I've just written a new version of Hansel and Gretel. On reading through the
finished text, I kept wondering why it was that I had chosen this particular
folk tale. It was partly because it is a dark and powerful story, of course;
and because I knew that the great Emma Chichester Clark wanted to illustrate
it. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that telling this
story, of the expulsion from the family home of two stepchildren, might have
been some kind of an attempt to exorcise perhaps my most tenacious gremlin,
or at least to come to a better understanding of it.
Stepmothers and wolves have had a bad press over the centuries. They have not
deserved it but folk tales have always needed their bad guys, and when
you're telling a story it's helpful to have a central character whose
malevolence is simply taken for granted, an embodiment of evil that must be
overcome if good is to triumph.
Take wolves. It's true that, deep in our pastoral past, wolves were a real and
constant threat. They did prey on livestock at a time when livestock was
essential to a family's survival and, although rare, wolf attacks on people,
particularly on small children, did sometimes happen. They happened often
enough to turn the fear of wolves into paranoia. Out of paranoia came
persecution, and persecution led to extinction. The last wolf in these isles
was hunted down and killed, in Scotland, in the 18th century.
The demonising of wolves was certainly not justifiable, but it was at least
understandable. So what about stepmothers? How come they are so often
portrayed in our folk tales as the arch manipulators; wicked, callous,
cruel, calculating? The perspective of history may help to explain if not
the demonising of stepmothers, then at least the reason there were so many
of them.
We're told that nowadays about one marriage (or partnership) in three ends in
divorce or separation, that in most cases one or other of the partners
remarries, and that often the children concerned will find that they
suddenly have a stepfather or a stepmother to deal with. Certainly it is
primarily because of the breakdown of adult relationships that children find
themselves catapulted into a situation not of their making and over which
they have little or no control, despite all the laws set up to protect their
needs and their rights.
But go back a few hundred years, to folk-tale times, when divorce was rare -
Henry VIII made an exception of himself, you may remember - and we still
find that there were vast numbers of stepchildren. How come? Well, we died
younger then, a lot younger. The loss of one parent through death was
common, and the death of a mother in childbirth one of the commonest causes
of all. The surviving parent would frequently be young enough to remarry and
have more children. So there were stepmothers everywhere, stepfathers,
stepchildren, half-brothers, half-sisters, and with them a whole host of
complex emotional and financial strains and stresses for the new family to
contend with.
Human nature being what it is, now as then, many such families have found it
difficult to cope with all this. There can be jealousy, resentment, even
animosity. For an incoming stepfather or stepmother, a new stepchild might
be an unwelcome and ever-present reminder of the previous spouse, whose
existence he or she would like to forget or nullify completely. For the
stepchildren themselves, this new step-parent can so easily be an unwelcome
intrusion into their old, familiar world, the one who has come between them
and their beloved parents, who seems to be trying to supplant one of them.
The potential for discord is considerable, for anger and bitterness on all
sides. Out of this can come cruelty, physical, mental, or both. It need not
happen, of course, and many step-families work out fine. But things do fall
apart sometimes and when they do, everyone gets hurt. When this happens it
is the children who are the most vulnerable.
My fascination for Hansel and Gretel began a long time ago, when my elder
brother, Pieter, and I were taken by our mother and our relatively new
stepfather to a performance of Humperdinck's opera. I was about 6 years old.
I knew the story already. I think my mother must have read us the Brothers
Grimm version before we went. I remember that I identified particularly
strongly with Hansel. At the time I was just beginning to comprehend what it
meant to be a stepchild. The truth is that I am still trying to come to
terms with it at the age of 64, as a grandfather seven times over. It's been
a troublesome old gremlin.
I grew up with two fathers: one who was there, Jack Morpurgo, my stepfather
and a publisher; and the one who wasn't there, my real father, Tony
Valentine Bridge, who was an actor, as my mother had been, too. What
happened to my family happened to many families after the Second World War.
Let's just call it collateral damage of the domestic kind.
My real father, Tony, was abroad when I was born, serving as a corporal in the
Pioneer Corps in Baghdad. Pieter and I spent most of our infant years, our
war years, growing up with our mother and her extended family in Radlett
[Hertfordshire]. Into her life, while Tony was away, came Jack Morpurgo, a
major in the Royal Artillery. There was an instant rapport, fascination,
attraction - all those things and more, I suspect. Pieter and I were far too
young to be aware of any of this at the time, of course. Tony came home
after the end of the war to discover that his place in my mother's heart had
been taken. He did all he could to try to woo my mother back. He took her
away to Suffolk to see if she could be persuaded. But she had committed
herself too far, I think. It was no use.
