At first glance the title of Tony Ross's 1991 picture book A Fairy Tale might seem deceptive. It takes place not in a lush mythical kingdom, but in a grimy industrial city in the early 20th century and the narrative that unfolds is, on the surface, a predominantly down to earth one. The opening page has our protagonist, a young girl named Bessie, angrily rejecting a book about fairies because she can no longer relate to such concepts. Her yearning for books that are about "real things" lays out Ross's own ambitions to tell a story that says something authentic to children on the brink of the same disillusionment. Young readers who may be too old and jaded to believe in things like the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas, but are also feeling the bleakness of that void and wondering what else in life could possibly come along to fill it.
Like Ross's Oscar Got The Blame, A Fairy Tale is about the conflict between fantasy and reality, more specifically a child's inclination to use imagination as a means of reckoning with their world versus the pressure to live in the real world. In this case the conflict is largely internal. Bessie is quite a bit older than Oscar and at the stage in life where she is questioning the value of escapist fantasy, yet she is clearly reluctant to abandon that lingering sense of childhood curiosity altogether. Her insistence that fairy tales are about made up things is challenged when she gets to know her elderly neighbour, Mrs Leaf (full name later revealed to be Daisy Leaf), who suggests that she herself might really be a fairy. Bessie is initially incredulous, since Mrs Leaf does not meet her preconceived notions of how a fairy should be, but Mrs Leaf explains that fairies only look dainty and beautiful when they are happy; an unhappy fairy would look absolutely wretched. Bessie observes that if Mrs Leaf were a fairy, she would have to be very deeply unhappy, a comment she immediately regrets but that Mrs Leaf does not appear to take too personally. Mrs Leaf, it seems, is indeed a deeply unhappy woman - the source of her unhappiness is never explicitly cited, but can be readily deciphered by anybody reading between the lines. Over the course of the story, she and Bessie forge a close friendship that endures as the latter comes of age, experiences love and loss, and enters into her twilight years. By the ending, which takes us up to the present day, Daisy is still by her side, and it becomes apparent that the ageing process has worked rather differently for her.
From the text alone, there might be some ambiguity regarding Daisy's claims to fairyhood. Ross never flat-out confirms that she is a fairy, much as he never flat-out confirmed what was really going on in the text for Oscar Got The Blame, although in both cases the illustrations appear to favour a particular conclusion. For the first half of the story it seems entirely possible that Daisy is simply humoring Bessie, by giving this frustrated child one last peculiarity to chew on before this kind of fanciful imagining becomes totally inaccessible to her. Bessie notices things about Daisy that make her different to others but do not, in themselves, prove that she is a fairy - for example, her vegetarian diet and her tendency to forage for wild berries (berries that she warns Bessie would be poisonous to anyone not of elfin origin). Then, as Bessie grows into an adult, Ross insinuates more heavily that there might indeed be something genuinely uncanny about Daisy. She does not show up as anything more than a ghostly smudge in Bessie's wedding photographs, although we are offered the glimmer of a rational explanation, with her husband Robert thinking nothing of it and insisting that no picture he's been involved with has ever turned out quite right. Bessie also observes that as she has come of age, Daisy only appears to have gotten progressively younger, although we could still chalk that up to Bessie's friendship bringing out a new lease of life in Daisy. But is there any way to make sense of Daisy's remarkable longevity, and the fact that she's still with Bessie at the end of the book, other than to concede that she is exactly what she says she is?
Bessie's initial distaste for fairy tales stems from her assessment that they do not reflect reality, but at the same time it is clear that she is not exactly satisfied with what reality has to offer. We sense that she turns on childhood fantasy as angrily as she does because she sees it as having betrayed her in not reflecting the world as it really is. And when she attempts to discuss her unanswered questions with the other children at school and gets predictably ridiculed for it, she becomes frustrated with the intolerance of the non-elfin world in not allowing room for such thought. Bessie cannot relate to fairy tale fiction, but nor does she feel at home in the world in which she's required to take her place; in many respects, Daisy's quest is less about convincing Bessie that fairy tales are real than it is steering her toward the qualities worth celebrating in a world that does not align with childhood expectation. The things she encourages Bessie to see as remarkable are, on the surface, very small and ordinary ("Have you ever had a magic moment...a summer afternoon when the sky's so warm the world stops, or the night before Christmas when you can feel the happiness in the air?"). The real world harbours ample magic, but it manifests in subtler, more unassuming means than one might find in an archetypal children's storybook. It is notable that when we first meet Bessie and Daisy, their respective living spaces are marked by dominant colours that point to the state of their internal worlds. Bessie's bedroom is blue and shady, reflecting her general gloom and dissatisfaction. Daisy's living room, by contrast, is green and vibrant, evoking both her connection to nature and, by extension, the fairy domain she describes to Bessie as being covered in grassland. It also hints at Daisy's latent vitality, and at the other hidden depths she possesses, something underscored in having her house's exterior seem as gloomy and disconnected from the natural world as everything else in Balaclava Street.
