Smoke And Mirrors

The White Road

There are two stories that have both haunted and disturbed me over the years, stories that have attracted and repelled me ever since I encountered them as a small boy. One of them is the tale of Sweeney Todd, "the demon barber of Fleet Street". The other is the tale of Mr Fox-it's a sort of English version of Bluebeard.

The versions in this retelling of the story were inspired by variants on the tale I found in The Penguin Book of English Folktales,, edited by Neil Philip: "The Story of Mr Fox" and the notes that follow it and a version of the tale called "Mr Foster", where I found the image of the white road and the way that the girl's suitor marked the trail down the white road to his gruesome house.

In the story of Mr Fox, the refrain "It was not so, it is not so, and God forbid it should be so" is repeated as a litany, through the recounting of each horror that Mr Fox's fiancee claims she saw in a dream. At the end she throws down the bloody finger, or the hand, that she took from his house and proves that everything she said was true. And then his story is effectively over.

It's also about all the strange Chinese and Japanese folktales in which, ultimately, everything comes down to Foxes.

This, like my graphic novel Mr Punch, is close enough to the truth that I have had, on occasion, to explain to some of my relatives that it didn't really happen. Well, not like that, anyway.