Facts about "Once Upon a Time" by Nadine Gordimer?

Nadine Gordimer’s short story “Once Upon a Time” was published in 1989—a historical moment in which South Africa operated under Apartheid. During this system of institutionalized racism, housing and employment opportunities—among other social factors—were explicitly dictated by race. Gordimer takes up these themes through her ironic use of the fairy tale form.

“Once Upon a Time” begins with a frame narrative in which the third person narrator is asked “to contribute to an anthology of stories for children" but says, "I reply that I don’t write children’s stories.” But after being awoken by what she first believes to be the sounds of a burglar, the speaker tells herself a fairy tale to fall back to sleep. 

Although it has many of the familiar characteristics of a fairy tale—it begins with “once upon a time,” features a loving family, and so on—the narrative reflects on the horrible conditions of Apartheid. The fairy tale begins as a suburban fantasy:

In a house, in a suburb, in a city, there were a man and his wife who loved each other very much and were living happily ever after. They had a little boy, and they loved him very much. They had a cat and a dog that the little boy loved very much. They had a car and a caravan trailer for holidays, and a swimming-pool which was fenced so that the little boy and his playmates would not fall in and drown.

Despite this fantastical beginning, the threat of violence in the form of burglars and riots creeps in. As the foreshadowing at the end of the above passage suggests, ultimately the boy falls victim to the family’s extreme security measures. As the boy plays out his own fairy tale, he climbs to the top of his family’s fence, which is now covered with serrated blades that make the wife “shudder . . . to look at.” The horribly injured body of the child gives us a final push out of the fairy tale, reminding us of the real children who were killed during Apartheid, such as those at the Soweto uprising.

It is a metafictional ending, one that points to the impossibility of retreating from the horrors of Apartheid. From this ending, the speaker’s initial refusal to write a children’s story takes on a new significance.