Once Upon A Time

By: Nadine Gordimer

Someone has written to ask me to contribute to an anthology

of stories for children. I reply that I don't write children's

stories; and he writes back that at a recent

congress/bookfair/seminar a certain novelist said every writer

ought to write at least one story for children. I think of

sending a postcard saying I don't accept that I 'ought' to write

anything. And then last night I woke up - or rather was wakened

without knowing what had roused me.

A voice in the echo-chamber of the subconscious? A sound.

A creaking of the kind made by the weight carried by one

foot after another along a wooden floor. I listened. I felt the

apertures of my ears distend with concentration. Again: the

creaking. I was waiting for it; waiting to hear if it indicated

that feet were moving from room to room, coming up the passage to

my door. I have no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow. But I

have the same fears as people who do take these precautions, and

my windowpanes are thin as rime, could shatter like a wine glass.

A woman was murdered (how do they put it) in broad daylight in a

house two blocks away, last year, and the fierce dogs who guarded
an old widower and his collection of antique clocks were

strangled before he was knifed by a casual labourer he had

dismissed without pay.

I was staring at the door, making it out in my mind rather

than seeing it, in the dark. I lay quite still a victim already

but the arrhythmia of my heart was fleeing, knocking his way and

that against its body-cage. How finely tuned the senses are, just

out of rest, sleep! I could never listen intently as that in the

distractions of the day; I was reading every faintest sound,

identifying and classifying its possible threat.

But I learned that I was to be neither threatened nor

spared. There was no human weight pressing on the boards, the

creaking was a buckling, an epicentre of stress. I was in it. The

house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on under-mined

ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the house's foundations,

the stopes and passages of gold mines have hollowed the rock, and

when some face trembles, detaches and falls, three thousand feet

below, the whole house shifts slightly, bringing uneasy strain to

the balance and counterbalance of brick, cement, wood and glass

that hold it as a structure around me. The misbeats of my heart

tailed off like the last muffled flourishes on one of the wooden

xylophones made by the Chopi and Tsonga migrant miners who might

have been down there, under me in the earth at that moment. The
stope where the fall was could have been disused, dripping water

from its ruptured veins; or men might now be interred there in

the most profound of tombs.

I couldn't find a position in which my body would let go of

my mind - release me to sleep again. So I began to tell myself a

story; a bedtime story.

In a house, in a suburb, in a city, there were a man and his

wife who loved each other very much and were living happily ever

after. They had a little boy, and they loved him very much. They

had a cat and a dog that the little boy loved very much. They had

a car and a caravan trailer for holidays, and a swimming pool

which was fenced so that the little boy and his playmates would

not fall in and drown. They had a housemaid who was absolutely

trustworthy and an itinerant gardener who was highly recommended

by the neighbours. For when they began to live happily ever after

they were warned, by that wise old witch, the husband's mother,

not to take on anyone off the street. They were inscribed in a

medical benefit society, their pet dog was licensed, they were

insured against fire, flood damage and theft, and subscribed to

the local Neighbourhood Watch, which supplied them with a plaque

for their gates lettered YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED over the silhouette

of a would-be intruder. He was masked; it could not be said if he

no racist.

It was possible to insure the house, the swimming pool or

the car against riot damage. There were riots, but these were

outside the city, where people of another colour were quartered.

These people were not allowed into the suburb except as reliable

housemaids and gardeners, so there was nothing to fear, the

husband told the wife. Yet she was afraid that someday such

people might come up the street and tear off the plaque YOU HAVE

BEEN WARNED and open the gates and stream in… Nonsense, my dear,

said the husband, there are police and soldiers and tear-gas and

guns to keep them away. But to please her-for he loved her very

much and buses were being burned, cars stoned, and schoolchildren

shot by the police in those quarters out of sight and hearing of

the suburb-he had electronically-controlled gates fitted. Anyone

who pulled off the sign YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED and tried to open

the gates would have to announce his intentions by pressing a

button ad speaking into a receiver relayed to the house. The

little boy was fascinated by the device and used it as a walkie-

talkie in cops and robbers play with his small friends.

The riots were suppressed. But there were many burglaries in

the suburb and d somebody's trusted housemaid was tied up and

shut in a cupboard by thieves while she was in charge of her

little boy was so upset by this misfortune befalling a friend

left as she herself often was with responsibility for the

possessions of the man and his wife and the little boy, that she

implored her employers to have burglar bars attached to the doors

and windows of the house, and an alarm system installed. The wife

said, She is right, let us take heed of her advice. So from every

window and door in the house where they were living happily ever

after they now saw the trees and sky through bars, and when the

little boy's pet cat tried to climb in by the fanlight to keep

him company in his little bed at night, as it customarily had

done, it set off the alarm keening through the house.

The alarm was often answered-it seemed-by other burglar

alarms, in other houses, that had been triggered by pet cars or

nibbling mice. The alarms called to one another across the

gardens in shrills and bleats and wails that everyone soon became

accustomed to, so that the din roused the inhabitants of the

suburb no more than the croak of frogs and musical grating of

cicadas’ legs. Under cover of the electronic harpies’ discourse

intruders sawed the iron bars and broke into homes, taking away

hi-fi equipment, television sets, cassette players, cameras and

radios, jewelry and clothing, and sometimes were hungry enough to

devour everything in the refrigerator or paused audaciously to

paid no compensation for single malt, a loss made keener by the

property owner’s knowledge that the thieves wouldn’t even have

been able to appreciate what it was they were drinking.

