Fairy Tales 🧚 Black Diamond

The Brave Little Tailor

It was after the jolly jumper near-catastrophe that Baldric decided two things. First, he would never get back on that hellish device again. There was nothing jolly about being hurtled from one crazed parent to the next! Second, he would learn to outsmart his elders. If he couldn’t rely on brute strength then he would arm himself with strategies so cunning and yet so simple that they would disarm his parental assailants. He would model his behaviour on that of the brave little tailor from the Brothers Grimm.

As he grew from a toddler into a strapping young boy, Baldric became more crafty, often nonplussing Antonio and Beatrice with his unpredictability. Soon they were less concerned about their ongoing spousal fray than about the threat of their son’s learning, which was increasing by leaps and bounds, and by amazing Three Musketeer thrusts of his rapier wit. 

The secret to Baldric’s success was that he insisted his parents read to him on alternate nights. As a result, each would only be privy to half the information he imbibed. He also took advantage of their obsessions. Antonio was wrapped upside-down like a vampire in his shrouded studies of evil, and for this reason he could never understand why Alice’s straightforward honesty won the time of day from the White Rabbit. Beatrice was forever perched on the silver lining of her cloud, and so she could never understand why the Walrus and the Carpenter couldn’t be trusted with hammers or needle-nose pliers. As a result Lorenzo never knew when or why his little devil might punctuate his mischief with altruistic deeds, and Beatrice was heartbroken and confused when her little angel broke off the finely-chiseled nose of her replica of Michelangelo’s David and rammed it into the backside of Rodin’s Eve. Baldric thus plumbed the depths of good and evil, inventing new combinations of the two which put deep grooves into the foreheads of his worried parents.

In order to ground his new-found wisdom in sturdy facts, Baldric urged his parents to read to him from books which had solid scientific foundations. He urged them to throw away all books that refused to deal with hard science — such as that dumb diary about the voyages of a beagle; foreign philosophical trash like Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (it wasn’t even written in English); an imaginary dialogue between two chief world systems (anyone knew that systems can’t talk, much less hold a dialogue!); a soap-opera family drama about Relativity; horror stories about a spiralling doppelganger called Double Helix; unfair accusations of selfishness against a man called Gene; Swiftean nonsense about The Insect Societies; failed attempts to count, such as One, Two, Three … Infinity; unnecessary philosophizings with pretentious titles such as What is Life?; mystical Hindu nonsense about The Cosmic Connection; excruciatingly slow Proustian descriptions of The First Three Minutes; pagan neo-Greek fantasies about The Silent Spring; perverted bodice-rippers with Gorillas in the Mist; and anything that contained Irish superstitions or titles like Under a Lucky Star.

All of that was just fantasy, out of some stupid play with mermaids and ocean choirs.

Baldric forced his parents to throw these fairy tales into the rubbish heap, and to replace them with real scientific literature — books about making artificial beings, travelling to the centre of the Earth, radio communication with the dead, and ornithological facts about ravens.

From the research of Dr Frankenstein, Baldric discovered the exact chemical ingredients of the heart and mind, as well as the difficulty of maintaining these in equal proportions. From the explorations of Professor Lidenbrock to the centre of the earth, he learned that the Underworld was made of habitable caverns, and that these caverns led to a volcano on the island of Stromboli. The psychological histories of Edgar Allan Poe taught him that people could stalk out of their graves at will, and that certain birds were good while others were agents of the Devil.

“These agents,” his father explained to him, “aren’t in fact trapped or squished together beneath the ground in a place called Hell, or Ullaloom, or any other place where people are buried alive. Au contraire, Hell,” and here he seemed to speak with some authority, “is in fact almost empty. The agents of Darkness are free to roam everywhere. They’re no longer trapped in the icy depth, pulling out each other’s hair.”

