About 'The Swans'

This story is a shortened version of a longer one. It is a retelling of one the German fairy stories that the Grimm brothers recorded in the 19th century and which have become for most English children the core body of fairy tales. A large number of my short stories are based on old stories – myths, historical characters, traditions and tales.

I have always liked this story because it has an unusually active heroine. In most of the stories we have the heroines are pretty passive – they are rescued from enchantments, or released from other tricky situations by magic or by the hero. The active women are usually bad – witches and wicked step-mothers have immense power which they use only for evil ends. I am also intrigued by The Six Swans because it is one of the few stories where a woman is allowed to put anything above or before her children – this heroine puts her own integrity and her brothers’ freedom first. Finally I like this story because it does not have a perfect outcome. Despite her best endeavours, one brother is only partially freed; and that seems to me to be the story of most struggles for freedom. There is a question though: is that trailing wing a wound or a memory of glory? I find that I often write about ambivalence rather than 'happy ever after'.

Lots of Fairy Stories (and lots of other kinds of old myths too) have silence and 'secrets' in them; the thing you mustn’t say, mustn’t tell (though by the very nature of stories they nearly always do get told!) One thing that I find fascinating about this story is that there is no 'secret', no taboo, nothing of that sort. The girl is told very simply that for six years she must not speak or laugh, and that she must sew each brother a shirt made of starwort. The prohibition is about nothing external, it is just a test of her integrity. I left out the beginning of the original story (how the brothers got turned into swans, and how the girl came to marry the King) partly because I wanted the whole thing to be a bit mysterious and partly because that involved yet another wicked older woman (the family’s step-mother.) Now I’m over 50 I can’t cope with too many Bad Mother figures! You will notice that I am even quite kind about the Old Queen – in the original story she is thrown onto the bonfire at the very end.

In this story I have used a good deal of description of nature. I usually do – I try to make descriptions very 'intense' and closely related to the emotional state of the characters. Technically this is called the 'pathetic fallacy' (pathetic here is like 'sympathetic', not like 'silly–sad') – the idea that the weather, for example, sympathises with our feelings. It is rather sneered at in fiction nowadays. But I like it – I like the idea that we are all closely related to the rhythms and 'moods' of the natural world; I prefer to call it 'hyper-nature'. These descriptions are always grounded in very careful observation and detail, but then given emotional resonance by repetition, by quite careful manipulation of adjectives and by piling up phrases very often in threes.

When I first started thinking about this story I planned to do two things that I have not done. It was research that changed my mind. In the UK we have three sorts of swans. One kind called Bewick Swans do not live permanently in Britain – they fly north every winter and bred in the Arctic. I love writing about ice and snow, so I thought I would describe their long flight over the frozen tundra and their isolation and struggle for survival in the intense cold. But when I started to read up the details about swans I realised that one of the other sorts of swan is called the 'mute swan'. I could not resist this. Although it is not mentioned directly in the story (because I thought that would be a bit over the top) it is the reason why the red-orange bills (or beaks) and the throbbing song of their wings are there – these are unique characteristics of mute swans. This meant I had to lose the arctic wastes, but instead got the singing flight. It felt like a worthwhile trade off.

The other thing I wanted to focus on was the starwort. I love descriptions of work in fiction – there aren’t enough of them, given how much time we all spend working. So I thought I would discover more about starwort, and explain in detail how she would sew it into shirts. The word 'wort' is a very ancient English word for a plant – and it is commonly used in the local dialect names of wild flowers. In my pocket edition (for walking) Book of Wild Flowers there are over 30 different plants that are called somethingwort somewhere in the country (some great names by the way). Starwort is the popular name for Stellaria holostea (stella is the Latin for star.) It is common enough woodland species. However I cannot conceive of any practical way in which you could 'sew' it – it does not have fibrous stems or leaves; its petals are tiny and ragged edged. The only thing that I could find that could have inspired the association is that the plants other popular name is 'stitchwort' (perhaps because it is held to cure 'stitches': that pain you get in your side when you run.) I have come to the conclusion that the original teller of the story put it in because the possibility of making a shirt out of starwort was as minute as the possibility of a woman staying silent for six years! I did not want that in my story. I experimented with changing the plant, but felt that was 'cheating', but could not find another plant that had such a lovely strange sounding name that one could in fact make shirts out of. So I was forced to leave her work magical and unexplained. This feels to me like an absence in the story.

I made one late change to the story: I shifted it into the present tense. Although this can give a feeling of timelessness I think it is high-risk strategy and usually try to avoid it. But I found that I could not write the 'transformation scene' in the past tense. I think these moments when things change are very difficult to write – because reading them always takes far longer than the transformation itself. In writing you cannot have more than one thing happening at once. In the past tense it became very linear, whereas what I wanted was one single instant in which the swans become men again and the Young Queen is free. I tried removing all the punctuation so that it would be a jumble of confused images (I’ve done this before – but then it was a woman turning into a tree, which meant there was a still frozen moment at the end, whereas here there is action after the transformation which made it too complicated). I tried having just the transformation in the present tense, but found it broke up the mood too much. I am not sure that what I ended up with is a perfect solution – but it felt the best I could manage.

I believe we can learn about ourselves now through looking at old non-realist stories and remaking them. So finally I hope this is a story about loyalty and courage which is applicable to the way women’s lives are actually and really lived now.

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