Danielle Wood - Rosie Littles Cautionary Tales for Girls

PRAISE FOR THE ALPHABET OF LIGHT AND DARK

An impressive debut Woods assured sense of place and her confidence with language single her novel out as a distinctively mature work translucent prose.
Sunday Age

Absorbing, subtle, impressive writing. Debra Adelaide, The Australian/Vogel Literary Award judge

Wood writes with a strong sense of place, bringing alive the landscape, and threads this through themes of colonial history and personal family drama beautifully written. Sunday Telegraph The author has that special quality which just jumps off the page. The voice is strong and the sense of place so powerful. James Bradley, The Australian/Vogel Literary Award judge Woods style is breathtaking at times Without sentimentality The Alphabet of Light and Dark powerfully conveys the importance of finding a place within history and the timeless craving for a sense of belonging.
Good Reading

Woods writing is sinewy, physical and elemental. Liam Davison, The Australian/Vogel Literary Award judge

A real talent written with clarity, authority and restraint. Herald Sun

Danielle Woods first novel, The Alphabet of Lightand Dark, won the 2002 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and the 2004 Dobbie Literary Award. A recovering journalist, Danielle teaches writing at the University of Tasmania.

Rosie Littles
C autionary
TalesforGirls

DANIELLE WOOD

First published in 2006

Copyright Danielle Wood 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a
maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for
its educational purposes provided that the educational institution
(or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to
Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth
Government through the Australia Council, its arts
funding and advisory board.

Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Wood, Danielle, 1972.

Rosie Littles cautionary tales for girls.

ISBN 9781741149302.

ISBN 1 74114 930 4.

I. Title.

A823.4

Internal design by Design by Committee
Set in 11/16pt Sabon by Asset Typesetting Pty Ltd
Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group McPhersons

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Xanthe (when she is older)
and in honour of
Saint Heather of the Immaculate Suitcase

CONTENTS

These are not, I should say from the outset, tales written for the benefit of good and well-behaved girls who always stick to the path when they go to Grandmas. Skipping along in their gingham frills basket of scones, jam and clotted cream upon their arms what need can these girls have for caution? Rather, these are tales for girls who have boots as stout as their hearts, and who are prepared to firmly lace them up (boots and hearts both) and step out into the wilds in search of what they desire. And since it cannot be expected that stout-booted, stout-hearted girls will grow up without misfortune or miscalculation of some kind, they require a reminder, from time to time, about the dangers that lurk both in dark forests and in the crevices of ones own imaginings.

Rosie Little

The Deflowering
of Rosie Little

T he trouble with fellatio, in my view, is its lack of onomatopoeia. Take more honest words like suck, or gargle, or gurgle and ta-da! Their meanings are all neatly wrapped up in the way they sound. Whereas fellatio, all on its own, could leave you clueless. Especially in the week before your fifteenth birthday.

Fellatio could lead the uninitiated to envisage something ornate, baroque even perhaps some sort of decorative globe, or a wrought-iron birdcage encrusted with stiff black vine leaves. Placed in a sentence: What a lovely fellatio you have on the sideboard, Mrs Hyphen-Wilson!. Not, of course, that I had the opportunity to make such a mistake. Because although Ccile Volanges got Latin terms on the occasion of her deflowering, I, Rosie Little, did not.

I witnessed the seduction of Ccile Volanges more than once in the year I turned fifteen. Nightly for three weeks, the actor playing le Vicomte de Valmont in the local repertory theatre companys production of Les Liaisons dangereuses whispered to the ingenue Ccile with the utmost delicacy, and from within the chintzy confines of a four-poster bed I think wemight begin with one or two Latin terms. And nightly for three weeks, I suspended my disbelief, more than willingly, endowing the sets plywood four-poster with all the solidity of pre-Revolutionary French oak, and thoughtfully touching up the dark stripe which, with each performance, was becoming incrementally more obvious in the parting of Cciles yellow hair.

Le Vicomte would whisper and Ccile would squeal with pleasure and toss her blonde curls as she yielded into the softness of huge white pillows. And from various dark corners of the theatre auditorium I would watch, rapt, a stack of unsold programs just inches from my beating heart. I wanted desperately to hear the words that le Vicomte was about to trickle into the innocent ear of young Ccile. But each night, just as these spellbinding incantations of seduction were to be disclosed to me, the scene would fade to black.

So, although I ripped tickets and sold programs, gratis, for the entire season of Les Liaisons dangereuses, I did not learn the word fellatio. Neither did I learn the two neat, clipped syllables of coitus (a demure game played upon the decks of ocean liners?). And now, some years later and knowing one or two things more than I did in the week before my fifteenth birthday, I strongly suspect that even if my own seducers vocabulary had stretched to cunnilingus, he would not have been terribly interested in its application.

In another country, in another time, a young man as well-off as Gerard Hyphen-Wilson (as I like to call him) would certainly have been schooled in Latin. His red-necked father would, with a little of his pocket change, have engaged a governess. Solemn of face and solemn of frock, she would have led him briskly through his first verbs. And later the little thug would have been sent away to boarding school, where he would learn to recite his Virgil, and perhaps utilise a few elementary Latin terms in his dealings with younger boys.

But not being in another country, or another time, Gerard Hyphen-Wilson had no Latin. In fact, the most interesting word I learned from the young lord of the manor was snatch. Placed in a sentence: Christ, your fucking snatch is tight. For such was his eloquence as he clumsily ruptured my hymen while I lay beneath him on the splintery bed of a jetty in one of the better riverside suburbs.