Forget fancy dress and helpless princesses, real Fairy Godmothers helped me get where I am today
This Halloween I’ll be dressing up as the Invisible Woman. Which basically means I’m disappearing off to Portugal to run a holiday tennis camp for kids. I’ve neatly managed to avoid Halloween for the past few years with work, but it’s never been the same for me since my kids grew out of it.
Gone are the days when I used to take Jamie and Andy guising while they were dressed as skeletons or ghouls. They had a blast dressing up and reciting their jokes or rhymes.
I can’t say I’ve ever been a fan of fancy dress but my mother is the polar opposite. Her party piece was the fairy godmother from Cinderella except she renamed herself the Fairy Grandmother. Wand, tiara, sparkly dress, white hair, the lot. Talking of Cinderella, did you see what actor Keira Knightley said last week?
She WON’T let her three-year-old daughter watch Disney films like Cinderella or The Little Mermaid.
Cinderella is banned, “because she waits around for a rich guy to rescue her. Don’t! Rescue yourself!”
And The Little Mermaid is off the list of acceptable films, because Ariel gives up her voice for a man.
This reminds me of how certain nursery rhymes have to be altered because they don’t match up with modern political correctness. They’re not Three Blind Mice – these days, children sing about Three Visually Impaired Mice. To some modern women Cinderella is the opposite of a feminist icon – a woman who spends her time doing chores and who needs Prince Charming to save her.
But that was never the lesson I took from it. To me, Cinderella was one of the original feminist films.
Here was this young girl whose mother and father had died and was enduring years of abuse from her stepmother and stepsisters. Despite all that, she remains optimistic and kind. When her chance comes, she takes it and bravely gate crashes a Royal party.
Importantly, the help she gets is from the Fairy Godmother. A woman in a position of power sees the situation Cinderella is in and decides to do something about it. In 1994, I was offered a role on the Lawn Tennis Association’s new performance coaching programme by another woman who thought I deserved a chance.
Not long after, another woman thought I would be good at accompanying some under-12 and under-14 Great Britain girls’ teams. And following that, the Secretary of Tennis Scotland, another woman, persuaded me to go for the role of Scottish national coach.
The big chances I got way back in 1994-5 were as a result of other women helping me out. They provided the launch pad for my coaching career and it’s something I’ve never forgotten. To me that’s the lesson of Cinderella – it’s not that she’s a helpless woman who needs a man.
It’s that she’s a woman who, despite everything, keeps her head up and takes her chance when another woman opens the door.