Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 (24 page)

INTRODUCTION

C
hildren, sooner or later, realise that adults keep secrets. Those who seek answers listen at doors, spy, probe, stickybeak, hunt out forbidden books and ask endless questions:

Where do babies come from?

The stork brings them.

What are you making?

A wing-wong for a goose's bridle.

Why won't you tell me?

Because Y's a crooked letter and you can't make it straight.

Curious children look for clues anywhere and everywhere, and hone their instincts for the cryptic and the mysterious. They want to
know
.

I was a curious child, preoccupied with notions of secret knowledge, and I poked around until I found it. On a high shelf I came upon the St John's Ambulance Association's
First Aid to the Injured
, with a whole section on childbirth which I read with appalled delight . . . several times. The faded blue cloth-covered volume of Grimms' fairytales was not forbidden, and yet the stories seemed full of secrets, hidden meanings and immutable laws. I could not understand their harsh wisdom, or their strange power, which I still find difficult to explain. Despite their apparent simp- licity, they felt dark and deep. I recognised but could not name a quality that was lacking in other stories, and I listened to them with dread and fascination.

I wanted to understand
life
, but nobody would answer my questions, and school was clearly no place to begin. By university, I knew I'd taken a wrong turn. The big narratives of history – politics, wars, the Church, the state – did not interest me as much as the traces left by ordinary people. When I should have been translating the Battle of Maldon or the Venerable Bede in Anglo-Saxon, I would flip through the riddles and charms. There were charms against a wen or boil, against swarming bees, delayed childbirth, even something called water-elf disease. These, like the fairytales of my childhood, seemed to be full of ancient knowledge, unscientific but enthralling. I especially liked the charms that required herbs or the plants we call weeds. The names were evocative – venom loather and hare speckle, dragonwort, ironhard and mare gall – and seemed to retain some of the lost herbal lore of the women who must once have used them. One charm, the Holy Salve, required almost sixty different plants – plus some black snail's dust – which you mixed with butter from a cow of a single colour, ‘red or white and without deformity'.

Another charm, ‘Against a Stabbing Pain', required you to boil butter with feverfew, red nettle and waybroad, which is plantain, the long ‘soldiers' we used as children in swishing fights, trying to decapitate our opponent's ‘head'. The charm diagnoses the cause of the pain as a wound from the nasty little iron knives or spears of hags, smiths, mighty women, gods or elves. In Germany, these sudden pains are still called
hexenschuss
(witch shot)
, a word linked to hex, witchcraft and hags, but more on them later. The charm's chorus – ‘
Out, little spear, if it be in here!
' – along with the herbal butter, will drive out the demons and cure the pain.

Fairytales spring from the same soil as these charms: girls like Briar Rose or Sleeping Beauty also receive magical wounds, not from knives, but from spindles or needles, and are transformed. Stay with me; sometimes hidden insights can be uncovered by pursuing instincts and hunches, by musing on the elements of these old tales.

Both charms and fairytales use powerful numbers:
three
pigs, wishes or tasks; sing the charm
nine
times; ‘The
Six
Swans'; ‘The
Twelve
Wild Ducks'; and so on.

The herbs and weeds of the charms also figure in fairytales. Rampion or rapunzel condemns a girl to life in a tower; parsley in the Italian version dooms Petrosinella. Nettles must be spun into garments if the sister in ‘The Wild Swans' wishes to turn her brothers back into young men. Roses figure in ‘Rose Red' and ‘Sweetheart Roland'; hazels in ‘Cinderella' or ‘Ashputtel'; not to mention fruit and vegetables such as apples, turnips and beanstalks.

Some old plant names carry clues to their earliest uses, and understanding those uses adds meaning to fairytales. For example, hazel, sacred to Thor amongst others, was used to cure the bite of an adder, and was the wood of choice if you wanted a divining rod to find hidden treasure. Not surprising then that Ashputtel goes for help to the hazel tree that she watered with her tears to say, ‘Shake shake hazel tree, gold and silver over me.' The hazel obliges, thus doing away with the need for a fairy godmother. If we only had the key to unlock all these secret meanings.

