Rapunzel - A Modern Fairy Story

"What is a nice Serbian girl's name?

Well, my translator in Belgrade was a very nice lady named Nada; she had a daughter named Branka, and our office manager there is called Sylvija. There's three possibilities."

"I don't like Nada at all – it sounds like nothing in Spanish. Yes, she looks like a Sylvia, let's call her that. Well Sylvia, how do you like your new name?"

Rapunzel had about a quarter of an hour to get to know Sylvia, before a voice calling from the big house summoned her to her lunch.

"You'd better run along, Rapunzel. I'll put everything away in that cupboard. Then I must go back to work."

"When will you come again?"

"Well, it can't be tomorrow, and I have to fly to Germany on Thursday night, so I don't think it can be earlier than Monday. Off you go now."

And off she went.

4. The Young Visitor

Summer turned to Autumn, Autumn to Winter and Winter to Spring. Notwithstanding the cold and frost, Rapunzel spent the mid-part of each morning on her wall, watching. When Florian did not come, her normally bright face dimmed a little, and after a while she walked back to the summerhouse to read on of the books he left for her. When he came, she climbed down her ladder and walked slowly towards the Summerhouse. Before she reached it, Florian had caught her up and walked the rest of the way with her.

They shared the thermos of hot cocoa he brought on cold days, looked at the new books he had brought, and played Monopoly, which she usually lost, Trivial Pursuits, which she always won, or scrabble in which they were roughly equal. In the summerhouse, Sylvia always sat on her lap, but always in her box so that she wouldn't get crumpled or dirty.

They gradually got to know each other, but, he felt diffident somehow, feeling that it was best not to pry into her life, and in all that time he never asked her surname. If he had, this story might have turned out very differently.

They were, it is true, carrying on a clandestine relationship, however innocent, and the situation was, inevitably, unstable. One cold day in March, Matilda was watching out of the window as Rapunzel, moving quickly and decisively, climbed down off the wall. There was something purposeful about her movements that made Matilda keep watching.

As the girl moved towards the summerhouse, a figure in blue and green leathers with a full-face black helmet came over the wall, paused to remove his helmet, and followed Rapunzel, catching up to her close to the door. He greeted her and she turned her head to smile happily up into his face.

Matilda hurried downstairs and made her way carefully to the summerhouse, keeping of the gravel paths and on the grass so as to give no notice of her arrival. She peered into the pentagonal room, in time to watch Florian pour two cops of what was unmistakably steaming hot cocoa, and hand one to Rapunzel. He took out a paper bag from which he extracted two paper plates and two eccles cakes. The guilty pair munched cake and drank cocoa in total contentment. Rapunzel began telling her visitor her reasons for preferring John Clare's nature poems to Wordsworth's.

"Clare just loves the physical world and the creatures in it. He is so true. You know where he says:

There's nothing mortal in them; their decay

Is the green life of change; to pass away

And come again in blooms revivified.

That's so positive, so optimistic. If we could feel that lives and our deaths were all just part of a great chain of being and nothingness, how much happier our lives would be.

"Wordsworth is so glum and so self-obsessed that he struggles to observe anything except his horse munching noisily. This is his response:

Now, in this blank of things, a harmony,

Home-felt, and home-created, comes to heal

That grief for which the senses still supply

Fresh food; for only then, when memory

Is hushed, am I at rest."

Florian thoroughly appreciated her point, but felt bound to make a counter.

"You can't judge writers solely, or even mainly on the basis of whether or not you agree with their opinions. That makes literature a popularity contest. You have to give weight to opinions that you disagree with profoundly. You have to give the writers the respect of assuming that their views are as thoughtful, as intelligent as your own". This was a truth Florian had been taught at school, but it was years later and under very different circumstances that he saw the wisdom of it."

"Yes, I suppose you are right, but it's not as easy as all that, is it? I suppose poor Wordsworth could not help being depressed, but really I think he used nature too often as a mechanism to talk about other things, and that is little more than moralising."

