Gender Swapping in Bedtime Stories - Why Not?! - & OF COURSE.... One Giant Peach!!

My mother had me pretty young, married and with child not long after in a whirlwind romance. My father so dapper back then in his panama hats. But even panama hats can lose their shine. And with my father an ambitious up and coming head chef, well, it’s no secret the high end restaurant can be a jealous mistress, spousal bliss all the more unlikely. But basically, they’d been young and dumb and in love. Hardly unique I guess. And so it was, and it wasn’t long and the naivety of young love soon soured and her and my father were divorced.

Make no mistake. My father can be one charming motherfucker. And as common an inception as it might be, I still count myself special as a love child, good Catholic girl my mother was before she met my dastardly lothario of a father. It could never have worked. For all the panama hat may have held its allure, and many a chef has ended up quite happily married, in the case of my father he is simply cursed as a hopeless romantic. And this can make or break a marriage. Usually the latter. And in my father’s case, it has left him with two failed marriages, a son, my baby brother, by his second, and a sizeable chunk spent over his lifetime on champagne and spectacular bouquets. And panama hats. But at least I sleep at night knowing he’s found the love of a good dog. Domesticity can strike fear into the heart of the most well-meaning romantic. But for now, and who knows if he’ll ever settle, for now, a good dog prevails. As for my mother, well, she still loves and loathes Lotharios in equal measure. And the more madly eccentric and utterly unattainable the better. So I guess that’s her curse. If only she would just embrace the love of a good dog.

But so it is, folks, and after the honeymoon was over, in the most everyday way of the modern love story, I became the daughter of a single mother juggling her artistic endeavours and part time gigs to pay the bills. And while my grandfather was the most unassuming but hopeless romantic of them all, he had eyes only for my grandmother. My badass beach beauty of a grandmother. A woman who had no use for flowers or champagne. Theirs a meeting on a train, a love story for prime time, all the same they’d tried to warn the young lovers. That fools rush in.

To their credit, they never said a word when it ended in tears and heartache. They simply stepped in to care for me on the countless nights and weekends too when my mother had to work. And oh how I loved growing up with them a regular North Star in my life. Sure, my parents’ marriage maybe wasn’t so unique, and maybe my inception as common as the lot. Love child. But I couldn’t care less. In the end, I was one of the special ones after all, as any child raised by a single mother and a pair of doting grandparents. I’ll let you in on a little secret. We’re the luckiest of the lot. And I was maybe the luckiest of them all.

I would eagerly pack for my stayovers. And only the essentials, and a cuddly favourite at the most, never needing much there, and never bored. No. They were enchanting times. Their home a beautiful double storey, a heritage house from 1864, painted sunny yellow, with a white wooden latticed balcony and a big white frontdoor with the biggest brass number 4 below a brass knocker, always polished and like pure gold. From their balcony, you could take it all in. A grassy park and white roses and a tree for climbing and a tree that looked like a willows from my storybook, cradled in a circle by other homes, heritage homes, though none as lovely, and a fountain at its centre, and on either side of the circle a couple of stone churches. Inside, the glossy wooden banister was a treat for sliding down, not once with a scolding. And hidden, behind high walls of ivy creeping, you’d never have known a bustling street just beyond, not in that courtyard of the sweetest disposition with my grandmother quite the gardener, and the sweetest of all in the sweet, sweet music of a water feature gurgling over all day long. Did I mention it was enchanting?

I loved my days and nights there.

My grandmother was a stalwart of a matriarch who saw to it that the home ticked over like clockwork. My grandfather and I of dreamier dispositions, left to long philosophical ponderings and afternoons in his beloved darkroom and best of all, on Saturdays, the very best of it all, an entire morning in the majestic library only a short meandering stroll down the road from their home. Religiously, a ritual I came to cherish, my grandmother made sure to fortify us first with flapjacks hot off the stove with melting butter and Lion’s syrup, and then we were free to go.

Down the hill we’d traipse along, past the towering Catholic cathedral and soon after the opera house with its red carpets and shimmering chandelier and not long until the bottom, to the giant marble steps of that kingdom of a library, a glass encased ship of such artistry just before you enter truly hallowed ground as we ascended to the final floor. There, my heart. The seat of my soul. Hallowed.

Reverently, my grandfather and I would make our way to the children’s section on that top floor. There my grandfather would take a seat on one of the wooden benches. And I can’t recall him every swaying me this way or that. I don’t think it was his style anyway. He’d just kick back, quietly and patiently, while I beheld, almost breathless, the shelves, shelves, endless shelves. Without fail, it would take me a whole morning, agonising from one book to the next, five and only five a torturous number for the infinity of those shelves. But eventually I would have to decide my fate as the bells chimed that it was ten minutes to closing at 1.