To counter the dangerous innuendo of Antonio’s remarks, Beatrice reminded Baldric, “While all sorts of spirits are floating among us, most of these are benevolent. Sure, there are a few ghouls and trolls and phantoms here and there, but there are also fairies and angels, and chalky-white fays playing flutes …”

“And there are delightful young imps who can make the whole quire hold their hips and laugh, and can jest to Oberon and make him smile.”

Antonio begged his son to ignore her outburst. “What your dear mother forgets to mention is that the fairies specialize in nasty tricks. It was Puck himself, the merry wanderer of the night, who confessed, The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale, / Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me; / Then slip I from her bum, down topples she. And it was Puck who turned Bottom’s head into that of an ass.

Antonio could see that he was being drawn into a literary argument he wasn’t likely to win (largely because Bottom’s head was being stroked by an infatuated nymph, and naked women were gathering all around), so he told his son a story that would more clearly illustrate his point: the goody-two-shoe priests had got it all wrong.

“Once upon a time there was a boy who had been told by the local priest that it was wrong to play with the little thing between his legs. Apparently this finely calibrated instrument was the Devil’s play thing, and not, as he had hoped, his own play thing. This boy was very normal and couldn’t resist doing something that adults told him not to do. For this,” Antonio added, “he should be held up as an example to the spineless youth of this Age.”

“On this point the priest was absolutely clear: if he even touched the thing (except for taking a pee) then it would be the same as taking part in a midnight initiation into the Devil’s Gang. The priest went into detail about the horrible things that went on at this initiation: there were genitals of fishes and bat’s fur and strange things done with the horn of a unicorn.” Antonio paused here, for even he couldn’t stand to repeat such ridiculous acts to his child.

“The priest told the little boy what he would do with the horn if he persisted in his filthy degenerate lusts. He threatened to show him exactly where he would put it, but the clever little boy just whacked him over the head with his Prayer Book and told him that he got the drift. Unfortunately,” and here a tear came into Antonio’s eye as he recalled his own gullibility, “the boy believed the priest. At least at first. The brave little soldier for Christ swore that he would do his scout’s best to stop the Devil’s gang from recruiting him into their Air Force.” 

“But the brave little soldier was tortured by all this. He desperately wanted control over his own toy, and he wanted to make sure that no one could take it away from him. But the priest told him that this was the sin of avarice, and that he must learn to give without expecting anything in return.”

“That night the boy dreamed a fierce Army of Darkness flew into his window, piloting the Spitfires of Hell. The pilots had blond silky hair that never grew and their eyes were the size of saucers. The sky pilots clutched him in their needle-like talons, threw him into a prayer-locker, and flew back down to Hell. Landing on the sulphurous plains, the little soldier for Christ saw that the strange light (which was just barely visible) was very similar to the light in their church. He also saw that the leader of the squadrons, wrapped in purple vestments and wearing a pointy red hat, was the local priest.”

“It’s all just a trick: they try to use against you the one thing that they can’t get their hands on. And Lord knows they try! They invent stories about the Boogey Man who pounces on bad little boys and about Santa Claus who rewards good little boys. You must use everything in your power to battle the forces of moral coercion!” 

Yet Baldric couldn’t get too worked up about his dad’s story, or about the fabled Army of Darkness that flew into rooms at night. As far as he could tell, people would believe just about anything. This he discovered while reading the case histories of Ovid and Homer, in which people acted like gods or idiots depending solely on their cast of mind. Everything seemed chiseled out beforehand, like the Venus de Milo or like the Grecian urn that teased his mother out of thought.

This isn't to say that Baldric wasn’t confused. Indeed, he secretly began to think he was a statue carved by some mad Greek, a mannikin of corporate design, a puppet on the string of some twisted puppeteer.

Baldric also suspected that he was being manipulated in some way by the man across the street, Ragor the Clerk. Every week or so, Ragor would stop in front of their house, look up to his bedroom and smile sadly. Baldric found this odd, because as far as he could tell Ragor had nothing to be sad about.

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