"Ok, have your own way. I don't disagree really. Now, here's one of the best poets of all. An American lady named Emily Dickinson. She can be difficult, but worth all the effort. Read this one:"

She read well, with just a hesitation or two:

"Nature" is what we see—

The Hill—the Afternoon—

Squirrel—Eclipse— the Bumble bee—

Nay—Nature is Heaven—

Nature is what we hear—

The Bobolink—the Sea—

Thunder—the Cricket—

Nay—Nature is Harmony—

Nature is what we know—

Yet have no art to say—

So impotent Our Wisdom is

To her Simplicity."

"Does she mean that poetry can't help us comprehend nature? Oh I think she is wrong – at least I hope she is."

Listening to them, Matilda was bewildered. She expected cold-hearted seduction; she found a man gently trying to widen her charge's mental horizons.

She watched and waited until he left, without a kiss, without even a handclasp. Before he departed over the wall, she watched Rapunzel put her newly-acquired book into one of the cupboards under the benches, stopping briefly to open one of the boxes and bestowing a brief kiss on its contents. This she would really have to report to Mrs. Catthorpe.

Mrs. Catthorpe was livid. She knew in her heart that she had been neglectful and that she had condemned the girl to a love-starved childhood, and her conscience reproached her. But the idea of some insinuating Lothario seducing the child was disturbing on so many levels. She was not so heartless as to wish suffering on the girl, but this nonsense would have to be broken up with a firm hand.

As with so many of her kind, It was axiomatic to the former Goldie that the welfare of Fixxitcorps could only be secured under her leadership. She had to think the unthinkable. This young Romeo threatened the future of the corporation that was her life.

5. The wicked witch appears.

Two pairs of spying eyes watched Rapunzel's every move for the next couple of days. Three pairs of prying hands unpacked all the treasures that Rapunzel hid in the cupboards, laid them on the pentagonal table and examined each one. Books of poems by various hands, girl's adventure stories, school stories and all the classics of childrens' literature that nobody had thought to give her until Florian.

There was a pile of Penguin miniature scores, Tchaikovsky's ballet music, some Mozart, Bach's Brandenburg Concertos and a Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. Goldie was taken aback by the obvious expectation that Rapunzel would be able to, and would want to read complex music scores.

Another pile was Board games, packs of playing cards, a cribbage board and a box of dominoes. A game she did not recognise, called Cluedo, had scrawled across the lid of the box in black marker pen 'This is not right!! It is wicked to make a game out of people being murdered.' She assumed that it was in Rapunzel's hand.

In a category of its own, was an exquisite costume doll, that looked as if it belonged in a museum, rather than in a child's hidey-hole. But, she thought ruefully, she really isn't a girl any longer, she is a young woman.

Finally the plans came to fruition and the young man appeared. Miss McGinn watched as Matilda phoned. Mrs. Catthorpe went straight to her waiting limousine, and ten minutes later she was driving through the gates, noting as she arrived the big red Ducatti parked against the wall. The war-party strode purposefully along the gravel path to the summerhouse. The two minions waited outside whilst their principal flung open the door.

Three pairs of lips opened and emitted words:

"Auntie Goldie!"

"Mrs. Catthorpe!"

"Florian Salter. You!"

Mrs. Catthorpe locked eyes with the young heir apparent of JTJ International, the nearest and closest rival of Fixxitcorps across a broad range of their activities. On many occasions they had been rival bidders for resources, for contracts and, increasingly, for businesses they wished to acquire. Recently, as both boards saw that the rivalry was cutting into their profits, she had found herself sitting alongside young Salter as they planned and executed joint bids for contracts all over the world.

Dammit, she thought, I should have recognised that damned doll. We have one very like it in the glass trophy case inside the entrance to Fixxitxcorps headquarters. Anger and hostility congealed into outright paranoia.

