A Gift Book of Fairy Tales
The illustrations and stories in Dean’s Gift Book of Fairy Tales fired my imagination with stories of witches, princesses and long-lost children.
Gretel by Janet & Anne Grahame Johnstone
The tall, dry grasses scratch long thin marks in the skin of my bare legs.
The scratches rise into red, itchy welts down my shins. The summer heat has sucked all the moisture from the ground and the air is hot and dry.
Earlier in the year, bluebells covered the ground in a wood close to where we used to live. In the image in my mind's eye, I'm wearing a dress, bright red printed with small, white polka dots with short sleeves that puffed out around the top of my arms. My socks sag around my ankles where the elastic has stretched out and my shoes are scuffed at the toes. I slip and fall into a large hole in the ground. I look up and see grownups, surrounded by a frill of forest flowers, all peering down at me.
Even further back, when I was almost too young to have memory, I fell into the pond in my granny's garden. Something drifts in my memory: the fish swimming in front of my eyes, my hair floating around my head. My mum thinks I was maybe eighteen-months-old.
Enchanted Kingdoms
I still have my favourite fairy tale book - Dean's Gift Book of Fairy Tales. I remember I loved to trace the lines of all the illustrations while I absorbed the stories of enchanted kingdoms, wicked witches and children left all alone in the world.
My eldest daughter looks over my shoulder.
"They're like still pictures from an animated film," she says.
I look again. The way drawings are so full of life and movement.
My daughter points to the dress of a princess in the story of Aladdin.
"She wears a dress like that in Princess Kaguya."
I nod and say how much I love that film.
Pictures of Influence
I begin to draw Cinderella running from the palace, one impossibly slim small foot wearing a glass slipper. I follow the lines of her hair with my pencil on a page of my notebook. Her hair flows out and spills into the air behind her as she looks back. The waves of her hair do not flow quite so easily from my unpractised hand. It's been years since I've drawn anything at all. I rub out the lines I've drawn and try again. The ink from the other side of the page is seeping through, leaving dots and traces underneath my pale unconfident drawing.
My mind wanders. I took a photograph of my eldest daughter on a day when the wind gathered up from the sea and blew a gale around the bare hills of the South Downs. Her hair blows around her face, flowing and undulating like she was taking a walk underwater.
I search back through my photographs and find recurring themes of wings, hair, flowers, feathers, and animals either dead and stuffed sitting in museums or very definitely alive. I find pictures of bones, twisted branches in woods and beaches grey and bleak on a cold winter day where a storm rises from the horizon. There is a trail of influence here, thin and subtle.
Janet & Anne Grahame Johnstone
I google the illustrators of my book. Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone. Janet and Anne were twins born in the UK in 1928. They experienced a bohemian childhood thanks largely to their mother Doris Zinkeisen, a high society portrait painter and costume designer. Their father Captain Edward Grahame Johnstone was a 'flying ace' in WW1 who died young in 1946. They had an older brother, Murray, who described his sisters as "one and a half people rather than two".
The sisters studied at St Martins School of Art in London. Anne excelled at painting figures in period costumes and Janet specialised in illustrating animals and birds. Several articles describe the sisters working closely together, passing their drawings and paintings between them, making alterations and suggestions as they went.
In 1966 they moved to the village of Badingham in Suffolk with their mother, Doris.
"It was here that the twins, along with their mother, could indulge their love of horses, Doris in particular, pursuing her love of carriage driving—a theme that had occupied many of her post-war paintings. A writer for the popular Woman’s Weekly was surprised when, having journeyed down to interview the twins at the White House, their afternoon tea was interrupted by an impromptu visit from their pony Victoria who wandered through the open French windows and into the sitting room."
Wings, Horns and Blank Faces
I'm surprised how these drawings I found so wonderful as a child have become embedded in my body to exhale as the words and pictures I leave here. I flick through the pages of the book again. I notice now how blank and expressionless some of the faces are. The princesses seem to only exist in profile, a perfect line outlining their forehead, dipping inward for their eyes, down a long royal nose to round out with small impossibly perfect lips.
I love the drawing of the witch in Sleeping Beauty with her huge bat-like wings and the curved horns growing out of her head. I love the picture of Tom Thumb, a tiny boy who wears a dry leaf for a hat and carries a needle for a sword.
I tuck the book back onto the shelf. The spine broke away long ago, leaving the cover separate from the rest of the book. Somehow all the pages are still holding together with the stitching of old-fashioned bookbinding. There is a careless tea stain on the front, half a circle where someone used my book as a coaster. Probably me, back when I'd grown older and thought fairy tales didn't enchant me anymore.
Wicked witch - illustration by Janet & Anne Graeme Johnstone