Then the time came when many of the people who were not

trusted housemaids and gardeners hung about the suburb because

they were unemployed. Some importuned for a job: weeding or

painting a roof; anything, baas, madam. But the man and his wife

remembered the warning about taking on anyone off the street.

Some drank liquor and fouled the street with discarded bottles.

Some begged, waiting for the man or his wife to drive the

car out of the electronically operated gates. They sat about with

their feet in the gutters, under the jacaranda trees that made a

green tunnel of the street for it was a beautiful suburb, spoilt

only by their presence and sometimes they fell asleep lying right

before the gates in the midday sun. The wife could never see

anyone go hungry. She sent the trusted housemaid out with bread

and tea, but the trusted housemaid said these were loafers and

tsotsis, who would come and tie her and shut her in a cupboard.

The husband said, She’s right. Take heed of her advice. You only

encourage them with your bread and tea. They are looking for

their chance. .. And he brought the little boy's tricycle from

the garden into the house every night, because if the house was
surely secure, once locked and with the alarm set, someone might

still be able to climb over the wall or the electronically closed

gates into the garden.

You are right, said the wife, then the wall should be higher.

And the wise old witch, the husband's mother, paid for the extra

bricks as her Christmas present to her son and his wife the

little boy got a Space Man outfit and a book of fairy tales. But

every week there were more reports of intrusion: in broad

daylight and the dead of night, in the early hours of the

morning, and even in the lovely summer twilight a certain family

was at dinner while the bedrooms were being ransacked upstairs.

The man and his wife, talking of the latest armed robbery in the

suburb, were distracted by the sight of the little boy's pet cat

effortlessly arriving over the seven-foot wall, descending first

with a rapid bracing of extended forepaws down on the sheer

vertical surface, and then a graceful launch, landing with

swishing tail within the property. The whitewashed wall was

marked with the cat's comings and goings; and on the street side

of the wall there were larger red-earth smudges that could have

been made by the kind of broken running shoes, seen on the feet

of unemployed loiterers, that had no innocent destination.

When the man and wife and little boy took the pet dog for its

walk round the neighborhood streets they no longer paused to

behind an array of different varieties of security fences, walls

and devices. The man, wife, little boy and dog passed a

remarkable choice: there was the low-cost option of pieces of

broken glass embedded in cement along the top of walls, there

were iron grilles ending in lance-points, there were attempts at

reconciling the aesthetics of prison architecture with the

Spanish Villa style (spikes painted pink) and with the plaster

urns of neoclassical facades (twelve-inch pikes finned like

zigzags of lightning and painted pure white). Some walls had a

small board affixed, giving the name and telephone number of the

firm responsible for the installation of the devices. While the

little boy and the pet dog raced ahead, the husband and wife

found themselves comparing the possible effectiveness of each

style against its appearance; and after several weeks when they

paused before this barricade or that without needing to speak,

both came out with the conclusion that only one was worth

considering. It was the ugliest but the most honest in its

suggestion of the pure concentration-camp style, no frills, all

evident efficacy. Placed the length of walls, it consisted of a

continuous coil of stiff and shining metal serrated into jagged

blades, so that there would be no way of climbing over it and no

way through its tunnel without getting entangled in its fangs.

and bloodier, a deeper and sharper hooking and tearing of flesh.

The wife shuddered to look at it. You're right, said the husband,

anyone would think twice... And they took heed of the advice on a

small board fixed to the wall: Consult DRAGON'S TEETH The People

For Total Security. Next day a gang of workmen came and stretched

the razor-bladed coils all round the walls of the house where the

husband and wife and little boy and pet dog and cat were living

happily ever after. The sunlight flashed and slashed, off the

serrations, the cornice of razor thorns encircled the home,

shining. The husband said, Never mind. It will weather. The wife

said, You're wrong. They guarantee it's rust-proof. And she

waited until the little boy had run off to play before she said,

I hope the cat will take heed . . . The husband said, Don't

worry, my dear, cats always look before they leap. And it was

true that from that day on the cat slept in the little boy's bed

and kept to the garden, never risking a try at breaching

security.

One evening, the mother read the little boy to sleep with a

fairy story from the book the wise old witch had given him at

Christmas. Next day he pretended to be the Prince who braves the

terrible thicket of thorns to enter the palace and kiss the

Sleeping Beauty back to life: he dragged a ladder to the wall,

body to creep in, and with the first fixing of its razor-teeth in

his knees and hands and head he screamed and struggled deeper

into its tangle. The trusted housemaid and the itinerant

gardener, whose "day" it was, came running, the first to see and

to scream with him, and the itinerant gardener tore his hands

trying together at the little boy. Then the man and his wife

burst wildly into the garden and for some reason (the cat,

probably) the alarm set up wailing against the screams while the

bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the security

coil with saws, wire-cutters, choppers, and they carried it the

man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid and the weeping

gardener into the house.