“I asked him,” I tell George as I rush into his room and sit on the wooden chair next to his bed. I drop my book bag and kiss his cheek before I take out the composition notebook with the marble-style cover I’d bought at Blackwell’s bookshop on the way home.
“Oh, Megs! You did? What did he say?” George sits up, and the energy in his voice takes away all doubt that I can make him happy with the notebook I hold.
“He’s the nicest man in the world. He talks . . . so precisely. I don’t know how to explain it. Like every word is exact and he means each one.”
George takes my hand. “Where did you talk with him? In a lecture hall?”
“I was hiding in the woods behind his house and his brother found me.”
George laughs and his smile fills his face; he throws off his covers to sit straight. “And?”
“The author and his brother live on a property that looks like Narnia slipped out of the book and into their back garden. Or”—I smile—“it slipped out of his land and into Narnia.”
“What did you ask him? What did he tell you?”
“Slow down, silly. I’ll tell you everything. I promise. He did answer me a bit but not quite like you’d think. He told me a couple stories and invited me back on Monday.”
“He didn’t answer?” George’s face falls and he slumps back to his pillow.
“Oh, he did. Just in his own way. With stories. He wouldn’t let me take notes like I do with my tutor, but instead told me to go back to my rooms and write it down as I remembered it. So this”—I hold up my notebook—“is how I remember it.”
George takes the notebook from my hands and flips through the pages I’d furiously written on with black ink, my handwriting jammed tightly from side to side and top to bottom. “I can’t read this very well. Your writing is . . . scrunchy.”
“I know. I wrote it so fast. I’ll read it to you.”
I take back the notebook and begin. While sleet pelts the windows, I read to George. “Outside Belfast, in County Down, a young—”
“Wait!” George presses his hand to mine. “That’s not how you start a story.”
“How do I start it?” I ask him, looking up from my words. “Do I say, ‘Once upon a time’?”
“If you want.” He seems incredulous at this boring start.
“How about . . .” I think for a breath or two. “How about, ‘Not long ago . . .’”
“And not far away,” he says.
“Or,” I say with a grin, “‘once upon a . . . wardrobe’!”
He smiles so buoyantly his cheeks rise to his ears. “Yes!” he says, his gaze wandering to the wardrobe across the room.
“Then here we go,” I say. “Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago and not far away, in County Down outside Belfast, a young Jack Lewis, only eight years old, same age as you, lived with his older brother, Warnie, who was eleven years old, his mother, Flora, and his father, Albert. There was a tutor and a nanny, Lizzie and Annie, and his grandfather Lewis also lived there. It was a full house.”
George interrupts again. “Who is Jack?”
“The author, Mr. Lewis.” I smile. “Clive Staples Lewis. I should have told you that. As a boy, he changed his name. He didn’t like Clive Staples. Instead, he named himself Jack. His mother called him Jacksie.”
George laughs, and the sound is as glorious as waves on rocks at Brighton Beach. “Jacksie? Like a baby?”
“I think it’s just a cute nickname. You know how mums are.”
He laughs and glances at the door in case Mum might be listening.
“Now let me tell it,” I say.
George nods and presses his lips in a smile.
“They lived in a house called Little Lea. It was a red-brick house on a hill looking over the green land, and on a clear day they could see the wild waters of Belfast Lough and the Antrim Mountains. In this house was an attic full of nooks and crannies and small spaces where Jack and Warnie would play. They could sit at the window and watch the ships in the bay, for their great-grandfather had been a shipbuilder and they were fascinated. During this time, the massive Titanic was being built in Belfast, right under their noses, but how could they have known its terrible fate?”
I pause and look to George. I’m not sure this is what he wants, but it is all I have, so I continue.
* * *
George listens to his sister, her voice telling him the facts, but his imagination breathes new life into the story. George listens and observes his sister’s beautiful face. She has more freckles on the left cheek than the right. There is a dimple low by the right side of her lip, and the curls of her hair are alive with her every move. Her smile takes some time but is always worth the wait.
Hours in bed have taught George how to find the soft edges of the facts and drop himself into the worlds he hears about or reads of. He closes his eyes, sets his mind’s eye on the words, and floats on them like a raft. Megs’s beloved voice continues, and George is transported to an attic with two young boys at a window seat in a place they called the little end room.
The brothers stare out at the emerald land and beyond to the whitecaps of a wild bay and the jagged edges of a mountain that rises into the clouds. Both of the Lewis boys have dark hair; they are quiet while watching the ships sail in and out of the harbor.
“Where do you think that one is going?” The younger boy, wearing brown knickers and a linen shirt, pressed his hands to the window. He pointed to a schooner that moved toward the open sea, where adventure no doubt awaited. The sky spread over the bay with a dome of clouds like sea foam.