Fairytales are both extraordinary, and ordinary, rooted in the everyday; never far from either the hedgerow or the kitchen garden. They happen to everyman and everywoman, everywhere at everytime. The cast includes millers, poor peasants, frogs and donkeys as often as kings, queens and princesses, and only luck separates the king from the peasant: both are susceptible to magic spells; both must obey the deep, hidden rules of life. If these characters are named at all, their names are often descriptive: Little Red-Cap or One Eye rather than Rosalind or Robert. The setting is often a cottage, whether of gingerbread, straw or bricks; a tower; or a wood or forest, where danger lurks but also transformation and new possibilities. Kindness, loyalty, even simplicity are set against pride, greed, and envy.

As I sensed, fairytales, like myths, legends and folktales, carry some of the oldest and deepest insights into the dramas of everyday life: birth, coming of age, sex, motherhood, fatherhood, jealousy, greed, goodness and evil. Psychoanalysts from Freud and Jung onwards have found rich pickings there – the Oedipus complex, Narcissism, the Electra complex – but the insights spring from countless common people, the nameless storytellers who passed on these tales. Perhaps something akin to the wisdom of crowds was at work over the centuries, or a Wikipedia-like process that filtered out any details that did not resonate and passed on only those that did, subtly shaping the stories until they carried profound meanings beneath their apparently simple exteriors.

Fairytales can be many things, but they are almost never sad. Sadness grows out of incompleteness, a sense of ‘if only', a yearning for resolution, and in fairytales there is a remorseless sense of completeness, of everything being in its proper place. Hans Christian Andersen's sometimes maudlin retellings and inventions are the only exception, often infused with his own sentimentality and beliefs. His stories can be freighted with morality, whereas fairytales are rarely moral or just in any sense we would recognise. Nevertheless they satisfy something deep within us; they tell us about life.

Traditional fairytales are told plainly, without unnecessary detail. They were part of a rich oral tradition for centuries before they were written down, and any repetition no doubt served as a mnemonic for the teller: ‘What big eyes you have . . .', ‘I'll huff and I'll puff . . .', ‘Mirror mirror on the wall . . .' But an oral tradition is difficult for us – children of the book and the internet – to imagine or really understand. We no longer have to remember much at all, except our passwords. Oral traditions still exist, though, as I discovered when I met an Englishman whose mother was a McNab, like me. I mentioned a story I'd heard in childhood that involves a stolen Christmas feast and some burly McNab boys sent to the neighbouring loch by their father to fetch it: ‘Tonight's the night if the lads are the lads.' Led by Smooth John, a name that would not be out of place in any fairytale, they carry their own boat overland to reach the island of the Neishes.

It is a bloody tale, and the McNab lads not only bring home the remains of the Christmas feast but the heads of the clan who stole it, leaving behind their boat on the top of a hill because they couldn't carry everything. ‘Here are some bowls [balls] for the bairns to play with,' the Englishman chimed in at the appropriate point in the story. I was astonished. He knew the story, and the pivotal phrases within it, though we had learned it on opposite sides of the globe.

Long unbroken chains of story like this must have stretched back in time to prehistory. Neolithic peoples must have been telling each other creation stories, law stories, stories that explained themselves and their world to their children and each other. One of the questions that intrigues me is just how old fairytales might be and what lost clues they might contain about our ancestors.

One place to look is in the language of these stories. I like browsing through etymological dictionaries; they're like an archaeological dig through the history of words and meanings. Sometimes you can climb down to ancient Indo-European roots, then follow their derivatives up through synonyms and words with no obvious connections, imagining the branching ideas and metaphors that once connected them, and the changes in thinking that brought about changes in meaning. To take three examples,
fairy
tales often contain
witches
and
spindles
.
Fairy
comes from Old French
faerie
(land or place of fairies, enchantment or magic) from
fae
, or
fats
(plural), meaning the Fates, from the Proto-Indo-European root
bha
 – to speak. The Fates appear in Norse and Germanic mythology, both of which inform Anglo-Saxon culture; they are usually women; and you don't have to look far before you find them associated with thread. One of the Fates spins the thread of life, the second measures it, and the third cuts it. In Anglo-Saxon, fate is
wyrd
, which gives us
weird
, as in Macbeth's three weird sisters, the witches.
Wyrd
is linked to words meaning to turn or come about, in other words to spin. Goddesses used a
spindle
to spin the thread of fate, and the words for spindle come from the same root.

