Girls and Wolves

Red riding hood and woods where no one should be afraid

As I walked home from the station, dark, late, I slowed, looked for something in my bag so the suited man, boy really, behind me would pass. Not because there was anything strange about him, not because of anything he did. Simply because we know, as women, it is better not to have a man behind you. At that time, in the nearness of dark, I know that I cannot take the shortcut through the woods, the wire fenced path behind the houses, where brambles grow and leaves rustle. I know instead I must walk up the road, the long way, winding round the fullest part of the hill, not cutting straight up it. This will take me twice as long and I am tired and I wore the wrong sandals, thinking of the sun, forgetting I would be on my feet all day, and now each step is a weary pound and I would like to just be home.

The suited man overtakes me without a thought. I watch as he turns, off the main road, through the beat-up kissing gate, onto the path through the woods. Without hesitation, without a glance behind him to see who is there, who is watching, who is following. How different our lives are. How unfair that is! Imagine taking the road you want to take. Imagine the only concern being which way is quickest. Imagine not being taught, your whole life, that you have reason to be afraid.

As I walk up the road, still careful as cars pass, aware, always that even this, even this is not safe, my red sandals hit the tarmac and I think of Red Riding Hood, alone in the wood, warned never to stray from the path. Was the wood cutter warned the same by his mother when he was small? Was the wolf?

I have always been fascinated by fairytales. At university, I included the moral from the end of Charles Perrault’s Red Riding Hood in my monograph, attracted to the rhyme, the sinister shiver of it. And yet, so clearly, the moral is only aimed at the little girl. The little girl who did nothing wrong, and yet who is the only character to be warned, to need to learn something;

‘Little girls, this seems to say, Never stop upon your way,

Never trust a stranger-friend; No one knows how it will end.

As you’re pretty so be wise; Wolves may lurk in every guise.

Now, as then, ‘tis simple truth — Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!’

Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, engraving by Gustav Doré

There are so many retellings, now, of that tale. So many ways to reclaim. To make it a choice, to put back some of the power. They come to me in snatches as I walk, half forgotten yet somehow embedded. Little Red Cap by Carol Anne Duffy, another version that made an impression on me but which is now lost to my scatty note keeping, where the wolf as threat is laid over a story of domestic violence. And this, the wonderful ‘If you were red riding hood’ by Hannah Grieco, introduced to me by Tania Hershman during a workshop for Mslexia. Please do follow the link to read it - short, powerful, beautiful, it is exactly the reclaiming of these old tales that we need.

What is the answer we want? What do we want to reclaim? Maybe this is why fairytales are so enduring, because they are warnings. Warnings for women, templates on how to be, to be young and good and pretty, to be humble and to work without complaining, to keep the house clean, to care for brothers and fathers, husbands and children’s and animals. To be perfect, untouchable, to ask for nothing. To turn away from our curiosity. Perhaps their endurance, the glut of retellings, is an acknowledgment of the laws they lay out, and a pushing back. An attempt to redraw the lines that have held us small and quiet for so long.

Little Red Riding Hood from the 1927 illustrated collection ‘Childhood’s Favorites and Fairy Stories’

For work this week, a new freelance contract, I had to download an app. I had to complete a section called ‘Proof of Living.’ Look into the camera, turn my head to one side, say the words in order, apple snow dog. Is this where we are? Proof of living? Is proof of living not everything else, all the rest of it, walking in the woods and picking berries, sun through trees, the aching slap of tired feet, the feeling of a body in the morning, the ways we make new rules, push old ways aside, the way we, endlessly, search for old stories, find ways to tell new ones.

The next morning, when it is light, I take the woodland path again. Ahead I see two boys in white shirts, black ties, school uniform. I think they are swinging a stick against the fence. I think, how unimaginative, how nothing ever changes. But then I see them raise their hands to their mouths. Berries. They are picking blackberries, ripened too soon by the insanity of the July sun, and then they go off, to school, to their days, and I pause, higher up the path than they were, and I see; there, by someone’s fence, close to a back garden, raspberries. Wild raspberries, a couple only. I have never seen them here before. Further down, the apples that I’m not sure can be eaten, clustered together, small still, growing. A round purple fruit that looks like a plum, but also too blue to be one, like a berry that could be poisonous.

And the blackberries; more now, enough ripe to pick and still leave some for the birds. I stretch for one, through the bare front branches, through the thorns, and I pick one, one big fat blackberry. It is so ripe. Drips of dark red juice spot my fingers. I raise it to my mouth and it is sweet, softer than it has any right to be in July. The leaves overhead are rustling, shifting shafts of sun pushing through, and it should be available to everyone, this. It should be available to everyone, without fear or limit.

No one should ever be afraid of the woods.

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