Scary stories for HalloweenFiction

Scary stories for Halloween: The New Mother by Lucy Clifford

At first sight a familiar kind of Victorian cautionary tale, this story opens on to some unusually profound anxieties

I came across The New Mother via Alan Garner and Neil Gaiman, a promising route to the uncanny. Garner includes a version of it in his Collected Folk Tales, published last year (with an introduction that states, firmly: "We need to be scared. It is healthy and good for us"). Reviewing the collection, Gaiman explains how Garner strips the story, also known as "The Pear Drum", down to its elements, weaving in a mournful refrain: "Iram, biram, brendon, bo, / Where did all the children go?"

Garner's spare, incantatory tale of how two children are tempted into naughtiness for the sake of a magical pear drum is unsettling in an almost wistful way: the fuller version, written in 1882 by Lucy Clifford and widely available online, is a tangle of nightmarish horror.

Two children, Turkey and Blue-Eyes, live with their mother and baby sibling in a lonely cottage on the edge of the forest, the tall fir trees "so close that their big black arms stretched over the little thatched roof". Danger is pressing in from the start on their nursery idyll, presided over by their loving mother, a classic angel of the hearth. When she sends them off to the village warning them not to talk to strangers, we are on the lookout for a wolf by the path, but the danger they meet with is wonderfully perplexing. "A strange wild-looking girl" sits by the side of the road holding a curious musical instrument with a box on its side. The children "were most anxious to see inside the box, or to know what it contained, but they thought it might look curious to say so" – yet their careful respectability crumbles when they hear that there are little people inside, who might come out to dance and tell them secrets, if only the girl will open it.

"'Let you see!' she said slowly. 'Well, I am not sure that I can. Tell me, are you good?' 'Yes, yes,' they answered eagerly, 'we are very good!'" But this turns out, for once, to be the wrong answer: only naughty children are allowed to peep inside the box. So the children begin a campaign of bad behaviour, much to the sorrow of their angelic mother, who warns them that if they can't return to their better selves, "I should have to go away and leave you, and to send home a new mother, with glass eyes and wooden tail".

The idea horrifies the children as much as the reader, but as the wild girl carelessly reassures them: "They all threaten that kind of thing. Of course really there are no mothers with glass eyes and wooden tails; they would be much too expensive to make." It's this strange mixture of wordliness with the otherworldly, realism with fairytale, that makes the eerie charge of a mother with glass eyes and a tail – imagine it dragging along the floor! – so powerful. Those eyes, that tail combine the inanimate with the animalistic in an economically horrible manner: the bric-a-brac of Victoriana stirring something deep in the subconscious.

It's no surprise that this story chimed with Gaiman, whose similarly creepy children's book Coraline features an "Other Mother", modelled on Coraline's real mother, but with buttons for eyes. The other mother: the concept combines two primal horrors, the loss of love and the imposition of the wrong kind of love. "The New Mother" is not just Freudian, and it's certainly much weirder than the average Victorian cautionary tale. The children destroy their idyll from the inside out, and not even by accident; being naughty takes effort. They let horror in precisely by being too sensible to believe in it, and there is no redemption. I certainly wouldn't read this story to children.

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