It's only a small hop to one of the old words for witch.
Hag
, originally
haegtesse
, was used by Anglo-Saxons to translate
goddess
, and the three
Fates
, but also for a mortal prophet- ess or witch. The coming of Christianity erased much of the knowledge of these pagan beings and their powers, and blackened their reputations; victors write history, and old religions always get a bad press. Hag is also connected to
haw
, meaning hedge, which links it to
haw
thorn. Like hazel, it was a sacred tree associated with holy wells, and safeguarded against witchcraft. Hawthorn was linked to the Tuatha dé Danaan of Irish mythology. One of them, Mac Cuill, was named after his god Coll, the hazel. By the time of Oisín, the Tuatha dé Danaan had become the fairy folk, and solitary hawthorns were believed to mark faerie territory.
Haegtesse
means hedge-rider, which not only brings flying witches to mind, but loops back to the hedgerows, sacred trees, herbs and plant lore for which these women were renowned. It's possible to keep leap-frogging from one word or concept to the next, in an unsystematic and unscholarly way, slowly building up a sense of the network of secrets and meanings hidden in these old tales, remnants of an earlier time.

I was in the midst of this meandering hunt when I thought to check on the sound shifts in words such as
pater
/
father
or
pedem
/
foot
, word pairs that derive from single roots. To my surprise and delight, I found that the law I needed was Grimm's law. Jacob Grimm not only collected fairytales, but studied corresponding consonants in Indo-European, Low Saxon and High Germanic languages. He was equally fascinated by the origin of his native language and German folklore and fairytales. (In German, fairytales are called wonder tales, and almost always contain magic.)

Grimm said, ‘My principle has always been in these investigations to undervalue nothing, but to utilise the small for the illustration of the great . . .' This sounds like an excellent way to approach fairytales. Often under- valued as simple stories for children, they are distilled from the insights and preoccupations of numberless ordinary and not-so-ordinary people. They are the concentrate of much of our culture's wisdom and insights about life, and receptive readers sense this and are unsettled by it. Artists, writers and poets know they have struck a rich vein.

In
The Wilful Eye
, the six fairytales are familiar: ‘The Tinderbox' (Andersen); ‘Rumplestiltskin' (Grimms); ‘The Snow Queen' (Andersen); ‘Beauty and the Beast' (French); ‘Babes in the Wood' (English ballad); and ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier' (Andersen). In
The Wicked Wood
, some of the stories are more unusual: ‘The Wolf and the Seven Kids' (Grimms); ‘Otesánek' or ‘Little Shaveling' (Bohemian); ‘The Little Mermaid' (Andersen); ‘Cinderella' or ‘Ashputtel' (Grimms); ‘The Fairy's Midwife' (English); and the Irish Tír na n'Óg, which edges from fairytale into myth. Here you will find stories as bewitching and powerful as any fairytale, monsters with benign human faces, heroines gutsy enough for any era, and people like us, who find themselves suddenly entangled in magic, or confronted by the terrible, bewitching world of Faerie.

The forest has always been a place of danger, mystery and transformation. Lose yourself in
The Wicked Wood
and you may discover new and magical secrets.

{A Tourist in Normal}

If you're Amish, you're given the world

outside as your eighteenth birthday present –

here you go, fall in love with a stranger at a bar,

go to parties, drop e,

you with your quaint rustic accent

and last decade's clothes.

A tourist in Normal.

The grandmother sends the mermaids up at fifteen –

Look, my mermaids:

there's land, there's the Love Boat

watch the couples dancing.

Dancing!

How would your tongue

mouth a pillow of passionfruit sponge

after years of salty sushi?

How could you cosy up to a sailor

you with your sequin scales and fish-breath?

But here, they say, here's choice.

No wonder they flick disdainful tails

flipping back under faster than whitebait.

One to five – basked on a sandbank, star-gazed.

Knew that the sky belled around them

that air smelled green and that sailors

hungered – but for what?

One to five didn't know.

The youngest mermaid was hollowed out by hunger already.

In her sea garden she'd sharpened her desire –

the beautiful marble boy she swam loops around

the boy who, in her rocking dreams,

tiptoed to the clamshell bed, bent over

his eyes full of nothing but her and then

his mouth, fluttering

like delicate fins, then firm

and then – oh she was starved and her yearning

sang her own heart siren songs.

