated by the forces of social control. Hargreaves may well pay homage to Kafka and Orwell in his work, but he also goes well beyond them.

Mr Neat and Mr Tidy march into his home against his protestations and make everything neat ‘as a pin’, a suitably painful image. Then they forcibly bathe him (grabbing one arm each) and transform him into a faceless pink blob, the basis of Mr Messy’s entire identity erased – something that happens repeatedly in these books, always leaving Hargreaves with the uncomfortable problem of what to call his characters in the final pages. In story after story, they are normalized into namelessness.

Elsewhere, physical violence is a perfectly acceptable way to coerce characters into obedience – Mr Nosey is set upon with a hammer; Miss Naughty has her nose tweaked raw; Little Miss Trouble is ticklebumped into submission (we are reminded that the UK did not ban corporal punishment in schools until 1986, and it is still legal to smack your child). As commenters have also noted, there is something incredibly sexist about the whole set-up. The Mr Men live in an almost entirely women-free world, while the ‘Little’ of Little Miss is instantly diminishing, and they are pointedly not Mrs Women. Incredibly, the first Little Miss was Little Miss Bossy (1981), her style of hat marking her out as a middle-aged spinster, in which we witness the unedifying spectacle of several Mr Men combining forces to punish her (she has the temerity to call out Mr Nosey’s nosiness and Mr Noisy’s noisiness). Soon all the stereotypes were being wheeled out, including Little Scatterbrain, Dotty, Contrary, Chatterbox and Plump(!!), who was only changed to Little Miss Greedy in 1988.

Roger Hargreaves had a stroke while walking down to breakfast and died aged just fifty-two. His 24-year-old son Adam, who later took over the brand, has carried on inventing new Mr Men and Little Misses ever since, though still signing the covers with his father’s signature. The franchise has been a magic porridge pot, churning out a never-ending slurry of profits and new titles. Little Miss Hug, Little Miss Fabulous, Little Miss Sparkle, Little Miss Princess (what an ugly little run of stereotypes that is). They have licensed a Mr Glug to peddle Evian Water, a Mr First to advertise the money transfer company World First. In 2004, Hargreaves’ widow, Christine, sold the rights to UK entertainment group Chorion for £28 million. After it was forced into administration, in 2011, Sanrio, creators of Miffy’s nemesis Hello Kitty, acquired the rights. There are Mr Cool toilet seat covers; Little Miss Helpful’s Gel Packs; Mr Funny’s Runny Honey; Little Miss Naughty Underwear in La Senza. There are even adult titles, following the success of the jocular adult Ladybirds (The Ladybird Book of the Mid-Life Crisis etc., etc.). You can buy Mr Greedy Eats Clean to Get Lean; Little Miss Busy Surviving Motherhood; Mr Messy’s Guide to Student Life; Mr Tickle’s Guide to Women [sic]. The Mr Men and Little Miss Libraries account for over 100 million book sales and are the second-biggest children’s books of all time after Harry Potter, but sometimes I think a wizard needs to make it stop.

Fairy tales were probably first told by women. The female storyteller is there in the figure of Old Mother Goose. The Grimm Brothers gathered over twenty stories from a group of educated young women in Kassel who would meet and recite tales they had heard from nannies or servants. Another forty came from Dorothea Viehmann, a poor tailor’s wife and mother of six who would go to their house on market days once she had sold her vegetables.

Talking about fairy tales often seems to mean talking about femininity. So many of the stories have female protagonists who display kindness and courage, but they are also filled with darker versions of womanhood such as witches and crones. In the early 1812 editions of ‘Little Snow White’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ the wicked stepmothers are actually biological mothers – they were only changed to stepmothers by the Brothers Grimm in 1819. Queens, sacrificial or self-regarding, die in childbirth; drip blood on to snow; rage at their reflections; utter curses. Time destroys or corrupts feminine power. Women my age are feared or disappeared.

The younger women in fairy tales are, of course, mainly princesses or princesses-in-waiting, their female attributes still fresh and so delightful. I prefer the ones who don’t know they are princesses yet, but whose nobility is recognized through their gentleness and sacrifice, because at least then the palace and tiara seem earned. (The first play I ‘wrote’, aged four, inspired by my mother’s play scripts for the WI, was about ‘The Little Goose Girl’.) But to be honest, as a child I don’t really recall princesses being a thing. Now, the sin of vanity is apparently no longer a thing. Search children’s books for ‘princess’ on Amazon and you get over 10,000 results, with most of these princess-protagonists glittery from the start, and many titles churned out to meet a seemingly insatiable desire for sparkles. (A low point is perhaps the uber-objectifying book That’s Not My Princess, from the That’s Not My … franchise by Fiona Watt and Rachel Wells, in which the speaker realizes it isn’t their princess because ‘her fan is too fluffy’.)

