NaNoWriMo 2020

Chapter 1 - Cinderella

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Ella.

We don’t know why it was once upon a time and not twice upon a time or indeed, once upon a space. Since we know that time and space are relative, thanks to Einstein – the real Einstein, not the guy at work you call “Einstein” because, well, he ISN’T Einstein – let’s take a look at Ella’s relatives. She unfortunately lost her mother, the careless little thing, so her father brought her another mother. She also got two sisters for free. They came with the new mother. Relatively speaking, therefore, it was her father, her other mother and her two free sisters who were her immediate relatives. There were a whole lot of aunts too but we shall talk about them later, in a relative sort of way.

Now Ella didn't like to go to school so she stayed at home to do all the cooking and cleaning. Truth be told, in order to be fair to Ella, schools didn’t really exist in those days. The boys were apprenticed to somebody with a trade and the girls stayed at home and were taught by their mothers to cook and clean and do other unfeminist stuff like sewing. Interestingly, for those who had farms, the girls did the sewing and the boys did the sowing but only the boys did the reaping. A heaping travesty of justice, really.

Now in those days, cooking was done at the fireplace and not on a stove, mainly because stoves hadn't been invented yet. This is significant because wood in fireplaces generally burned down to cinders and Ella, being too lazy to sleep in a bed, just slept among the cinders. One can’t really fault her there, cinders are much warmer than beds, and in a European nation in winter, that was a heap of good. So her step-sisters started calling her Cinders-Ella. Very soon they realised that Cindersella didn't sound as hot as Cinderella so they dropped the S and simply called her Cinderella. Ella didn't mind in the least. You see, Ella was short for Isabella and she didn't really care for a name that sounded like a flirtatious Italian man going, "You eess a bella!"

Cinderella was much better also because it contained Cin, the other spelling of which is not allowed in fairy tales. Now you may have been told that her step-sisters were very cruel but that was not at all true. Cinderella simply didn’t let them work because she loved doing all the housework. Since there was nothing to do at home, her other mother also found herself twiddling her thumbs, especially since she couldn't teach her daughters the way the mothers in the village did. She did try to teach them sewing but Cinderella just scoffed at their amateur attempts to sew, so sorely superior was she.

And so it went on, day after day for years, until the girls were all in their teens and discovering boys. They discovered that the boys of the village were dirty, stinky dolts who had no idea how to woo a woman and just went woo-woo when watching the women, which wasn’t very conducive to romance. After asking around, since Google wasn’t available those days – in fact, even encyclopaedias hadn’t been invented and no one knew how to read anyway – they concluded that the only teenage boys who weren’t dirty and stinky were princes, since they bathed at least once a year and had attendants to spray them with all the sweet perfumes of Arabia to bury their body odour.

And so they set their sights upon the prince of the land. Figuratively speaking, of course, since even gossip magazines hadn’t been invented to show pictures of princes. Come to think of it, even cameras hadn’t been invented and princes generally didn’t have the patience to pose for portraits. And there was no point publishing magazines anyway since, as was seen earlier, no one knew how to read, except the town criers and a few other people, mainly men. Feminism hadn’t been invented yet. So the gossip mills told the stories of the handsome prince who bathed at least once a year and wore perfume. These days, of course, only metrosexuals wear perfume and even they call it deodorant.

One day the Prince (we capitalise this prince, since he’s THE Prince of the land) sent the town criers to make a specific announcement. And so they went around ringing bells and crying – since they were town criers – “Hear ye, hear ye.” For some odd reason, even though they rang the bells loud enough for the dead to hear, they also had to yell “hear ye, hear ye.” Probably because a lot of people rang bells in the streets, like hawkers and those with communicable diseases.

Once people gathered around to hear the news – newspapers hadn’t been invented and no one knew how to read anyway – the town criers announced that the Prince was going to have a ball deciding whom to marry. These days it's called "playing the field". There’s a ball involved in the field too but that’s a different story. Or a different context. One of the two.

So anyway the Prince announced – through the town criers, of course – that he was going to have a ball and all the eligible wannabe brides of the Prince were invited. He was a rather enlightened prince and didn’t put peas in girls’ mattresses to check if they were princesses. That’s another story and shall be narrated further in this narrative of the REAL fairy tales. So anyway, he didn’t mind marrying a girl who wasn’t a princess and so invited all the unmarried girls of marriageable age to have a ball with him. He had expanded the field, as it were.

Cinderella's step-sisters, of course, decided to go but Cinderella couldn't be bothered. She didn't really care for princes who played the field. In fact, she didn’t care for princes at all. In her words, “A prince is just a prince but a cat shares my cinders.” She was quite pragmatic, was Cinderella.