There's always one. One colt-boy or gawky girl

looking at life through the keyhole of a different world

who says, yes, yes.

We grow old, hunch-backed, rheumy-eyed

but we said it once.

Yes. Yes. Paid whatever it took

to squirm us through from one world

to whatever it was we saw –

love, fame or magic.

Look at me now wearing my boa

of seasnakes, my fat toad familiar

squat on my shoulder.

Yes, I said, yes.

{My Childish Days}

I played in the garden

where the marble boy

was king to my queen.

One by one my sisters went up

for their days in the sun.

They came back. Yes, there were lights

and people, birds flew, so?

I was as patient as the moon.

I knew what I'd find – 

a sky wide as the ocean

filled with flying and – 

passionately real, no longer stone

but warm skin and heartbeat,

the king to my queen.

{Witch of the Love Boat}

Mostly they plop to the surface

like baby seals, wet behind the ears,

get bored and go back home.

It's not what they thought it would be,

land ahoy but out of reach,

the passengers on the Love Boat

standing awkwardly on their two legs.

Give up sequined flip of that sparky tail?

They cover their yawns with a dainty hand.

Not number six.

Surfs up on a wave and spies

the Lurve Boat and who on it

but him, languidly leaning on the rail

watching for whales or mermaids

or staring vacantly out to sea.

(I'd guess the latter.)

She loved his eyes, brown as earth

the waves of hair the wind lifted

his dinner shirt strained just so

across his biceps.

He'd caught her in his net

and he wasn't even fishing.

There's always a catch – 

he's married, she's emo

the internet dating site crashes

just as he hits her profile.

You think you have trouble?

Imagine a tail. How to tuck it under

the wedding dress. How to waltz?

Then think of it slipping between silk

sheets, the scales catching.

No joy there.

Enter me, Witch of the Love Boat.

{The First Chorus}

We saw her longing and knew her lost.

Oh little sister, would you leave us for a man?

What has he, that we can't offer?

Come, let us braid your hair,

let us sing together,

swaying like soft weed to the songs

that loop and flow, ribbons of seduction,

velvet handcuffs that lock

each of us fast to the other.

Why would you leave us,

little lost note

in our loving harmony?

We reach for you

but you evade our pale fingers

as though they were sticky tentacles.

{The Storm}

Who questions the storms and rips of Fate?

Destiny pulls the carpet from under

our questing feet – or tails – 

and suddenly we're shoved off course

or back on if you're an optimist.

So there she is, my sixth little one,

all hair and silver,

all ache and emptiness,

but with a heart full as an old sea boot.

She'd watched him watch the horizon.

She'd watched him dance with the lucky ones,

his cheek – a little manly stubble – to cheek

with powdered softness, she'd seen his hand

tighten around a waist, bunching up the satin.

A squall of darkness on that particular horizon,

a rough swell, monstrous under the surface,

thrashing upwards under the ship,

a whipping foam frenzy, the fairy lights

extinguished, then lightning and
crack
,
crack,

the captain hears the great bow sunder.

Life boats – but it's too late. The girls go down

shrouded in party frocks. Some call out

feebly and bob about like tossed seabirds,

some cling to broken planks or each other

but soon the ocean closes over all,

sailors and revellers alike.

The sixth one, the littlest, dives deep.

She's looking for one man only,

leaves the rest – takeaway for night foragers – 

strikes for the shore in her best bronze medallion

rescue stroke. She's got him,

her pale arm looped around his neck.

But will he ever be so docile, so needy

so much hers

again?

{The Rescue}

As soon as I saw him dancing on the deck

I knew it in every silver bone

that he was mine.

I cursed my spangled tail,

flapping around on the sand

like a dying fish.

When the storm came I was pleased.

I heard the mast snap, the great ship groan.

I saw the people flounder and sink.

All the girls he'd danced with,

their pretty dresses wrapped around their useless legs.

I found him, mouth and fingers blue

his chill skin white as marble.

I swam him right through the night.

Let him live, let him live
,

I begged the moon and stars

but they shone for themselves

not for me, not for him.

