What mattered then was the sequence of wondrous events and the emotional colours they were suffused in: comedy, delight, suspense, fear, and not least that very suspect thing, the exotic, the oriental. My first Aladdin may have been a pantomime, or a Ladybird book, or a story in a child's edition of The Arabian Nights - I simply can't remember, and it doesn't matter. Every child should have the chance to absorb these experiences of language and narrative at play our first encounter with the great wonder tales should ideally take place when we're so young that there's nothing but pure enjoyment in the encounter. I can't remember not knowing Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk either, or the great nursery rhymes like Hey Diddle Diddle or Sing a Song of Sixpence. In fact, like millions of people before me, I absorbed Aladdin so early in my life that I can't remember not knowing it.
It would be like Wittgenstein's lion: if it could speak, we wouldn't understand what it said. If someone composed an entirely new story, perhaps we wouldn't recognise it as a story at all. In a sense, we write nothing original and everything we compose is a re-ordering of events, scenes and ideas that other storytellers put together long before we were born. But I had a greater privilege than that: I re-wrote it.
