Diary: Kathryn Davis on Who Wrote the Fairy Tales (Part One)

Nordic Paper Industry’s English-language edition of the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen

“There was once a little boy who had taken cold by going out and getting his feet wet,” the tale begins. “No one could think how he had managed to do so, for the weather was quite dry … ” You didn’t have to be a genius to see that this was the way I’d come down with pleurisy at my best friend Peggy’s seventh birthday party, or to realize that the black gumdrop and toothpick poodle I’d been making was to blame. So it happened that I got to spend the whole next month in bed, my mother beside me, reading me one fairy tale after another. Every now and then she’d steal a glance in my direction to make sure I hadn’t stopped breathing.

Downstairs the sun may have been shining, my little sister playing her Mouse Guitar, my father whistling, the dachshund racing mindlessly from one end of the house to the other. Downstairs it may have been noisy and bright but upstairs in my bedroom it was hushed and dark. My mother had drawn the venetian blinds and plugged in the raveling black-and-white cord of the vaporizer, a queerly shaped enamel-coated relic of her own sickly childhood. Puffs of yellow steam came out of a hole in its top, musty and stale smelling, as if the steam itself were a thing of the past. “The little boy looked at the teapot and saw the lid raise itself gradually. Branches sprouted, even from the spout, in all directions, till they became larger and larger, and there appeared a large elder tree, covered with flowers white and fresh …”