I was given a copy of Household Tales as an eleventh birthday present by my much older sister, Deborah. In some ways it was a surprising choice: we weren't a bookish family, and though I was known as the reader of the house, most of the books that came my way were pretty unmemorable ones. Perhaps Debbie was drawn to this one by its illustrated cover, which depicts a pair of fey sweethearts in an enchanted-looking wood; she might have supposed that its stories would resemble the fairy tales of Disney. I think I guessed at once, however, that the book was of darker stuff, for to look at the cover with the sharp eyes of childhood is to notice subtle shades of menace - to spot the pair of gleeful goblins who are observing the sweethearts unseen, and the hissing black cat almost hidden in the shadows.
The artwork is Mervyn Peake's, and his lovely, eccentric, unsettling images were part of what made the book special to me. They complement the stories perfectly - for, as I realize now, these are folk tales rather than fairy tales, with nothing cosy about them at all. In fact, with their recurring cast of vulnerable characters - neglected children, "simpletons," cashiered soldiers, faithful dogs and laboring horses past their best and facing the chop - they offer a quite terrifying glimpse of the brutalities and uncertainties of peasant life.
But childhood, of course, can also be a brutal and uncertain experience, and it isn't hard to see why these stories' preoccupation with injustice and sacrifice, with harsh punishments and outrageous rewards, might speak so meaningfully to younger readers. And though the tales are full of violence, it's usually the bloodless violence of childish extremes. In "The Seven Ravens," for example, a little girl blithely cuts off a finger in order to use it as a key to the locked door of her brothers' prison. In "The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids," a mother slices open the belly of the slumbering wolf who has just gobbled up her children, and fills him up with stones instead; he subsequently tumbles down a well and drowns. I don't remember being troubled by any of this, though I do remember grieving over "A Sad Story about a Snake," in which a kind snake befriends a child, only to be unfairly killed by the child's startled mother. It's one of the few tales in the collection that has no magical resolution - which is perhaps why it so upset me. At eleven, already on the journey out of childhood, I was beginning to understand that magic has its limits, that injustices are not always redressed.
And I was starting to understand, too, the power of books for the people who read and love them. My edition of Household Tales still has the plate I pasted into it in 1977, which declares importantly that This book belongs to Sarah A. Waters. I like to look at that, remembering my younger reading self. I like to read the book again, finding new details and meanings in its strange, enchanted landscapes as I grow older.
Editor's Note: Sarah Waters is the award winning author of The Night Watch and the recently released novel, The Little Stranger.
