Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago and not very far away, a little boy entered the world in a small stone cottage in the English countryside. Some babies are born closer to the end of their story than others, and this little boy was one of those.
For a short while the boy named George remembered where he came from, and then the memory faded, almost disappeared into the bright light of this loud world with all its talking adults and worries and words. But when the boy read a certain kind of story, or heard a very particular type of tale, he had the nudge of a memory, a thrilling kind of prescient joy, an echo or reminder of something more, of somewhere very important, of somewhere where it all began.
That feeling returned with every book he picked up and with every story he begged his sister, Megs, to tell him.
And Narnia was his favorite of all, and he wanted to know about the author and how he found this story.
You see, there was once, and is even now, a city on the banks of the River Cherwell, a city as abundant with timeless tales as any city in the world. The slow river begins its journey in Hellidon and meets its destiny in the Thames at Oxford, a city of stone towers and pinnacles where this story, and many, many others begin. Some stories imagined in this ancient place rise above the others; they ascend from the towers, from the quiet libraries and single rooms, from the museums and the cobblestone streets. Some of those stories become legends.
Myths.
Tales that are as much a part of us as our bones.
“Wait!” Young George’s voice stops me. He jumps from where he’s been sitting on the floor of the library and rushes to my chair, climbs into my lap.
“Start over. Say it again.”
I laugh and tousle his red curls. “We’re only on page three.”
“But if you start again, it will last longer.”
I understand this logic. It’s why I wrote the book in the first place, to make it all last longer.
I kiss my grandson’s round cheek. Growing up in the countryside, he’s as wild as the land and his parents’ farm of sheep and goats and cows. His wild red curls are an imitation of his grandfather Padraig’s in his younger days. The Devonshire cottage in Worcester is his home, only a few houses down from the cottage where Padraig and I live, married for thirty years.
This George is the child of my daughter, Beatrice. He’s squirming to no ends in my lap. I wrap my arms tight around him to still him, and he exhales, snuggles closer.
Our cottage, Padraig’s and mine, where we are right now, is the one we built right after we married to be near Mum and Dad while we taught at Oxford. It has become our permanent home in retirement, although I can’t rightly call it retirement when Padraig and I are both still writing books and articles, and lecturing when called. But to be here in the countryside with Beatrice and my grandson is about as right as the world can be, even when it’s not.
The library here is just like the kind my brother dreamed for himself, the kind George talked about and wished for. I designed it with his imagination in mind. The high shelves of dark wood, with leather-bound books of classics, include an entire collection of the Narnia chronicles, signed by Jack. There came six more after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There’s a ladder that rolls along the hardwood floors so I can reach the top shelves and grab a George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, or one of Mum’s many Dorothy L. Sayers novels that she left me. On the middle shelves, alphabetical and orderly, are my physics and mathematics books, from Einstein to the new theories of a man named Hawking. And across the room is a fireplace big enough to walk into, snapping and crackling with a fire to warm our early spring afternoon.
“Tell me the part about the trip to Dunluce,” George says. “And the castle.” He exhales the next words with a smile. “In Ireland.”
Ireland, the place his grandfather comes from, the land of wild dreams and adventures. We’ve taken him to visit many times, always on Christmas Eve Eve.
“Oh, we’ll get there,” I say.
“Go there now!” He is almost bursting.
“But all that comes before the castle matters just as much.”
George settles in and flips to the next page for me. “This is my favorite picture,” he says.
He points at a mighty drawing of Aslan standing behind a young Jack Lewis as Jack draws his own pictures in a little end room in Belfast. The image is colored in with the pencils I once brought to my brother from Blackwell’s bookshop. “My favorite too, love,” I say. “Mine too.”
Outside, wind rattles the new leaves of the beech tree against the glass. It is March. Spring is moving, hidden beneath the hard and cold ground, rising up to new life.