As books have become increasingly gendered, so the princess, born into beauty and bling, has come to predominate in publishing for little girls. And as those little girls have grown up into millennials, princess-culture has spread: unicorn lattes and pool-floats, rainbow layer cake, #princessnails. The aesthetic of Instagram, with its preening selfies, is the aesthetic of princesses. Mirror, mirror.

Such is the ubiquity of the princess picture book genre now that it can accommodate a whole sub-genre – princesses who defy princess stereotypes – in titles such as The Strong Princess; The Wrestling Princess; Beware, Princess!; The Princess in Black; Dangerously Ever After; Don’t Kiss the Frog!; The Worst Princess. These are books whose intention, like Disney’s recent Brave or Frozen, seems to be to lure in princess-mad little girls, and then expose them to a more feminist storyline. The question has to be whether, however progressive the narrative, ceding to the same type of privileged protagonist yet again (upper-class, able-bodied, pretty, largely white) undoes this good work, and how radical any book that adds to the ocean of pink can truly be. It is worth looking at some of the alternative-princess books in a little more detail.

My clear favourite is arguably the first – The Paper Bag Princess (1980) written by Robert Munsch and illustrated by Michael Martchenko. In it a princess called Elizabeth is in love with a handsome prince called Ronald. But a dragon kidnaps him and scorches off her clothes (smoke, in the picture, masks most of her nakedness, but she is definitely still a flat-chested young girl). Elizabeth makes herself a dress out of a paper bag and in a marvellous picture is shown tensing all her muscles with fury in a bone-strewn wasteland.

Elizabeth then rescues Ronald, mainly by appealing to the dragon’s ego (‘I bet you could fly around the world really fast’) until the beast is exhausted.

The writer Robert Munsch is an interesting figure, very honest about his addiction and mental health problems, who trained seven years to be a Jesuit priest and worked in an orphanage. He is also the author of one of the most strange, sentimental picture books ever written, Love You Forever (1986), which he wrote after he and his wife had lost two stillborn children. In it, a mother sings a lullaby to her baby, announcing that she will love her baby forever. Munsch has said it was ‘my song to my dead babies’. The mother repeats the song as the son grows up, and he ends up singing it back to his mother on her death bed. As if that wasn’t enough to process, the cover also features a little boy sitting by a toilet.

The Paper Bag Princess, though, is the opposite of sentimental. Munsch was working in a childcare centre in Oregon when he first told Elizabeth’s story, inspired by his wife, who worked there too (they met ‘over a diaper’) and who was tired of his usual dragon tales. She asked: ‘Why can’t the princess save the prince?’ It was perhaps Munsch’s belief that ‘to kids there’s only one character in the story and that’s themselves’ that made him realize this idea could not only be radical but life-changing. In the original ending, Ronald’s lack of gratitude when rescued made Elizabeth punch him in the nose, but when Martchenko drew this they decided it looked too violent. In the final version, Elizabeth instead utters those brilliant, defiant lines to Ronald:

Your hair is nice.

You look like a PRINCE.

But you are a BUM.

The word BUM, in this context, read out by an adult at the end of a fairy tale, is still shocking. It makes my children giddy with daring. For a while, in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, Scholastic decided that people didn’t call each other bums and Ronald should be a toad. But even if small children don’t quite get the connotations of Ronald being idle and useless (a vagrant, a lounger), the pure delight of being able to (righteously) shout a synonym for bottom is the genius of the book. Toad isn’t the same at all.

The classicist Mary Beard has cited it as one of the books that made her a feminist and observed that its last line is: ‘power for you, in a nutshell’.

Princess Smartypants (1986), written and illustrated by Babette Cole, was also an early trailblazer in the alternative-princess genre and is great fun. In this story, Princess Smartypants wants to be a Ms not a Mrs, so sets all the princes who come to try and win her hand impossible tasks involving her pet dragons, a frightening forest and polished glass towers. When one suitor, Prince Swashbuckle, finally succeeds in completing her tasks, Princess Smartypants solves the problem by giving him a ‘magic kiss’ that turns him into a toad. Having frightened off all potential suitors, she then lives happily ever after.

Babette Cole was a provocateur of the picture book world who spoke openly in interviews about her secret love affairs, as well as writing a book about sex being fun and how mummies and daddies ‘fit together’ – Mummy Laid an Egg! (1995) – that tabloid rants branded ‘the Kama Sutra for kids aged three’. She viewed Princess Smartypants as her ‘autobiography’. The pictures are lively and funny – I love the princess’s dungarees and roller-disco moves, as well as her beloved pets (a cat, a dog, a pony, various dragons, a hairy spider, a castle-sized snail) that seem to have been loosely based on Cole’s own menagerie at her home in Lincolnshire. But Princess Smartypants, ‘very pretty and rich’, whose idea of pleasing herself is eating chocolates, drinking cocktails, painting her nails, sunbathing and doing ‘exactly as she pleased’, is only feminist in the way, say, Sex and the City is feminist.