“To India,” the older boy, Warnie, said.
“You think every ship is going to India,” Jack replied with a sly grin. “Or it could be going to Animal-Land.”
The brothers glanced at each other with a look of kindness and friendship. Jack did love the view, but it was Warnie who was endlessly enchanted by the ships. The barkadeer and the brigantine, the clipper with three sails, and the galleon with a square rig and two decks. The rally with oars and the schooner with masts.
The exposed beams of a low-slung ceiling loomed over them. All around the attic were doors opening to other spaces. A wooden wardrobe, its handles thick as branches, crouched in one corner. Dust settled in the cracks of its dark etchings. Their mother kept her furs and fancy dresses inside. More than once, and more than twice, the brothers had crawled inside to tell each other a story.
But now the boys sat quietly, watching the ships with sails as big as dragon’s wings fly into the bay. Dark blue waves splashed against the sea walls; sails billowed and breathed. Then Jack hit upon something in his thoughts and he turned to his brother.
“Oh, Warnie, in two weeks you will take one of those boats to England, to boarding school, won’t you? You will leave me.”
“Yes.” Warnie tried to be brave when he said this. “But I’ll come home often. The days will go by quick as a flash. You have your schoolwork and Lizzie and Annie and Mother and Father . . . and Grandfather.”
“I hate my schoolwork. Math is the devil.” Jack jumped from the edge of the window seat and walked to a small desk his father had made for him—“Jack’s desk”—and sat down: drawings and maps scattered on its surface, piles of papers tilted, and colored pencils stored in boxes.
Warnie stood and joined his brother. “You’ll be jolly fine. I won’t be gone long, and you have your Animal-Land.” Warnie pointed at the drawings and maps and notebooks, some spilling onto the wooden floors. These held Jack’s creations: funny creatures that were half human and half animal, others that were all animal but dressed as humans in suits and top hats or in knight’s armor, carrying swords. Elaborate maps detailed imaginary places: mountain ranges and loughs and seas and towns.
Jack called it all Animal-Land.
To create this land Jack had used every color in his pencil box and every piece of paper he could find, filling notebooks, one after the other, with his handwriting—crooked and sideways—revealing story after story about King Bunny and Sir Peter Mouse, Gollywog, and others with strange names. On a sheet of lined paper, in his funny half-capital-letter, half-cursive handwriting, Jack listed all of them under the title Dramatis Personae.
Warnie considered the papers for a long while before looking up with a grin. “I have an idea! I have India and you have Animal-Land.” Warnie pointed to one of Jack’s characters, an owl in coattails named Puddiphat. “We can combine our worlds. Then it will be like we’re still together even when we are apart!” Warnie ran his finger along the drawings of Jack’s map, the seas crocheted with foam and creatures lurking beneath. The squiggly lines of various kingdoms’ territories made puzzle pieces of the land.
Warnie quickly strode across the attic room, ducking beneath a low beam and retrieving his map of India before returning. He held the two maps—Animal-Land and India—near each other, and the edges touched. “Let’s combine them into one country! You’ll work on them while I’m at Wynyard. Write to me about what happens in our new together-kingdom.”
Jack shuffled the papers on his desk and brought out a drawing of King Bunny in full armor. “Yes! We’ll make maps and—”
“We’ll call it Boxen,” Warnie said.
Jack jumped up now. “There will be steamships and trains. There will be knights like Sir Walter Scott and talking animals like Squirrel Nutkin.” Jack’s imagination grew far beyond the thing he’d created alone. Now, with his brother, something altogether new was unfolding, yet it took nothing away from his own creation. Outside, the rain ceased, and sunlight streamed through the attic’s dusty air.
The brothers went to work on their combined land, and after many hours and an almost-missed dinner, they had established a new kingdom, one that combined their separate lands and brought them together as more than brothers; now they were cocreators.
* * *
A week later, an early autumn afternoon spread sunlight as sharp as King Bunny’s imaginary sword through Jack’s bedroom window and onto the hardwood floors. Jack couldn’t go outside. Miserable and tired, he was ill again, as he often was.
His chest ached with heaviness, and his barking cough brought the family doctor running to Little Lea.
“It’s his weak constitution,” the doctor said in the hallway in a deep voice, believing Jack was out of earshot. But Jack heard him; he always heard things the grown-ups thought he didn’t. Now his mother was bustling about and making him stay in bed. The only good thing about being in bed was that he had more time to read the books on his bedside table.
When her footsteps faded down the hallway, Jack flopped back onto his pillow and closed his eyes. He imagined playing with Warnie instead of lying in bed with a cough.
