The Children's Book

chimes sounded, Aschenputtel fled, the little gold shoe was left shining on the tar.

The final scenes were gruesome. One disdainful sister, her proud expression unchanging, aided and abetted by her mother took a kitchen cleaver to her big toe, splat. “When you are queen, you will not need to go on foot,” said the mother, falsetto. The bride and groom set off on horseback, on a finely caparisoned horse made of real hide. The gold shoe brimmed with blood. Several of those children remembered, well into their future, that they had seen the red liquid dripping from the shoe.

Dorothy blinked and refused to imagine.

The pirouetting doves called to the prince

Turn around, look behind

Blood in the shoe.

Turn around, change your mind

She’s not the bride for you.

So they turned back. And the stepmother, learning nothing, following her fate, took the cleaver, slap, to the second sister’s heel, and crammed her porcelain toes into the golden shell.

“How horrible,” said Hedda, audibly. “When it’s already all bloody.”

The doves sang, the prince turned back.

Aschenputtel’s father called her from the cinders where she sat in drab rags. She came and put her dainty toe in the slipper and was embraced by the prince. She ran off, and reappeared, radiant in her starry dress. Puppet father and puppet daughter clung to each other, centre-stage, her china cheek on his shoulder, as he stroked her golden hair.

The backdrop became a candlelit choir. The wedding procession came back from the altar. The doves flew down, at the church door, cooing and shrilling, and mobbed the haughty sisters, beating their white wings about their heads, topping their headdresses, obscuring with commotion faces that were then revealed to be eyeless, with bloody sockets.

Griselda closed her lips. Dorothy shuddered crossly. Phyllis said that it was all wrong, there had been no pumpkin, no godmother, no glass coach. No rats and mice and lizards, cried Hedda, overexcited, unnerved by cruel doves. Florian said, More, having understood nothing, mesmerised by the moving miniature world.

Griselda said to Dorothy that it was interesting, how different the story was. Dorothy said she herself wasn’t very interested but that if Griselda wanted to know, she should ask Toby Youlgreave, he was always going on about fairytales.

Griselda, looking like a lost china shepherdess in a swarm of raggedy fairies, pulled timidly at Toby’s arm. She said she really wanted to know why the story was different. “Dorothy said you would tell me.” Toby sat down beside her on a garden seat. He said that the version she was used to was the French one by Charles Perrault— whose stories were written for young ladies, and usually had fairy godmothers. Whereas Anselm Stern’s version was German, out of the Brothers Grimm. Griselda said that she herself was half-German, but that she did not have German fairytales at home. She wished she did. Toby said those were only two of the endless versions from many, many countries from Finland to Scotland to Russia—with varying combinations of some or all of the events—wicked stepmother, selfish sisters, friendly animals, magic dresses, shoes, with or without blood in them. The Grimms believed that what they were collecting were part of the very old beliefs and magic tales of the German Volk. There are English fairytales, too, said Toby. Mrs. Olive Wellwood uses them, very cleverly.

Griselda said that her aunt’s fairy stories frightened her. So did Hans Andersen, he made her cry. But not this sort of tale. She didn’t know why. It should be scary, there was a lot of blood. Toby said these were memories of some other time, long ago, and he agreed, they weren’t scary.

“They are just like that,” said Griselda, feeling for what intrigued her, not finding it.

Toby looked at the serious thin face. He said he would send her a book of the Grimms, if she was allowed to receive it. Griselda said she didn’t think her family had anything against the Grimms. They just didn’t know about them. Toby wanted to stroke her hair, and say, don’t worry, but he didn’t think that was a good idea.

Everyone, old and young, now gathered for a kind of sumptuous picnic. As happens in such gatherings, where those whose lives are shaped, fortunately or unfortunately, are surrounded by those whose lives are almost entirely to come, the elders began asking the young what they meant to do with their lives, and to project futures for them.

They started, naturally, with the older boys. Prosper Cain said Julian had a fine eye for antiques, and could tell the real thing from a fake. He had a collection of valuables he had found in flea-markets, a mediaeval spoon, a very old Staffordshire slipware beaker. Julian said easily that after Cambridge he might indeed like to work in museums, or galleries. Seraphita Fludd said she hoped Geraint would be like his father, an artist, and make lovely things. Geraint said she knew really he was no good at that kind of thing. He was good at maths. An astronomer! cried Violet. Geraint said he should like to make a comfortable living. He smiled amiably. Basil said he should go into business, in that case. Like William Morris, said Arthur Dobbin, who hoped to introduce business practices in the artists’ workshops in Lydd. Geraint went on smiling, and eating jellied ham mould. Basil Wellwood said Geraint was welcome to join Charles in his family firm. Charles made a strangled noise, blushed, and was heard to mutter that that was yet to be decided. Etta Skinner said it was odd that nobody in this forward-looking community had asked any of the girls what they wanted to be. She hoped some of them had ambitions. Prosper Cain, simultaneously, asked Tom what he hoped to become. Tom had no idea. He told the truth.

“I don’t ever want to leave here. I want to go on being in the woods—out on the Downs—just being here —”

“And to be boy eternal,” said August Steyning, inevitably, with a theatrical hum. Olive said Tom had all the time in the world.

Leslie Skinner took up Etta’s point. He addressed Dorothy, almost pugnaciously.

“And you, young woman. What do you hope to be?”

“I am going to be a doctor,” said Dorothy.

Violet said that was the first that had been heard of that idea. It was indeed, the first time it had formed in Dorothy’s mind, and she had spoken spontaneously. Doctors and nurses was not a game they played. But she heard herself answer, and suddenly in her head there existed a grown-up Dorothy, a doctor. Not sweetly benign, but wielding a scalpel. Skinner said that was a fine ambition, though the way was hard still, and he hoped she would come to University College.

“But you must want to be married, Hejjog,” said Phyllis, using a nickname Dorothy disliked. “I do. I want a