Zog (2010), writer Julia Donaldson and illustrator Axel Scheffler’s more recent attempt at the alternative-princess genre, is a little better in that Princess Pearl has ambitions beyond a life of leisure, but it is still an odd one. The hero of the title, Zog, is a young dragon at dragon school, learning skills such as flying and fire-breathing and constantly having accidents. Miraculously, Princess Pearl always seems to be nearby when these accidents happen and keen to assist. Though it is framed as empowering that Pearl wants to be a doctor, she fits into a feminized, caring role more akin to a nurse – always available to offer Zog a sticking plaster, a peppermint, a poor you. When Zog is told that for his next lesson he has to learn how to kidnap a princess, rather than encouraging him to rebel against the entire patriarchal dragon educational system, she offers to let herself be captured. Is it okay because it’s tongue-in-cheek, like pole-dancing in the 1990s? At the end the unattractive Sir Gadabout ‘the Great’, with his awful moustache, tries to rescue her, and whilst she boldly insists she doesn’t need rescuing, she still somehow ends up partnering off with him as they agree to embark on a career as medics together and fly off on Zog, who has volunteered to be their ambulance.

We recently borrowed the sequel Zog and the Flying Doctors (2016) from the library, and I found it even more confused in its message – Zog is diminished to the status of a clumsy vehicle, basically, whilst Pearl is locked in a tower by a misogynist uncle who asks where her ‘pretty, frilly dress’ is (although she’s not in jeans, by any means, and is already wearing a very feminine dress) and makes her sew ‘pretty cushions’. She is reduced to the usual passive-princess position while her drippy partner, Gadabout, somehow gets to be the protagonist: Prince Charmless on a quest to save her by gathering the ingredients needed for a medicine. At the end Pearl cures her uncle and he admits girls can be doctors – but again, the king isn’t punished or even challenged. Everyone is just very grateful he’s stopped locking women up … Feminism, whoop.

Since Cate was born, I often think of that line in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, when Daisy says, bitterly, of her daughter: ‘I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’ Too often that seems like the central message of princess culture, but I don’t think beauty or stupidity will help Cate in the future that is coming. There are women I know and admire who love costume jewellery and power-ballads, and I’ve never had a problem with Gruff liking conventional boy-stuff like Transformers or Ninjas, but polyester Disney ballgowns set my teeth on edge. My daughter has not discovered princesses yet, or barely, though last week I discovered her looking in the mirror saying, ‘Princess Cate, Princess Cate.’ She hasn’t got this from me. Is it nursery? A friend? You cannot protect your child completely; there will always be a spindle somewhere to prick her finger.

There is something terrible about the world of princesses – their spellbound servants; their christenings, alarming with gifts. How they’re made from a mother’s longing. Breathing dressing-up dolls with ruby lips, sapphire eyes, pure gold hair. ‘All the dizzy and colossal things’ hanging on such genetic fluke. When you have everything already, what storyline exists but one in which disaster befalls you? A woodsman dragging you into the forest; a coma; a poisoned apple? It is like a metaphor for being born into Western privilege, and it makes me feel guilty and fearful.

It also made G. K. Chesterton uneasy. He observes in ‘The Ethics of Elfland’:

This princess lives in a glass castle, that princess on a glass hill; this one sees all things in a mirror; they may all live in glass houses if they will not throw stones. For this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of the fact that the happiness is bright but brittle, like the substance most easily smashed by a housemaid or a cat. And this fairy-tale sentiment also sank into me and became my sentiment towards the whole world. I felt and feel that life itself is as bright as the diamond, but as brittle as the window-pane.

Maybe, though, little girls are not so easily made into fools. When I take Cate to Ten O’Clock Club, I must admit it is often the girls dressed as Elsa from Frozen who are driving the plastic digger most competently; who know all the actions for ‘The Banana Song’. The phenomenal global success of the Spanish writer María Isabel Sánchez Vegara’s Little People, Big Dreams series of picture book biographies, featuring women such as Frida Kahlo, Maya Angelou and Josephine Baker, and Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls (2017), created by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, mean alternative role models are now easier to find in bookshops. As long as it isn’t the only option, perhaps a shimmery sprinkle of ‘happily ever after’ is not too damaging.

‘Distance is the soul of the beautiful,’ the philosopher Simone Weil said. Fairy tales, so far away and long ago from our children, teach them that pleasurable yearning for a beauty which is always out of reach. We can contemplate the beautiful but never truly possess it. Still, it can fill our hearts with joy that such beauty is possible.

And now it’s dusk, and our garden is tangled with yellow and pink roses. Our hollyhocks look like they’ve grown from magic seeds; are turrets climbing up to the clouds. Cate puts a witch’s hat over her mess of golden ringlets. She is making a spell from grass and pebbles and washing-up liquid and most likely snot. She decides she needs to add an elephant, and marches back in the house to get one from the toy box, returning to launch it into her cauldron with a splash.

I watch her at a distance, through the dirty kitchen window, with my washing-up bowl of slimy knives. ‘Izzy wizzy,’ she shouts at me, laughing, waving her spoon like a wand, and I am transformed.