This agility in the storytelling keeps the book from being just frightening, just comic, or just a cautionary tale. You get a real sense of the wolf being truly threatening, sinister and cunning, but this is almost immediately dispelled, a few lines on, by his childlike pleasure in having managed some shopping on his own. In the title story he is at one moment saying “I shall be in your bedroom before it’s light tomorrow morning, crunching up the last of your little bones,” and the next proudly telling Polly that he bought half a pound of beans “with my own money … all by myself”. The wolf is simultaneously a dangerous wild animal, a sexual predator and an annoying little brother, slipping from one role to another within the space of a sentence.
One of the joys of revisiting the tales as an adult is discovering that, like all really good children’s fiction (and films too), there are many levels to them. This literary theme is carried on through the book, which references many favourite children’s stories, including Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs and The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids, but it also has overtones of Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights, with Polly managing to deflect the wolf’s violence towards her over and over again, albeit with chocolate cake and daisies rather than cliff-hanger stories. Inside the front cover was a book plate with my five-year-old scrawl across it, proving (if proof was necessary) that the copy was really mine, and on the opposite page, my mum’s name in neat letters, indicating that she once took it into the primary school she taught at (where books without the name of a teacher written inside were likely to go missing). There is also an old printer, a vacuum cleaner and a roll of carpet in there, but “book room” still suits it best, as all the walls are covered in shelves and all the shelves are stuffed with books, and it was between a copy of Tom’s Midnight Garden and a set of Ladybird fairytale books that I rediscovered Catherine Storr’s Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf. At nine years old I had moved into a slightly bigger room, and this smaller one had become a junk room, or book room, or study, depending how kind you want to be. A few weeks ago I was helping my mother clear out the room I had as a small child, sifting through moth-eaten teddy bears, boxes of broken crayons and hundreds of children’s books.
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