The Princess Rules

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Once upon a time (that means I don’t exactly know when, but it wasn’t that long ago), in the land called the Seven Kingdoms, the king and queen very much wanted a son. They waited and waited until one day the queen told her husband, ‘I have news for you. We are going to have a beautiful baby boy!’

‘And when he grows up he will be king,’ said the king, very pleased. ‘What a lovely surprise.’

But when the baby came, it was not a boy. It was a girl.

This was a big shock for the king and queen, but since they were royal they put on a smile and took the baby through the tall windows to the balcony of the palace and waved at everyone. They pretended that they did not mind that she was a girl when they had been counting on a boy, and after a little while they loved her anyway. ‘Besides,’ the king said, ‘undoubtedly she will marry a handsome rich prince, and they can be king and queen over his kingdom and ours. Undootedly!’

‘We’ll call her Florizella,’ said the queen. ‘Princess Florizella.’

Though they started with good intentions, the king and queen were dreadfully careless parents. They messed up the christening by inviting everyone, so that nobody was furiously offended. No angry witches blew in and put a fatal spell on the baby, nobody turned her into a mouse. The king and queen forgot all about locking her in a high tower so that a prince could climb up her hair to rescue her, they did not forbid her from spinning, or ban her from sharp needles. They did remind her not to run with scissors in her hands, but this is of no use to a fairytale princess – it’s just normal. They did not strap her into tight gowns so she had a tiny, tiny waist that a prince could span with one hand. They did not feed her poisoned apples and bury her in a glass coffin. The queen was particularly neglectful – she completely failed to die and leave her daughter to a cruel stepmother to make her herd geese or sit in the cinders.

They let Florizella do as she liked, and so it was partly their fault that she did not learn the Princess Rules, but grew up into a cheerful, noisy, bossy, happy girl who spent her mornings on her horse called Jellybean, and her afternoons working with them in the royal office. She particularly liked answering letters of complaint about the expense and the unimportance of a royal family. Mostly, she agreed with them. ‘We are dretfully ex-pence-sieve’ she wrote when she was six years old.

‘You’re never going to post it like that!’ said the king.

‘So sweet,’ said the queen, putting it in the bin.

Florizella was friends with some princesses who had studied the Princess Rules, and behaved just as the Rules said they should. Florizella thought their hair was lovely: so golden and so very long! And their clothes were nice: so richly embroidered by devoted peasants. And their shoes were delightful: so tiny and handmade in silk! But their days bored her to death!

In the morning, they got up, washed their faces and put cream on their cheeks and on their hands and on their noses. Then it was time for breakfast. They drank hot water and sometimes green tea. The Princess Rules were clear about breakfast: ‘Princesses live off air,’ the Rules said. They got dressed, and that took them hours because they wore petticoats and underclothes and beautiful gowns and overgowns and even those tall pointy hats called henins. By the time they got all that on, and did their hair, it was lunchtime.

In the afternoon, they were too tired to do anything but pluck their eyebrows.

In the evening, they said they were bored.

‘What do you do all day?’ they asked Florizella, looking in bewilderment at her. She wore trousers and a shirt for riding, and a skirt or a dress for best.

‘I’m learning how to run the Seven Kingdoms when I’m grown up,’ she told them. ‘I’ve got a lot of ideas.’

‘Ideas!’ They were all quite horrified. ‘We don’t have ideas! We have the Rules.’

But Florizella thought that everyone should live in the size of house that they needed. So families with lots of children, or who had friends living with them, should have the biggest houses, and small families should have the smaller houses.

‘Actually, that sounds rather sensible,’ said the queen, who was sick of dusting the 134 royal rooms of the palace.

Florizella thought that everyone should be paid whether they had a job or not. They should be paid to garden or think, to paint or run. Fathers could stay at home and look after the children, and when mothers went out to interesting jobs they could come home to a clean, tidy house.

‘That would never work,’ said the king, who had no intention of dusting 134 rooms, not even one or two.

Florizella laughed and went out to canoe in the moat. ‘You know, she’s not like a regular princess at all,’ the king complained to the queen. ‘I think you must have gone very badly wrong somewhere.’

