Tess by Emma Tennant Page B

lifting in the atmosphere makes Baby Tess open her eyes.
    Can she see you? In the blurred blue of her eyes she can see you, perhaps – lifting a spoon to eat egg and ‘soldiers’ of bread and butter (made by me to tempt you here, Ella, for your next story or lesson).
    You’re awake, little Tess, in this room with the low ceiling at the end with the log fire, and the millwheel in the middle, and the great white stone keeping the door into the garden securely closed against the beginning of the equinoctial gales.
    And as you’re awake, and history lessons must start as fairy tales – as you will discover in your time – I’ll tell you of my mother, your great-grandmother – and about the foremother of Ella, too: the first Tess.
    Stay with me, as those runaway children dance down the road to the swings and the roundabouts of West Bay. Hear how the beliefs of an extraordinary and brave woman – and the punishment she received for them – led her to end this particular day. But be grateful for her. As I have said, our mother went to the beginning of time, to the roots of women’s poetry and myth, to the origins of the lies they had for so long been told; and she was before her time in doing so. But without her – and without other pioneers like her – we would still be as unfocused in our way of seeing things as an infant – as Baby Tess.

On the Art of the Spinster
    I didn’t know then – indeed I couldn’t know until much later – that the stories told by my mother were warnings really: coded messages passed from the lips of one woman to another down the generations and in need of constant repetition in case the old stories were forgotten.
    But the worst of it was that two men – the Brothers Grimm – listened to these old tales told by mothers to their daughters; and they decided to record them for posterity.
    For a male posterity, of course. How could we have a posterity when we have no past?
    Like the tapestries, embroideries and patchworks which carried the message of our anonymous love or suffering, the oral tradition of telling stories was our great, unsigned charter.
    And, like the earth before the balance was thrown out by the rise of the phallocentric culture, the stories we told were equally about the bravery, and the hardships, and the love and growing up of female and male children alike.
    But the Brothers Grimm could understand only the tales of courage and manliness and chivalry on the part of the boys. The girls were relegated to virtues – Patient Griselda; or sheer physical beauty – Sleeping Beauty; Beauty and the Beast. Always we must read that our heroine is a Beauty.
    Would it have been better for my mother to have left these tales in their patriarchal form – frightening, but somehow not quite real, or convincing (to little girls and women, at least)? Good for interpretation by Freudian male analysts – but not for us?
    No, she would not have done better, definitely not.
    But the truth, like the truth about women, is far from reassuring or anodyne.
    Men have professed through the centuries that they are ‘terrified of women’. They have clothed us in fragrance and exquisite gentleness and pink and white colouring to hide the primeval truth they know very well lies in us. The blood and the birth-pain and the milk and the sex-juice that in Eastern cultures is called ‘chi’, giver of energy, and the tears. They are afraid of us – and so were the Brothers Grimm. They preferred us to remain silent on the subject of ourselves. Yet my mother did try to present a balanced picture: to read one story from the coloured picture books and to tell the next from the store of words that lies in all women: and, as all women know, the story won’t end well.
    My mother tried to teach us that the story can end well, if we see the way and we keep our strength and courage. It was immensely hard for her to