This book is based on a true story, but some of the real things had been lost by the time we were doing the pictures. So other people made substitutes: Alex White drew the ocean liner card; other children, whose parents wanted their names kept private, made fortune catchers and played cat’s cradle and let the pictures be printed — and the author and publisher thank them. Marza’s daughter gave us permission to use the pictures from later Sibton Park school catalogs: thank you, Barbara Service. Thanks also to Kevin R. Tam for the photographs of the France and the Liberte; BBC Wales Capture Wales and Daniel Meadows, photographer, for the Wellingtons; Jim Gaston for the pens; and Charles Owen & Company, headwear manufacturer, for the English riding hat. All used with permission. Special thanks to Miranda Hickox, who edited an early version of this story when she was nine and read it again and again after that.
When the author says something is real, it is. The dolls and their tea set, all the letters and stories and school compositions, the Sibton Park clothes list, and the quote from the catalog are real. So are the photographs she took of her friends at Sibton Park and the horse in the field. She took the picture of the window in London later, but it’s the same window. The author’s father, Arthur Koponen, took the pictures of her reading, all the family photographs, and the paddock steps with Sibton Park in the background.
Some people may be curious about the illustrations from old books: they are real too. The artists were Arthur Rackham (Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens), Kay Nielsen (“East of the Sun and West of the Moon”), Edmund Evans from a design by “Phiz” (“Hansel and Gretel”) and H. P. Thorpe (Pride and Prejudice).
The author thanks Megan Tingley for her perceptive comments and strong support, Christine Cuccio for good judgement and a major save, Billy Kelly for the beautiful fonts and layout, Renee Gelman, for making it such a beautiful book, and Alvina Ling, who believed in the book from the beginning and read it all over and over, without ever losing her enthusiasm or her temper. Thank you, Alvina.