Read me a story
Are you ready for a scare at bedtime? Or any other time of the day? Donal O’donoghue on scary stories
“Read me a story,” says the wee man for the umpteenth time. It’s near midnight (actually ten to eight but hey, it feels close to the witching hour) and I’ve exhausted the stock of bedtime books. Thomas the Tank Engine? Peppa Pig? The Complete Works of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler? All done and dusted. Still the kid wants more. “This is most definitely the last one,” says I unconvincingly. “I’ll pick it myself,” says himself, clambering out of bed and making a beeline for the biggest volume on the shelf, an omnibus edition of classic fairytales.
This week (from October 25) RTÉ 2 will be doing their bit for parents everywhere when Will Sliney’s Storytellers sails forth into the sometimes stormy seas of mid-term. It’s all about a fearless Viking mapmaker and her quest to save the world’s greatest works of art from a dastardly type called The Chronicle. And with Hallowe’en nigh, and getting ever nigher, there’s also A Breath of Fresh Scare (RTÉ 2 too), short animated films to scare your little preciousesses and the short film, X Marks the Spot. But when those shows are gone they’re gone (to the RTÉ Player) so what then?
If they’re looking for a scare at bedtime, one need look no further than a good old-fashioned fairytale. Grimm and grimmer they be with a gallery of characters as twisted as that weird-looking tree that invariably pops up in the book’s illustrations. Indeed, those very illustrations can be more chilling than the book’s vividly coloured gothic plates that leave little to the imagination. Not that much imagination is needed for the story of Little Red Riding Hood wherein a granny-eating (the X-rated versions) wolf is disembowelled by an axe-wielding maniac.
To this day, the fairytales of Sinéad de Valera have left their mark: gothic horrors of evil fairies and wicked giants and terrible curses with their own peculiar shamrock slant. We loved them even as they gave us goose bumps, just like those sinister stories populated by anthropomorphic horses and bears sporting the finest tweed suits. “Too scary,” himself might say, which roughly translates as, I’m bored with that one, next please.
So here we are, close to midnight (for real), woken from a deep slumber on the dinosaur duvet. The bedside lamp is glowing, emitting a faint burr. On the floor the book of fairytales lies cracked open, yarns of guts and gore spilling forth. From outside comes the whizz and crack of a lonely firework. Is that what woke me at this unearthly hour? No, it was something even more chilling than a pork-loving wolf getting boiled alive in a vat of water. From beneath the covers, sure and insistent, comes a familiar cry: “Read me a story, Daddy! Read me a story!”