Endless passageways ran through the family’s house. Jack would run down hallways and through empty room after empty room. Sometimes when the sunlight fell through the windows, the house was just as jolly as a forest glade. Jack knew that anywhere he looked could be magic if he saw it with his imagination. Peter Rabbit might scurry under the dining room door. Farmer McGregor might be hiding in the vegetable garden, and Celtic faeries could be dancing beneath an oak tree’s bough of leaves outside the window.
With his “weak constitution,” Jack wasn’t allowed outside as much as other boys. That was fine by him, because the house was also full of innumerable books, so many that when they moved from the old house to this one, which his father had built for them, Jack didn’t understand where all the books had come from. They seemed to have simply appeared.
Now sick enough to stay in bed but not too sick to read, Jack leaned over to pick up his Squirrel Nutkin book. The bedroom door creaked open and Lizzie, his nanny, with her dark Irish curls springing from beneath her white cap and her blue eyes so vivid they seemed to spark, entered. She spoke in her thick Belfast brogue.
“Jacksie.” She pulled up a chair and sat next to his bed, then set a cuppa on the bedside table and grinned. “I am here to regale you with the one tale worth the telling.”
This was his clue that a story was to begin. Jack smiled at her and sat up straight. He put down the book and picked up his tea.
“Across the western sea is an invisible world, a parallel world where one year of time equals seven of ours; where the fairies live in the sidhe, the people of the Goddess Danu.”
The familiarity of this beginning soothed Jack and he leaned in, wanting more of the Tuatha Dé Danann and their adventures.
“This,” she crooned, “is the story of King Nuada.”
“Tell the one where he loses his hand and—” The bedroom door opened, and the loamy aroma of earth and adventure blew in with Warnie.
Warnie reached Jack’s bedside in hasty steps, his smile at the ready. “I have something for you!”
The metal lid of a biscuit tin rested in Warnie’s hand. He placed it in the nest of Jack’s palm. A tiny garden made of twigs and moss rested inside the lid, a miniature world as mightily real as the ones Lizzie had begun to spin from the air. Jack stared at the mossy collection and a feeling passed through him, a warmth and an opening of his heart that he could barely put into words: a yearning, a longing, a wanting . . .
Jack held that tiny world his brother made for him and also held the deep feeling, even as the day of his brother’s departure approached like a speeding train.
For the remaining hours and days they had together at Little Lea, the brothers played chess, checkers, and Halma. They read books and created their new land called Boxen.
When Warnie finally departed for boarding school—across the sea to England by ferry and then on a train to Wynyard in Hertfordshire—Jack guarded Boxen and the miniature garden as if his attention to this made-up world would hurry Warnie home to him.
* * *
One frigid November night, after Warnie had been gone for weeks, the house felt emptier than ever. Mother tucked Jack into bed, holding The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. Jack thought for a moment to protest that he was nine years old now and much too grown-up for such stories, but that would have been a lie. His love for the story was greater than his pride.
Mother sat next to Jack’s bed and a light snow began to gather outside the window, a tinkling of sleet and a slip of white building up on the outside windowsill. Jack imagined Warnie in some common residence hall with other boys snoring about him and possibly not enough blankets to warm him. But Mother, with her long black hair piled on top of her head and her warm voice of love, began to read.
Jack’s mournful thoughts faded.
He could almost see the impertinent Squirrel Nutkin slip under the door, running from the owl, Old Brown. Nutkin and Twinkleberry tripped across the story, and Nutkin almost lost his tail when he taunted the owl.
Jack snuggled deeper in the blankets. Safe. Warm.
When the story ended, Mother kissed him good night. As she went to turn off the light, she spied a pile of papers. She lifted them and held them under the puddle of lamplight. “Jacksie, what is this?”
“I wrote it. It’s called My Life.” Jack beamed with pride. “Everyone in the house is in the story.”
Mother bent closer to the light as she flipped through the pages. Jack held his breath; he wanted her to love it. Finally a laugh erupted when she read out loud, “‘A bad temper, thick lips and generally wearing a jersey.’ This is how you describe your father? I am not so sure he’ll want to read this.”
“But it is true,” Jack said indignantly.
“All the same . . .” She read a few more pages, then looked to her son. “You include all the pets: our mouse; the canary, Pete; and our terrier, Tim! You are wonderful, my child, wonderful. You know, I was once a writer.”
“You were?” This was astounding. Mother always seemed as if she had only and ever been Mother.
“Yes. Someday I shall tell you about it. But for now, you must sleep.” She lifted the pages. “May I take these to read myself?”
“Yes! And, Mother?”
“Yes?”
“Only fourteen days until Warnie returns,” Jack said and rolled over to sleep.
The soft sound of his door closing was the last thing he heard.