Kensington Gardens

1950

Second star to the right of what? The Big Dipper? Big Ben? Well, it’s a fairy tale, old girl, not a bloody road map.

Perhaps the children should be sitting up with me. I could roust them out of their beds, invent some game that requires us to all gather round the open nursery window. Their parents should never know, they scarcely pay any attention to the prattling of their children. That’s my job.

But these little ones are too modern for fairy stories. It’s not that they remember the war, exactly; little Maggie wasn’t even born until after D-Day. But the rubble of London, the shortages of nice things, the strain and anxiety and impatience of the grown-ups trying to put their lives back together, well, it all argues against magic, somehow. There’s no place for fairies any more in this world.

So I sit and wait alone, me and my dear and constant friend, Mr. Boodles. Waiting for what, well, I wish I knew. But an urgency stirs my dreams, however heavily I try to medicate them with the tonic in this glass, a sense of longing that comes from some place unimaginable, as deeply rooted as memory, as old as time. It haunts me beyond all reason, an ache in my heart I can’t explain or ignore. And it all began with the damn book.

There it sits, the crumbling old thing, on the tea table next to the window. I run my fingertips over its nubby, embossed cover, the gilding almost entirely worn away, a boy in leaves and a pair of tarty little mermaids. I needn’t open the cover again to see what’s written there; it’s scrawled just as indelibly in my memory: a single word, Believe. And I do believe, far more than these sleeping children. Far more than the gray old grown-up world, with it’s rationing and austerity, and its neverending loss and deprivation.

A better world exists, some place where the grown-ups haven’t got to yet. I’ve seen it in my dreams. I know it in my heart.

This book ends, as books must do, but there’s always more to the story.