In the aftermath, there was more hurt than anger. Tony came to an
extraordinarily magnanimous and selfless decision. He agreed to a divorce
and said that, under the circumstances, there was little point in playing
the part-time father to two children whom he had never known and who
scarcely knew him. That, in his view, would serve only to confuse and upset
us. He did want us to keep his name but thought that it would be best for us to
settle down in a new family with our mother and our new stepfather. He would
simply disappear from the picture. That's what happened. I became Michael
Andrew Bridge Morpurgo, and life had to begin all over again for Pieter and
me.
Life was not miserable, but it was perplexing. For a start, we were
encouraged, Pieter and I, never to call my mother and stepfather Mum or Dad.
We had to call them Kippe and Jack, because it was felt that we should not
differentiate between them. This way, they imagined, I presume, that one
would be no more real a parent to us than the other, in public or in
private. Soon my mother had two more children. Again, there had to be no
differentiation between us. To anyone who came to the house, we were all
Morpurgos, one happy family. Tony was a phantom father. Pieter and I knew
little or nothing of him. He was simply airbrushed out.
There were reasons for this, understandable reasons too. At the time, in the
1940s and 1950s, divorce in a family was rare, and a matter of some shame.
My mother had been brought up in a Christian socialist family. She had
divorced against their wishes. The vicar in our church would not allow her
to take communion. She was, in the Church's eyes, a fallen woman. Not much
forgiveness there then. My mother was tormented by all this for the rest of
her life. She had to keep up appearances, like the rest of us. Neither she,
nor anyone else among family and friends, ever mentioned my father. Our
phantom father was also a taboo father.
As I grew out of early childhood the whole sham of it became more and more
difficult to live with. I felt implicated in the conspiracy. It was a mould
I could not break without causing great hurt. And anyway, I thought, what
was the point? Sham or not, it was a happy enough family. In a way, Kippe
and Jack had done what they could to make it work. Jack was certainly very
demanding and domineering. He could be unkind and harsh at times,
particularly towards Pieter. But I think they both did their best, under the
circumstances. If I hold anything against all three of them now, Kippe, Jack
and Tony as well, it is that Pieter and I had no opportunity to get to know
Tony while we were growing up. We'd have liked that. We were a split family
and they covered it up. They didn't need to and I wish they hadn't.
I didn't meet Tony until I was nearly 20, and then it wasn't in the flesh. It
was Christmas Eve, 1962. We were all at home for a family Christmas. The
television was on, black and white, the teatime BBC classic serial slot.
Everyone was watching: Kippe, Jack, step-aunts, half-brother, half-sister,
family friends, Pieter and me too. It was Great Expectations. You know the
moment. Young Pip is making his way through the graveyard at dusk, the mists
swirling around, when up from behind a gravestone rears the terrifying
figure of Magwitch, the escaped convict, his face hideous, his eyes glaring.
Kippe, sitting beside me, let out a cry and grabbed my arm. “Oh my God!” she
breathed. “That's Tony. That's your father.” It was the first time in all
those years that his name had been spoken in public.
It was a memorable meeting. Pieter and I met him properly a few years later.
He came for tea. Everyone talked very politely, I remember. It was a lot
less memor-able, but I was very relieved to see that he did not look at all
like Magwitch. We both got to know him a little after that, and followed his
distinguished theatrical career in Canada - he'd emigrated there back in the
1950s and found a new life. I went to see him in a play at the Shaw Festival
at Niagara-on-the-Lake, only a short time before he died. He was over 80 and
still acting in leading roles. A genuinely super trouper.
They are all three of them gone now, their drama done. Tony was the last to
go. As we were spreading his ashes in the garden, on January 14, 2006, one
of my granddaughters made it very clear that she thought Tony's ashes
belonged under the hornbeam tree, where Kippe's were and Jack's too. So
that's where he is, that's where they all are. Together.
As for Hansel and Gretel, what I learnt in the retelling was that the story
really isn't about how wicked the stepmother is at all - and don't forget,
the father colluded in the abandonment of the children, too. Rather, it's a
tale of two children who, to survive, have to learn to use their own wits
and their own courage, to escape the clutches of the wicked witch in her
gingerbread house. They know they can't rely on anyone else for help, so
they have to help themselves. They just have to forget their fears, and take
control of their own destiny. It's called growing up. Shoving that old witch
into the oven and slamming the door to shut out her screams is everyone's
favourite part of the story, and certainly the moment in Humperdinck's opera
I loved best. She was Hansel and Gretel's gremlin, and they got rid of her.
We should get rid of ours, too - well, that's what I keep telling myself
anyway.
Hansel and Gretel by Michael Morpurgo, illustrated by Emma Chichester Clark,
is published by Walker Books at £12.99. It is available from Times Books
First for £11.69, free p&p. Telephone 0870 1608080, or go to
timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
