The Stepmother. Children's audio story narrated in British English.

One day, Miss Ellis arrived at class accompanied by a young woman and two girls. "Today I have brought Cinderella and Snow White with me. They are accompanied by Cruela, their stepmother." Such an introduction certainly suggested they would discover something of interest that day, and that the teacher had done sufficient lesson preparation.

When everyone was seated, and Mrs. Cruela was preparing to speak, all the classroom lights went out. Amid the darkness two tremendous slaps could be heard, and a short time afterwards both Cinderella and Snow White could be heard crying. Just then, the lights came on again and everyone could see the two girls weeping.

-"Who did that?"

asked Miss Ellis.

Without hesitating, all the children pointed at the stepmother. Mrs. Cruela shook her head, but at that moment the lights went off again. Then two loud thumps resounded around the classroom, and Clara and Phillip began crying. When the lights came on again the two of them were weeping and looking angrily at the stepmother, who everyone was pointing at accusatively. The stepmother began to speak again, saying she was innocent, but again the lights went out.

However, this time it took only a couple of seconds for the lights to come back on. When they did, everyone could see what was happening: Cinderella and Snow White were running towards Charlie and Robert, with their arms raised, ready to hit the children. Seeing this, all the children asked Cruela to forgive them. In reality she was a very nice, kind woman, who didn’t know what to do with her rebellious stepdaughters, who she loved greatly but who would cause problems wherever they went…

-"And that’s what I wanted to teach you all today, children,"

said Miss Ellis.

-"Let us not make judgments based on prejudice and surface appearances like race, beauty, or even names. That would be the most unfair thing we could do, don’t you think?"