When I reached land, I hauled him in,

always my tail tripping me up – 

how I hated it! I breathed into his mouth.

I lay over his body until I felt it grow warm.

Then I slid back to the sea,

leaving a slick of salt on his skin,

a hint of silvered scale, the smell of me

on his breath.

Enough for a man in love

to find his heart's joy, his heart's own.

Other men have done it with just an old shoe.

He woke to
her
touch. Some beach babe,

cheap sunblock and attitude.

He reeled with love.

Not for me.

Never for me.

I took my shamed heart home.

My arms ached

from tugging him towards life.

My mouth stung

from the chill I'd kissed warm.

But still I was tossed up

and abandoned by his heart's tides – 

not even remembered.

{The Prince Speaks}

As I sank into the dark I saw odd things – 

the steam-train cake my mother made

for my first birthday, my father polishing

his boots, the girl with red hair

who sat behind me in school.

I'd loved her that first year and the second.

I had forgotten how red her hair was,

how it was a fire around her face

I longed to touch.

I saw my dog waiting at the gate,

his old tail flicking up dust

as I got nearer. Then

a great rush of water or wings

lifted me up.

A speedboat's no way to get to heaven

but I couldn't say that for the water

poured back into my mouth and out

and the words flicked away like minnows.

Woke on the cold beach, most of the ocean

vomited up beside me and there she was – 

that blaze of hair, that fire,

all I'd loved. And me, shaking and puking

like a puppy, but she didn't care.

Wrapped me up in a towel that smelled of

coconuts and jasmine and shooed off the

crows who were gathered like widows at a wake.

{The Second Chorus}

Sister, the beach is littered with broken shells,

bones and washed-up hearts.

Don't lean too closely over him.

Don't press your mouth against his

and breathe your breath for him.

He'll take your voice, clip its wings

so it sits on his finger

croaking platitudes.

He'll want a cup of tea,

the news at a certain time

and legs against his, warm in the bed

and all the better

to wrap around him

against the cold night and old age.

If he sees you at all, little sister,

he'll want you in his image,

softer of course and a little mysterious,

but not unknowable, unchanging

or wild.

Sister, your heart's washed up with the wreckage

and we can do nothing but sound our warnings

surfing them into the shore, mournfully,

wave after wave.

{Without Him}

The colour's leached

from every living thing,

even the morning's bleached bone-white.

I can't carry a note, my voice

is a toad croak, a gull's hoarse caw

and all songs sound like a scavenger's dirge,

my sea garden withers,

shells crumble, the anemones droop,

there's no salt in the sushi,

no sparkle in my tail swish,

no light, no joy, no life

without him.

{The Third Chorus}

There's a murder of crows

on the beach little sister,

brooding black

against the white sand.

They're looking at you,

little sister, with their abacus eyes.

Slide back in to the sea.

Sing with us – no missed notes,

no broken chords.

Don't look at the crows

looking at you,

don't look at the prince.

Sing little sister

so the crows don't know

how you'd let them

slit and slice, twist, wrench

tug and dice until they had your heart

laid out on a stone.

And all for love.

There's a murder of crows

on the beach little sister,

a feathered dark, waiting

on the white sand.

{His 'n' Hers}

She thinks love is a piece of wedding cake,

matching His 'n' Hers bath towels

always fluffy on a heated rail.

Let me tell you about the word
lover

 – rhymes with
smother
 – 

take away the
l

and it's all over, red rover.

She's a pretty little thing – 

with her cost-a-fortune smile.

The tail's an obstacle

we agree, but one we can sort

with a large enough fee.

I read her the health warnings:

searing pain with every step

bunions, corns, blisters

and little bloodied footprints,

but she hasn't dodged

the seasnakes, the

guard toads and deadly coral

to go away fainthearted, tail intact.

Falters only when I demand her voice –  my payment.

Everyone's entitled to a

lullaby or two, even the toads.

How will I talk to him?

Look, miss, there are other ways,

you know what I'm saying? You don't have

to talk all the time. Most men would rather

you didn't. You want legs. I'll sell them for a song.

She doesn't get the joke.

But will I be beautiful?

As you are now but with ten toes to twinkle,

and twinkle you'd better – it's marry or burn.

If he chooses another, you're dead in the water.