I read to my grandson. I read of meeting Mr. Lewis after Warnie found me hiding in the woodlands behind their house. I read to him of Mr. Lewis’s life stories that twist and spin into and out of Narnia. I read of George’s adventures in his imagination, and I read of our journey to Dunluce Castle. At each page, I pause for my grandson to stare at the sketches of Aslan near young Jack Lewis: in an attic where Jack is writing of Boxen; in the classroom of a horrid boarding school; in the trenches of France; in an office at Oxford. The well-wrought sketches change from page to page, the lion’s expression as wise or as caring or as fierce as the scene demands.
I am near the end when we’re interrupted by a deep voice.
“Hello, my loves.” Padraig enters carrying a stack of wood. My heart reaches for him; it has never stopped moving toward him since the evening at the castle, or maybe even before, on a bridge over the River Cherwell when he ran after me to walk me halfway to the Kilns.
Padraig’s hair is silver, pure silver, as if a child with a paint box took his bright red curls and painted them. His face is lined with wrinkles to mark his smiles. Twenty bestsellers my husband has written now, fairy tales and legends of the Irish countryside, even while tutoring at Merton for all these years. But the book young George and I are reading?
Once Upon a Wardrobe.
I wrote it.
My brother illustrated it. Of course, he hadn’t known he was illustrating a book; he merely drew while I told him stories.
The book came later.
Much later.
Padraig drops the logs into the fire and comes to kiss us both. “What part are we on?”
“The end,” George says, “until we read it again.”
I look up to Padraig, and he smiles down at me with that crooked and dear grin that melts everything in me. I think of the first time I knew what that smile meant—on my front porch on Christmas morning—but it was at my brother’s final good-bye that I knew for sure.
It was the end of 1950 when we bid farewell to my brother. The whole village was there. Almost everyone to the end of every lane had come for my family. They whispered and they cried and they kept their eyes downcast.
I sat on the front row with Mum and Dad, and I wasn’t crying because I’d cried as much as one body knows how to weep. I’d believed—fool that I was—that because I knew this end was coming, I was prepared, that I would not grieve as I had. As if one can pre-grieve and get it out of the way. It’s not true. Grief is the price I paid for loving fiercely, and that was okay, because there was no other choice but to love fiercely and fully.
In the church, I hadn’t looked behind me, because I knew I’d have to stand and speak, and I didn’t want to see all the familiar and mournful faces. Mum and Dad had asked me to talk about George. It wasn’t customary, getting up and speaking in such a way at an Anglican service where the priest usually just reads the Book of Common Prayer pages for the Burial of the Dead, but I’d said yes. George would have wanted me to say something. I knew he would. That didn’t make it easier, just necessary, and there was a difference.
When I stood and walked to the center of the church and faced the pews, I saw Mr. Lewis and Warnie in the third row. Next to Mr. Lewis sat Padraig Cavender himself. I was already shaking, and to see their sorrowful faces made my hands flutter like wings, almost sending my handwritten pages to the stone floor. The choir sang a gorgeous hymn in Latin, a hymn whose words I knew in English, but for some reason the Latin itself was squeezing my heart in grief.
“Come, Thou fount of every blessing . . .”
The choir finished. Padraig gave me a sad smile and nodded as if to say, or as if I imagined him to say, “You can do this.”
I was scared. All the thoughts flew through my mind at once like a flock of wild birds. I thought about George and his last breath with his gaze on the wardrobe. I thought of Mr. Lewis and Warnie and the Kilns’ warmth and books. I thought of Padraig’s kiss. I thought of the snow outside and how George would never again see spring, or not the kind of spring we would see when the baby lambs were birthed and the crocuses burst from the ground. George’s would be a new spring I couldn’t yet see.
I thought how we are never, any of us, in one place at a time, but in our minds and in our imaginations we are many places all at once. We were here and there at the same time; it was my body in a black dress at the front of the church, but my heart was with George.
I stood at the lectern and took a breath; everyone waited.
I meant to read what I’d written the night before in one long exhale of words. I opened my mouth and let the words flow with the beauty of all George was and is.
