Stick your leg out Tommy so I can chop
it off
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When I was a pup me Granny would read to us (my
sister) from a
collection of storybooks (which I still have). By far our
favorites
were the old fairy tales, and Mr Miacca was number one on the
chart.
A very dark story, which begins:
TOMMY GRIMES
was
sometimes a good boy, and sometimes a bad boy; and when he was a
bad boy, he was a very bad boy. Now his mother used to say to him:
'Tommy, Tommy, be a good boy, and don't go out of the street, or else
Mr Miacca will take you.' But still when he was a bad boy he would go
out of the street; and one day, sure enough, he had scarcely got round
the corner, when Mr Miacca did catch him and popped him into a bag
upside down, and took him off to his house.
When Mr Miacca got
Tommy
inside, he pulled him out of the bag and sat him down, and felt his
arms and legs. 'You're rather tough,' says he; 'but you're all I've got
for supper, and you'll not taste bad boiled. But body o' me, I've
forgot the herbs, and it's bitter you'll taste without herbs. Sally!
Here, I say, Sally!' and he called Mrs Miacca.
So Mrs Miacca came
out
of another room and said: 'What d'ye want, my dear?'
'Oh, here's a
little boy
for supper,' said Mr Miacca, 'and I've forgot the herbs. Mind him, will
ye, while I go for them.' [Full]
****
Just now I came across this site; Top
10 Gruesome Fairy Tale Origins. For the most part, these are
the very versions we learned from, e.g.
Foolishly riding hood takes the advice of the wolf and ends up being
eaten. And here the story ends. There is no woodsman – no grandmother –
just a fat wolf and a dead Red Riding Hood. The moral to this story is
to not take advice from strangers.
She overhears him singing his name by a fire
and so
she guesses it correctly. Rumpelstiltskin, furious, runs away, never to
be seen again. But in the updated version, things are a little messier.
Rumpelstiltskin is so angry that he drives his right foot deep into the
ground. He then grabs his left leg and rips himself in half. Needless
to say this kills him.
The original tale (which actually only dates to
1837)
has two possible variations. In the first, the bears find Goldilocks
and rip her apart and eat her. In the second, Goldilocks is actually an
old hag who (like the sanitized version) jumps out of a window when the
bears wake her up. The story ends by telling us that she either broke
her neck in the fall, or was arrested for vagrancy and sent to the
“House of Correction”.
Somewheres between than and now, someone decided that kids couldn't
handle this stuff, so they fluffed 'em up. The Bible?
they just outlawed it.
The
fairy tales were of course morality plays designed to instill in der
kinders a sense of right and wrong. By scaring the crap out of
them with horrors that
befell bad boys and girls who did not obey their parents.
Even without the Bible stories that would come later, these cautionary
tales were burned into my mind. That's not to say that I never
took me chances, but I did with full knowledge of what to expect if
caught.
A later example of "the speech"
I'm going to throw this in. The television show Dragnet was very
popular. The episode I remember the most was about
drugs. At the
time I had no knowledge whatever about Pot, Heroin, etc. It was
not part of our culture, and that culture was Chicago.
Anyway,
the story, which I don't remember, was about drugs. At the
end Sgt Joe Friday gave his "speech" to the person arrested for using,
and it stuck with me. I am an addictive person. Cigarettes,
whiskey, blah-blah-blah. But I never fell for drugs of any kind.
I'm certain that was because of that first impression Sgt. Friday made.
There are, it seems, no Joe Fridays anymore.
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