Daisy tells Bessie that the human world and the fairy world exist simultaneously, and together, but are like two sides of the same coin. Ordinarily they can't see each other, although cracks will occasionally appear between the two, allowing fairies to wander through into human dwellings, only for them to retreat in an instant. The implicit message here is of the duality of life, as Daisy teaches Bessie to consolidate the harshness of reality with the ephemeral blessings it also brings, which Bessie must be alert to in order to seize and appreciate. The cruelty of the human world takes many forms, ranging from the teasing Bessie receives from her schoolmates when she lets her fairy agnosticism slip to the onset of the world war that will eventually claim the life of her beloved Robert. Ross's story centres on the transformative power of the friendship that persists between Bessie and Daisy and how both parties are mutually lifted from their respective solitude and despair. The friendship proves physically transformative for Daisy, but it also visibly changes Bessie's world. As the two grow closer, the illustrations depicting the happenings in that grimy industrial burg already seem brighter and more colourful. The street outside Leach's shop, in which Bessie and Daisy have their second encounter, looks warm and lively, even beneath the clouds of factory smog, and populated by other individuals who are likewise seizing the moment (two men engaged in intimate conversation, a boy hoop rolling). Sharp-eyed readers might notice that littered through the book's illustrations are various hidden fairies and gnomes, lurking somewhere within the corners or, in the case of the illustration depicting the military cross issued posthumously to Robert, right within plain sight. It is a charming touch that seems to bear out Daisy's words about the fairy world always being connected to the human world and the magic intermittently seeping its way in, but the real revelations are in the broader sense of atmosphere and how alive Bessie's ostensibly humdrum existence becomes when she is sharing these experiences with Daisy. Ross's description of the Whit Monday they spend together seems hauntingly reminiscent of Daisy's earlier words on the magic of a summer day in which the sky is so warm that the world seems to stop. Nothing especially out of the ordinary happens. Daisy watches Bessie participate in a parade, they have a celebratory meal in the church hall and then walk home together. But each individual moment is fused with an elation that Bessie wishes could go on forever. It proves a day more magical than any fairy tale.
Bessie cannot actually stop time, of course. The blissful Whit Monday she would have gladly inhabited for all eternity is followed immediately a time leap, in which Daisy becomes a young woman and her perspective on life somewhat changes. She begins to identify as Bess, and her unanswered questions about the existence of fairies are largely put to one side. She and Daisy still talk about it, but have contextualised it as a fond memory of a bygone time in which Daisy had playfully tried to make her believe in fairies. Now Bess's interests lie with more adult pursuits, such as her job in one of the local factories and her romance with her colleague Robert. The idyllic future she might have built with Robert is savagely ruptured by the coming of war; Robert goes away to fight and is killed in action. Bess is naturally distraught, but Daisy is able to support her through the grief until, some years later, "the sadness about Robert turned into happy memories, just as Daisy said it would." Implicit in this line is, I think, the most salient hint regarding the source of Daisy's own implied sadness when first encountered by Bessie. Daisy does not reveal much about her background, other than to suggest that she became stranded in the human world after being unable to find her way back to the fairy world, although we might well have read some significance into her identifying as Mrs Leaf. With that in mind, Daisy's assurances of light at the end of the tunnel following the loss of Robert could be taken as stemming from personal experience. Perhaps when she described being unable to get back to the fairy domain she was speaking at least somewhat metaphorically, referring covertly to the loss of the life she had previously known when her husband was with her. Eventually, it seems that her sorrow transmuted into happy memories, but it took the renewed joy from her friendship with Bessie to get her to that point. Daisy is now able to return the favour by being there for her friend amid her own voyage through grief. But even before Daisy had clearly always helped to fill a hole in Bessie's life. From what we know of Bessie's school life, she was teased and something of a misfit among her peers. There is a passing reference to her mother and at one point we get to meet her uncle Harold, who is a pigeon fancier and points to the birds' homing instincts as an example of the inherent mysteriousness of life. But by all indications Bessie felt more of a connection to Daisy than she did her own flesh and blood family, who stay largely out of the picture. Daisy helped the lonely Bessie find a sense of belonging the real world once before, a function she is able to keep on fulfilling for the adult Bess.
Ross's story ends more or less where it began, with Bess and Daisy in the present day, as close knit a pair as they've always been, although the two of them have now switched places. As we can see from the closing illustrations, Bess has grown old while Daisy now looks young and dainty. By now, Bess feels that she's finally attained clarity for those unresolved questions she had many years ago regarding the existence of fairies. "Maybe old friends never notice the changes in each other. Now and again though, a faint memory comes to old Bess. Something about fairies looking young and beautiful when they're happy...stuff and nonsense, she knew there were no such things...she'd always known." Ironically, Bess's sense of closure on the matter arrives right as Ross gives the reader what looks to be irrefutable proof of Daisy's fairyhood. Is Bess's ageing intended to be symbolic of her relinquishing of childhood fantasy? I would argue not. While the story closes on an unmistakably poignant note, it still reads to me like a positive ending. The implication is that Bess no longer feels the need for fairies, because she has found assuredly the fulfilment she'd long deemed to be lacking in the real world, and is contented with the friend she has, who also just so happens to actually be a fairy. Her friend too could not be happier. Significantly, the final illustration, which has the two friends walking along 1991-era Balaclava Street, appears to show them heading out of the urban environment that has dominated the narrative and in the direction of a distant stretch of greenery. The feeling is one of transcendence, as if the fairy world is their ultimate destination. Their hands linked, we see them bridging the gap between the young and adult worlds, with youthful innocence and graceful maturity co-existing side by side. The pair compliment one another perfectly. Far from a mournful story about the inevitable abandonment of childhood awe, A Fairy Tale is an optimistic yarn about its endurance, and its ability to grow and develop along with us. Life is filled hardship - in that regard it's not so different to a fairy tale - but we've a valuable ally in the magic that floats up through the cracks.
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