When I finished, I was undone by it all. I had nothing left. I walked back to the pew in a haze. I sat between Mum and Dad and their arms were around me lickety-split, pulling me as close as they could. We stayed that way for what remained of a service I don’t remember, the sounds and prayers sliding off of me.
An hour later, as we stood in the warm narthex crowded with people, Padraig walked toward me with his long strides and his green eyes and his kind, sad smile.
“Megs,” he said. I loved hearing my name on his lips in the midst of despair. “It was beautiful. You are beautiful.”
“Some of those words are yours,” I said. “The words you gave me Christmas Day.”
“They are ours.” He moved closer just as my uncle Brian approached and swooped me into his arms and held me so tight I had to give him a light punch on the arm. “I will miss him every day, Megs. Every. Single. Day.”
“Me too,” I said. “Every minute.”
“He was something special, that lad. Not meant for a place like this.” Uncle Brian kissed my forehead. “And what you read, that was beautiful. Who wrote it?”
I lifted my eyebrows and sensed the swollenness of my eyelids. “Padraig and I did.”
“Huh.” Uncle Brian stepped back. “Well, look at you. A writer to boot.” He kissed me again, then he was off to another cousin.
Padraig had taken a step or two back. I reached for him. He came closer and knit his fingers through mine and held tight. It was the best I could do at that moment, the only way I knew to say, “I love you.”
But he knew. I could see that he knew.
Mr. Lewis and Warnie approached. It was an odd feeling to see them together outside their home or acreage or college, as if a storybook had come to life. I didn’t think about it as I let go of Padraig’s hand and threw my arms around them, both of them, one arm each, and embraced them.
They hugged me in return, and I marveled at this. In a matter of weeks I had come to know these two men better than some of my own family. They had changed my life, my heart, without telling me what to do or think or believe, and I didn’t understand how.
And they had eased George into a new world.
“Thank you for everything. Both of you. Thank you. You gave my brother beautiful last days.”
“No, Megs,” Mr. Lewis said. “You gave your brother beautiful last days. Your heart shines as bright and clear as the stars.”
Padraig piped up. “He’s right, indeed. Your heart does do that.”
The doors of the church opened as people began to make their way outside, and our group of four did the same until we stood on the grass that was turning to slush under everyone’s shoes.
Warnie coughed past his sorrow-drenched voice. “We wanted to meet him. I am so sorry that didn’t happen.”
“He met you in your stories,” I said. I looked away from these men I had come to love. I looked to the sky, to the stars hidden in sunlight that would reveal themselves in the night. I looked to wherever my brother might be. “And you’ve allowed me to see that we are enchanted not by being able to explain it all, but by its very mystery. That is—finally, that is—enough.”
Padraig squeezed my hand so tightly and Mr. Lewis said, “I hear you. I hear you.”
Now, yanked from the memory, another hand pulls at me—my grandson’s. And I am back in my library with my husband and young George.
Padraig sees my faraway look and he asks me, “Love, are you okay?”
I tilt my face up for another kiss as George squirms in my lap. “I am more than okay.” I glance down at the last pages of the book and I read the ending, the words I’d read at a service all those years ago when we said good-bye to my brother.
The brave boy’s story was short but full of just as much courage as any knight in shining armor fighting a dragon, just as full of bravery as any explorer journeying to the ends of the world to save a maiden, just as adventurous as any odyssey to the center of the earth.
The young boy understood now, after all the tales and adventures, after all the drawings and stories, and he told the grown-ups, who aren’t as smart as children, “There is a light, a bright lamppost light where all stories begin and end.”
Then his bedroom filled with the feeling of snow and light and warmth and darkness and joy and grief—everything of the broken and whole world, incongruent and holy, overflowing with mystery.
This feeling in his room was far better than the stories he loved, and yet the same. The hints had always been right in front of his eyes and inside his heart. The stories that thrilled him were echoes of the world that waited for him.
And he heard, as loud as a new world thundering out of the cosmos, the mighty roar of a lion.