Her thoughts whirled in her mind:

"His father and uncles are getting ready to face retirement. They have been throwing responsibilities onto young Florrieboy for a while now. Soon he'll be made CEO, and now he's making a grab for my Fixxitcorps. Well I won't have it!"

Above all, Mrs. Catthorpe felt aggrieved. She felt that her surprise at the putative seducer's identity had robbed her of the moral high ground. Time to go on the offensive.

"How dare you sneak around, invading my home and establishing a clandestine relationship with my naïve step-daughter? What was to stop you from behaving decently, talking to me, and getting my permission?"

Florian could see that his ignorance of the girl's identity would not provide any kind of excuse. In fact his quick mind told him that he really had no excuse at all. All his self-exculpations were useless, and more than likely harmful. For the moment he decided to keep quiet. Not so Rapunzel.

"Florian is my friend – the only friend I have in the world. He comes and talks to me, and brings me books to read and tells me about the world outside. You don't want me to grow up, you don't want me to know things, and you don't want me to have friends. You want to keep me in a box, like I keep my doll Sylvia."

Anger and guilt combined to make Goldie reckless. She screamed:

"And what has your "friend" done to you in these secret meetings? He been touching you? Has he been putting his hands under your clothes? Has he asked you to play "Doctor" with him? Has he offered to show you his weewee if you showed him yours? Has he tried to put it into you?"

Two white faces stared at her aghast; shocked into momentary paralysis. She knew that, in her moment of self-revelation she had done something unforgivable. Her rage turned to shamed embarrassment, and she sank down onto a bench, head in hand and sobbed aloud.

"I always knew there was something damaged in her", Florian thought to himself. "I bet she is as cold as a polar bear's toenail under that sexy, flirty exterior."

Florin strode to the door. He spoke sharply to the two elderly women shivering outside:

Go and make a large pot of tea and some biscuits; cake if you've got it. Don't forget the sugar. Bring five cups. Now hurry."

The strife was over. Three people sat in silence whilst the tea was brought. Rapunzel, for the first time, reached out to Florian and took his hand in hers. If Mrs Catthorpe noticed, she showed no sign.

When the tea was poured, and the cake passed around. Florian looked directly at Goldie.

"I suggest we should ask Rapunzel what she wants to do with her life."

Four pairs of eyes looked fixedly at the girl. She was ready.

"First of all I want all this hateful hair cut off at about shoulder length. I want some sensible clothes, jeans, sweaters, skirts, some warm winter boots and a long coat like yours, Auntie Goldie.

Then I want to go to a girls' school and spend some time with young women growing up. It will be hard at first, but I shall learn to get on with them, you know, like Darrell Rivers had to. I hope I can come back here for holidays, but I won't be locked up like a caged animal. If Florian wants to come and see me, you won't stop him, either in school or here. Auntie Goldie, I don't want to be your enemy, and I don't want you to be mine."

Rapunzel soon discovered what she knew in her heart. Malory Towers and the Chalet School were fictional constructs, not pedagogic institutions. There were, however, finishing schools abounding for the Catthorpes of this world, and she took a place in one of the best of these, in Switzerland.

Three years later, a box arrived and placed among the wedding presents put on display by the family of Florian's bride-to-be. It contained a beautiful costume doll. Florian's new wife kept it for her first daughter, and not many years later, Auntie Rapunzel was sitting on the nursery carpet playing with the doll and its adorable owner. When the nanny protested that the doll was too good for a two-year-old, Auntie Rapunzel was scornful.

"Nonsense", she cried robustly, "let the child play. They're only young once, and for such a short time."

Rapunzel rose to be Warden of an Oxford Women's College. She never married but lived openly with the College's head gardener.

Goldie Catthorpe returned to her tower block headquarters much impressed by the series of children's books called Choose your own adventures. She instructed the editorial team of her wholly owned publishing house to commission their own series, aimed particularly at girls. They were a huge success.