‘She’ll find her own way, in her own time,’ the queen said comfortably. ‘And surely, since she’s a princess born and bred, she’ll just naturally come to the Princess Rules in time? Won’t she?’

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One day an invitation came to the palace. It said ‘Princess Florizella’ on the front in wonderful curly writing. It was an invitation for a ball, to be given by Prince Bennett in the next-door kingdom – the Land of Deep Lakes. He wanted to meet all the princesses in the neighbouring realms so that he could choose one to marry.

‘I’d like to go,’ said Princess Florizella at breakfast when the invitation arrived.

The king gave the queen a look, which meant that she must start the job of telling Florizella ‘no’.

‘I don’t think you’d enjoy it,’ the queen said nicely.

Florizella said she thought she would.

The queen gave the king That Look, and he said, rather impatiently, for he was uncomfortable when he thought he might hurt Florizella’s feelings:

‘Thing is, Florizella, Prince Bennett will never choose you to be his bride because there will be very, very pretty princesses there, trained in the Princess Rules. And you have never been like that. Not at all.’

‘I know that,’ said Florizella. ‘But I’m not going there to get married to Prince Bennett. I’m going to see my friends and enjoy the party.’

‘Ah,’ the king said. ‘Then you may go. Undoubtedly. Undootedly!’

So she threw a clean pair of jeans in a bag, and after lunch she hopped into the glass coach – for they had no cars and trains or buses in the Seven Kingdoms – and drove off with her horse, Jellybean, trotting behind.

Prince Bennett’s kingdom wasn’t far from Florizella’s home, and Florizella was the first to arrive. The prince had invited one hundred and twenty-one princesses, and Florizella waited at the gate to watch them all drive past. One hundred and twenty princesses went by, some in fine carriages, some in smaller ones, and one or two in carts. One very poor princess came in a wheelbarrow. Some of them were very beautiful and some were less so, but they all desperately wanted to marry Prince Bennett. They didn’t have anything else to do in those days, and the Princess Rule no. 500 (the last) said: Marry a handsome prince.

The one hundred and twenty-first princess, Florizella, was the only one not planning marriage. She was just there for the party.

‘And to eat the food!’ said Princess Florizella longingly when she saw the banquet.

She had a wonderful time. There were tons of cakes, and three hundred different sorts of ice cream and forty different coloured jellies. There were meringues, pizzas and hot dogs. There were sticks of rock and candyfloss. There were toffee apples, and strawberries still growing in the strawberry beds that you could pick yourself and eat – as many as you wanted. Florizella ate a very good dinner indeed.

But the one hundred and twenty princesses ate a little bread and butter and nothing more. They were worried about spilling on their best ballgowns. They were worried about whether they would be able to dance lightly on their toes. They were worried that someone might think they were greedy. (Princess Rule no. 42: Princesses Live Off Air.) Florizella worried about nothing. She had seconds and thirds of nearly everything.

She had a much better dinner than Prince Bennett, who had to dance with every single one of the hundred and twenty-one princesses. He thought he had better make an early start. He danced with each princess, one after another, and they all smiled and agreed with whatever he said.

They were lovely. They were the nicest girls he had ever met. They were so pleasant that he could not tell them apart. They were so charming that he had the horrid feeling that nobody could be that nice all the time. So how could he possibly know which were nice for most of the time? One or two might not be nice at all, but might just be putting it on for the party. And very sorry he would be if he married one of them! Prince Bennett’s head was spinning by the time he came and sat down beside Florizella, who was just finishing a bowl of raspberries.

‘Would you like a dance?’ he asked politely.

‘Not especially,’ said Florizella. ‘And I would have thought you might have had enough.’

‘Yes, I have,’ Prince Bennett said honestly. ‘I think it’s the worst party I’ve ever been to.’

‘Have a choc-ice,’ said Florizella to cheer him up, and Prince Bennett started to feel better.

‘You’re a girl,’ he said trustingly. ‘You advise me. How can you tell which princesses are really nice and which are just pretending?’

Florizella looked around. ‘I only know a few of them. Most of them I don’t know any better than you do,’ she said. ‘The thing you have to remember is that they all have to be nice to you because it’s in the Rules. You’re the handsome prince.’

‘That’s just it!’ Bennett groaned. ‘How do I choose which one to marry?’