Nadine Gordimer in "Once Upon A Time" begins telling two stories that at first do not seem to have any relationship. The first is about herself, and the second is about an imaginary family. The two stories relate through their theme of greed and unfounded fear. In both stories she tells of the imagination and handed-down beliefs literally making people become prisoners of fear and keeping them from examining their preconceived ideas about apartheid.

In Gordimer's personal story, she is a victim of a fear that "neither threatened nor spared" (69), a fear that can be universally understood and felt by everyone. The object of her fear, however, is misplaced. The real threat is not the outsider who might come into her house but the house itself, with its faulty foundation weakened by an earlier mining for gold. Gordimer satirizes her own unwillingness to deal with the foundation of her fears by calming herself with imagining a fairy tale, in which the fear is also misplaced.

In the bedtime story or fairy tale the plot centers on a family who love each other very much and begin to live happily ever after in a suburb. The husband's mother, called the "wise old witch" (69), and other residents warn about hiring people off the street unless they are reliable and trustworthy. They believe that the natives as a whole are thieves and could be instigators of trouble. Gordimer shows that instead of living happily, the family begins to live in fear, the little boy's pets can not come and go as they choose, and the family no longer pauses to enjoy their walks around the neighborhood streets. All of the families of the suburb are afraid and have built security barriers around their properties. All of these events occur because of the residents' preconceived beliefs about racial tension.

There is a fear of riots because "the people of another color" (69) lead debased lives, though any potential riots in the suburb are suppressed. There are many burglaries; the hungry and jobless people that beg and loiter are claimed to be responsible. But instead of providing something constructive to help these people, the citizens think of them only as loafers and "tsotsis" (71). The residents of the suburb are not willing to offer jobs or encourage self-improvement of the people perceived as the root of their problems; they offer work only to the highly recommended outsiders. The residents decide to build high concentration-camp style fences (71), place burglar bars over their doors and windows, and install security alarms into their houses. They live in constant fear that their possessions will be stolen or that undesirable people will "open the gates and stream in" (70). Gordimer ridicules their fears by showing that none of the imagined fears result in any actual harm. Instead, she uses the razor sharp wire as the symbol of the real threat.

Not only are the residents' fears unfounded, but these fears are handed down from generation to generation. Fear is passed down through fairy tales by the mother-in-law to the parents and then to the little boy, and their fears are as imaginary as fairy tales. In fact, the only real injury in the story occurs as a result of the child trying to act out one of the fairy tales. The boy acts as the Prince in a fairy tale, who braves the thicket of thorns and crawls into the razor blade coils built around his home. As the housemaid, the gardener, and his parents try to cut him free, his pet cat sets off the burglar alarm. The solutions to prevent damage by the natives results in a more serious injury of the child, with the implication that the system with its built-in distrust is a greater threat than any individual.

Gordimer's story shows how foolish people are to work on such elaborate superficial elements to combat fear grounded in racism or elitism. She compares the faulty house foundation in her story to the traditional position the system of apartheid has placed everyone in. She ridicules the building of barriers that do not resolve anything but cause problems and come back to hurt everyone. Through the use of the gold and the fences as symbols of greed and discrimination, she clearly suggests that problems are caused by the very thing that people do not think about: economic repression and racism.