On the day the Prince was having a ball, Cinderella's step-sisters were all atwitter. No, not like the Twitter of today. They didn’t post updates of what they were doing for their friends to read and get jealous. They just tittered and twittered and generally behaved like giddy teenagers, which they were, actually. In those days, girls got married around the age of sixteen or so. Cinderella was happy to iron their dresses, as long as they didn’t expect her to go to the ball too. She was quite happy having a ball among the cinders with her cat and a few friendly mice. To be honest, she could never be sure they were the same mice from day to day, since the cat was also in the cinders. It could happen that the mice were eaten by the cat and replaced by rats, who then became mice, who then became cat food. The food chain was quite transparent those days.

So anyway, the step-sisters got all gussied up and went to the ball. Gussied up means they got all dressed up in their finest clothes and jewellery and best shoes and all that. Cinderella couldn’t care less and cosied up in the fireplace with her cat. She was looking forward to a nice snooze until her step-sisters returned from the ball, after which she would help them change into their nighties and then have a good sleep among the cinders. She really loved her life.

All of a sudden a gang of concerned aunties barged into her house. They had heard of this stubborn niece through the village grapevine, there being no newspapers those days, and were very concerned that a niece of theirs would prefer to remain unmarried. They were all happily married, unmarried aunts being unheard of those days. A couple of aunts forcibly bathed her, using fancy soap that they had brought with them. Cinderella, of course, had no idea what soap was, since she never bathed, and washed the vessels with ashes from the fireplace. Those days, people reused material naturally and didn’t have to be politically correct in order to do so.

Another two aunts shaved her legs and dressed her in fancy clothes, though why they bothered with the shaving was anyone’s guess, since they shrouded those legs in layers of frilly petticoats. Then they bedecked her – which is nothing like decking her – with accessories, including earrings, necklace, bracelets, glass slippers and all. They then collared a passing carriage and forced the driver to take Cinderella to the palace. They didn’t think rats and mice and pumpkins could be used to transport Cinderella, since magic doesn’t really exist. The aunts made sure Cinderella sat in the back seat with her knees together, though again, with those layers of petticoats, it was all moot.

So Cinderella reached the ball and thanked the good man who had been forced to drive her there. “How about a tip M’Lady?” asked the good man. Cinderella being a rather healthy young lady and naturally polite, she duly tipped his carriage onto its side, leaving the horses whinnying in fear and the man cursing in anger. Cinderella learnt a whole lot of new words that day for parts of the human body.

Not knowing what to do to mollify the man, although she had only done what he asked, Cinderella then entered the palace and was directed to the ballroom. That was the large hall where the ball was being held, in case that was not clear.

The Prince had been having a ball of a time, dancing with this maiden first, then the next, cycling through all the maidens and then trying out dances with the ones he fancied. When Cinderella walked in, though, that changed drastically.

“Heigh ho!” yelled Cinderella, “Where’s this Prince I’m supposed to dance with? Let’s dance and get this over with, I want to go home to my warm and cozy cinders.”

Now Cinderella had quite a hearty voice due to the fact that she had to shoo pigs and other freeloaders from her father’s yard. Had she been of landed stock, she could perhaps have frightened many a fox out of its skin at the hunt, though she never learnt to yell “yoicks!” as landed gentry are reported to have yelled at fox hunts. Those have been banned now, of course. No sense killing an animal one can’t eat and all that. So anyway, Cinderella grabbed the Prince’s attention with her robust voice. Reasoning that there was a robust body supporting that voice, the Prince immediately came to her side and asked if he might have the pleasure of a dance.

“I’ll dance mate,” growled Cinderella, “But you try any pleasure stuff and your dad better go about making another prince because you certainly aren’t going to be able to make any princelets.”

So at the ball, the Prince danced with Cinderella. Then he danced with her again. He found it quite invigorating. He had danced the Basse Dance, the Black Alman, the Black Nag and Rufty Tufty. Cinderella’s dance, however, had no title. It was like jumping on a horse and hanging to the bridle. Left a prince quite goggle-eyed but braced as well, don’t you know. So he invited her to see his paintings. As they walked into the majestic gallery, his hand wandered south of her back, upon which she took off her glass slipper and whacked him over the head with it. She silently thanked her aunts for providing her with such a formidable weapon.

"I like your spirit!" exclaimed the Prince.

"Well, what spirits do you have?" retorted Cinderella.

The Prince called his Vintner, who rattled off all the names of the wines in the wine cellar, upon which Cinderella fell in love with the cellar. Sorry, we mean Prince. She fell in love with the Prince.

And she lived happily ever after in the wine cellar. One of the days in that ever after, as she and the Prince were sampling the latest blend from the brewery, the Prince let slip that he had originally intended marrying a princess, until the episode of the pea in the bed. Cinderella, of course, having experienced mice peeing in her bed, asked him to elaborate. He did, and that’s the next story.

True story.