Are old fairy stories too scary for kids?

Moving house, stacking books in boxes, I came across a clutch of fairy books, Andrew Lang’s folk tales from around the world in their coloured cloth covers: yellow, brown, red, grey, blue. I picked up ‘yellow’, opened the cover and fell down a wormhole, away from 2014 into the past.

My mother, as a child, had coloured in some of the book’s etched illustrations and I could see her kneeling, perhaps fireside, sawing away at the mournful knights in blue crayon. Then there was my own pre-teen self, mid-1980s, feeling strongly the injustice of being forbidden any further colouring in.

As I turned the pages, images began to dislodge from some cerebral crevice — magic caskets, witches, giant prophetic carp — and with them came a realisation: without ever being quite conscious of it, I’ve been thinking about these stories for decades. I’ve learnt from them in a way I never did from other children’s fiction, Five on a Treasure Island or The Magic Faraway Tree.