I devoured the adventures of Moomin. And the wondrous escapades of the Magic Faraway Tree. I remember most all two books I took out time and time again, for all the choices that glittered like precious treasure. The first was an omnibus of the tales of Mrs Pepperpot. A beast of a book my grandfather dutifully began and read, cover to cover, again and again and again. And I have heard it said, and sagely so, that if you want to read writing at its finest, look no further than a children’s book, bearing the scrutiny of being read over and over and over when a child has become fervently fixated on that book alone.

I loved my grandfather for this, and I will love him for it always, never once making it a chore to read the same book to me when I pleaded just one more time. One more time.

And beyond the ingenious Mrs Pepperpot, I loved dearest a collection of Shakespeare’s works turned to childen’s story, with whimsical illustrations that I can still picture so very vividly in my mind’s eye. I was smitten most by the story of ‘The Twelfth Night, or What You Will,’ for the clever cross dressing and the doomed Malvolio’s disastrous but deplorably vain undoing. But, and oh what a but, when I discovered Roald Dahl, it was an insatiable love affair from that day forth. I coveted all I could in the years that followed, one after the other… Even the (mis)adventures of Uncle Oswald, tales truly too saucy for a young girl, though I barely batted an eyelid. Glum, so glum, when I’d read the total sum of his genius.

And of all his books, and many a heroine to be found in them, from The Magic Finger to The BFG to Matilda, still, it was James and the Giant Peach I clung to in my wildest dreams.

And it makes me think now on a sad day, at an independent bookshop where I moonlighted in my varsity years. A grandmother had poo pooed my glowing recommendation of the magical Kate DiCamillo because the book told the story of a girl and her dog, and well, apparently it mattered that her grandchild was emphatically a boy.

A good book.

A sad, sad day.

For in James, I had once found a piece of myself.

A fairytale, really, that swept me away like no other.

And hardly your average fairytale at that!

With two awful aunts, orphaned, our young James doesn’t need a coach and a dress and glass slippers to escape the tyranny…

No.

Not for James.

Just a giant peach and a blossoming kinship with a gaggle of garden variety insects.

And for one who loved to spend her days in the garden after school, revelling in all those smaller miracles and tiny critters and it was the greatest love story my wildest dreams could dream up.

Let the rest keep their princes!

Dahl knew better.

What some children crave, and maybe more than we know…

What some children need, more than they know, and more and more…

Oh, what some children long for most of all…

Maybe, many, many more…

And for me, finding most children my age far too cruel, or insensitive, or just plain boisterous, never still… Well, silly as it might sound, it was bugs! Bugs! Bugs! Glorious bugs! And my mongrel of a mutt, Bojangles. Of course Bojangles!

And it’s a funny thing.

We forget sometimes who we are, and what we love, really love, that love that unfettered joy, as time ticks over and we get caught up in the fray of real life and that woebegone condition that is Adulting. All a big show really, trying to be what we think the world wants us to be. Woebegone. Woebegone, so horribly woebegone, I had forgotten that I needed the garden, that I needed the grass tickling and the bugs making merry, the bugs, the bugs, the glorious bugs. And then it came to me, and I would not be so horribly woebegone, and I began to remember who I was and decided to save myself. To save myself before it was maybe too late. On the inner city balcony I’ve long left behind. First, with a lime tree that suffered neglect and withered. Then again with a jasmine creeper that just wouldn’t flower. And then, finally and praise be, a river indigo that thrived in spite of me. Ah, that one took mercy on me when I needed it most.

But really now, the older I get, I am returning more and more.

Saving myself.

Before it is too late.

Returning more and more to the garden.

Returning more and more to the lucky lady bugs and the clumsy Christmas beetles and the shimmering dragonflies and the big bottomed bumblebees and the industrious ants and the moths, my woebegone moths, that save me and come to me by nightfall to keep me company. And no, I suppose, in real life, we just can’t live in a giant peach pit. But that doesn’t mean we can’t befriend the little critters. Talk to them and fret not that it strikes as mad. Well. Maybe that’s me not you. Though I’d highly recommend it.

But if nothing else, at the very least, marvel.

Marvel in their magnificence. For all it’s an itsy, bitsy spider. Or the cricket calling out in the moonlight. Or the songololo lost, in need of rescue and return, returning more and more to the garden, with just a bit of help, as it curls to human touch, unfurling once more in the tickling grass, the forgiving earth. Home.

And maybe that’s it.

Really.

Just a bit of help and homeward.

As Dahl knew better.

Our orphaned James finds a place, a giant peach pit to call home, a happy ending adopted against all odds by an unlikely but loving family, more than friends. Family. Home. A giant peach and a gaggle of garden variety insects. Dahl knew that sometimes the softer child, the contemplative child, the strange child, so beautifully strange, and maybe more and more, these children so like me just long to feel at home happily ever after. And truthfully, a part of me still yearns for a place to really call home. Even at the ripe old age nearing 40.

Oh, I’ll carve it out one day.

One day.

But for now, I’m quite happy enough in the garden, my wildest dreams running wild with wildflowers and bugs, bugs, glorious bugs, all the while dreaming wild dreams of a giant peach pit.

James & The Giant Peach by Nancy Ekholm Burkert