Chicken-Licken in the "Modern" world

I can remember the first book I read, a tale which haunted me as a little child. My mum read it too me firstly and often a such a book is magical to a child, a comfort to hold and copy mummy by the child attempting to read himself or perhaps hold when mummy helps you pronounce the words, I can’t remember the actual exact circumstances but I do remember the story well and how It haunted me as a child. The book in question was Chicken-Licken, a fable also known as Chicken Little, I can hear you scoff already but allow me to tell you about it. My copy was published by Laadybird, I attach a library photo of what it looked like.

Its an cumulative tale about a youndg chicken (a chick) who believes the world is coming to an end when an acorn falls from a tree and hits him on the head, he believes that it’s the sky which is falling. Our wee chap is hysterical with a mistaken belief that disaster is imminent and runs around telling his mates, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Drakey Lakey, Goosey Loosey, Gander Lander, Turkey Lurkey….the hysteria is contagious and they band together to tell the King until they meet Foxy Loxy who asserts an impression of helpfulness and offers to show them the way to the King, he takes them down into the fox hole where he and his fox cubs make a meal of them all abruptly ending the tale. No happy ending to be found in this story, just a lying fox to leads the naïve to a gruesome death. This was the ending in my Ladybird version, the ending I always knew. Can you imagine the fear this story delivered to a child who’s environment leads him to believe in “happy every after”? Certain a lesson in the real world that not all frogs are Princes or the hair dangling from the high tower leads up to a Princess. Only recently I found out about other alternative endings in other book…. How Foxy Loxy eats the chicken's friends, but the last one, usually Cocky Lockey, survives long enough to warn the chicken and she escapes or the characters being saved by a squirrel or an owl and getting to speak to the King; the characters being saved by the King's hunting dogs; even one version in which the sky actually falls and kills Foxy Loxy. There is a moral to this story usually interpreted to mean "do not believe everything you are told". It could well be a cautionary political tale: The Chicken jumps to a conclusion and whips the populace into mass hysteria, which the unscrupulous fox uses to manipulate them for his own benefit. There is a lot of psychological evidence that children need to be exposed to the idea of danger quite early so that they understand the world and aren't confused by it. It doesn't do any good to "shield" a child so that when their granny dies they have no idea what's going on (although mine on both sides were away long before I was born) Children accept the world in quite a matter of fact way, they don't have the same hangups as adults and stories are a good way to introduce concepts such as the fact that not everyone is friendly, there is danger in the world etc. The world is a big bad place and I have seen this very much from experience. Chicken-Licken is not the only story for kids with such an ending, remember The Snowman, and how me melts at the end. Some of these stories have since changed due to pressure from groups who are doing more damage than good. In the latest Little Red Riding Hood, even the wolf doesn't die, just gets stones in his body and has to eat sprouts. In the newest 3 little Pigs no pigs are eaten, and the wolf runs off. Are we really doing our kids a service with these new edition happy endings? The real monsters are still out there in this world, sitting outside a primary school in a car, planting an explosive device on a bus, grooming young girls and mounting pedestrian zones with vans…..Foxy-Loxy pales in comparison, the trolls out there are no longer found just under bridges, sleeping beauty wakes up and pisses off back to the arsehole who cursed her in the first place, kissing the frog gives you a STD and the Little Mermaid pulls you under the ocean to drown until your bloated crab eaten body returns to the surface. Death is not beautiful, often its slow, ugly and rips the soul out of you when you sit at a loved ones bedside watching and waiting for her final breath to turn to air. Life is a shit and experience will corrupt, but the saving grace is the beauty which is hidden and sometimes appears like a rose pushing its head through a fence. The moments when you touch your child for the first time, a piece of classical music that fills your heart or the most beautiful sunset on foreign shores, we plough on in this life because circumstances can change at any time and if you are a decent person then surely time will reward your efforts.....we need to believe this otherwise we would just lay down now and let the world grind us into the grave.