Happily Ever After

I've spent this week immersed in fairytales, and I have to say I've been a bit distressed.

I was looking out one in particular, that I vaguely remembered for being about seven brothers who were swans and their sister who made them shirts of nettles to turn them back into men.

I remember it as magical and have a strong visual memory of something I've never seen - the boys turning to swans and flying in the moonlight.

I wanted to tell the story as part of my Book Week session at the local nursery, where they've been telling stories about their families and themselves. I thought the swan brothers and their loyal sister might suit the theme quite well.

The Grimm original turns out to be a complex tale, dark and twisted as they tend to be. And I find it a tough call: it's not the blood and poisons and death that I want to shield from my daughter and any other children I might be telling stories to. It's the wickedness of people: the calculating stepmothers, the careless fathers, the brutal siblings.

I think I want to keep the swan brothers as they are in my childhood memories: beautiful and endangered, but still somehow with a sense of purity and innocence. I fear I may be hopelessly naive and not preparing little a for the realities of life at all.

Or maybe it's that I feel Julia Donaldson's message is a better one to learn. We read Zog this evening at our friends' house. How brilliant: it has all those elemental elements of fairy tale - dragon, princess, knight - but with a great twist on the classic ending that gives them all an 'after' to the happily ever bit. And not a wicked stepmother in sight.

So, I think I will tell the story of the seven swan brothers, but with more of the beauty and less of the baby-snatching (the poor unlucky heroine in Grimm's tales suffers not only an evil stepmother but a wicked wicked mother-in-law).

And it turns out the shirts are to be made, not of nettles, but of starwort, a delicately beautiful water flower.