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    The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel
    The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel
    The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel
    Ebook226 pages3 hours

    The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

    By Neil Gaiman

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A brilliantly imaginative and poignant fairy tale from the modern master of wonder and terror, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is Neil Gaiman’s first new novel for adults since his #1 New York Times bestseller Anansi Boys.

    This bewitching and harrowing tale of mystery and survival, and memory and magic, makes the impossible all too real...

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 18, 2013
    ISBN9780062255679
    Author

    Neil Gaiman

    Neil Gaiman is the New York Times bestselling and multi-award winning author and creator of many beloved books, graphic novels, short stories, film, television and theatre for all ages. He is the recipient of the Newbery and Carnegie Medals, and many Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner Awards. Neil has adapted many of his works to television series, including Good Omens (co-written with Terry Pratchett) and The Sandman. He is a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR and Professor in the Arts at Bard College. For a lot more about his work, please visit: https://www.neilgaiman.com/

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    Reviews for The Ocean at the End of the Lane

    4.5/5

    961 ratings519 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Gaiman is a favorite listen, he has a lovely voice. His horror mixed with nostalgia style can be unsettling, but I assume it's meant to be. He draws upon his own childhood for a layered story of memory and perception of a seven year old boy with a creepy family and kindly neighbors.
    • 3/5
      Reminds me of Ray Bradbury very much.
    • 3/5
      It's a beautifully written book with some very evocative text, but the ending rather spoilt it for me (though that may not be problem for many readers). The book is written in the first person, past tense throughout, but the last page makes a nonsense of that. How can a story be written in the first person, if the narrator has forgotten most of it?
    • 3/5
      This was okay, but I did not particularly like the direction that the main plotline headed. I was expecting something different from Gaiman, having highly admired his other works. Nevertheless, I am still glad I read it.
    • 5/5
      Love this book!
    • 5/5
      Just brilliant!
    • 3/5
      Very dark.
    • 5/5
      Truly amazing
    • 4/5


      I am going to read this again some day to help me decide. On what? Oh, maybe everything or maybe just one little thing. So well written, but I have so many questions and the answers only beg more questions.
    • 4/5
      This story is like a fairy tale, where everything is possible and the impossible is non-existent. It is easily told. In between, I like these types of stories, but it is a kind I do not want to read regularly.
    • 5/5
      A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. The house is long gone but he finds himself drawn to the old farmhouse at the end of the road where his childhood friend lived. Lettie Hempstock wasn't an ordinary little girl and her mother and grandmother weren't ordinary women. He hasn't thought of Lettie in many, many years but as he sits by the pond, the pond Lettie claimed was an ocean, he's taken back to the past. A past so strange it's hard to believe.

      I don't honestly know what to say. It took me a while to get into but even so it's still a great book from start to finish. It's creative and magical and weird and real.
    • 5/5
      This was engrossing, fascinating and somewhat surreal all at the same time. It's a tale of childhood and memory, starting when a man goes back to his childhood home after a family funeral. The house doesn't give him what he is looking for, that sense of memory and homecoming, but he continues down the lane and comes to the Hempstock farm. Here memory does come to life and he relives the events starting on his 7th birthday. I won;t try and describe it, it gets far to strange. It's a flight of fancy and yet speaks strongly to the terrors and seriousness of childhood. There is an entire range of emotion and experience here, and it's all seen through the filter of a child's eyes, when emotions are so much brighter and vivid. It was fascinating and it drew me in.
    • 5/5
      Coming back to his childhood home in order to attend a funeral, a middle aged man reminisces about his time as a young child and the strange girl, Lettie Hempstock who lived at the end of the road. Memories of great and terrible things resurface, things he had long ago forgotten. He once again recalls those monstrous and frightful events and what truly happened to little Lettie Hempstock. I am SO. GLAD. I took Jennys advice and cracked open another Neil Gaiman book. This man is a master storyteller. His writing is intoxicating, addicting, and mysterious. His story and world building feels ethereal and otherworldly but simultaneously real and present. This novel brings you back to the days of youth, when magic is commonplace and monsters are real. It's a world long lost by adults but present nonetheless. Do yourselves a favor and add this one to your TBR list, like right now. 
    • 4/5
      Once again Neil Gaiman does not disappoint. A masterful tale for all ages (or at least most) that is as uplifting as it is dark. Mild spoiler alert - it ends in a real life way, where everything is not all better, but folks still must go on with their lives.
    • 4/5
      Its a Neil Gaiman book- that is, it a mix of modern story mixed with old myths, telling a coming of age story in a new and interesting way. As always, he has a way with words that is easy to understand, but can tell a deeper story. The story is simple - a young boy who is shy and doesn't have any friends, meets his neighbor, a girl a bit older than he is. She lives with her mother and grandmother, and together resemble a trio is recognizable from mythology. Even though Letti, the girl, isn't quite what she seems, she is still a child that makes mistakes. When a creature gets loose in the world, Letti deals with it, allowing for a greater evil to escape.This is a story about the unknown monster under the bed, the ghost behind the curtain that isn't there when you look - its a child's world, told from the view point of an adult . This is a slim novel, only a 178 pages or so. Its a good book to read if you want an introduction to Neil Gaimon Books.
    • 5/5
      Up until reading this book, the word "fantasy" to me conjured up images of King Arthur, "The Chronicles of Narnia," "The Dark is Rising," and "The Black Cauldron." These works have something in common: good and evil are clearly defined, and there is a quest for one to vanquish the other, which the reader can always sense that it inevitably will. Gaiman's "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" turned everything I thought I knew about fantasy on its head. There is no hero's quest per se, but a great mystery that the reader and main character keep trying to unravel together. You can never tell exactly where this book is going to go or whether it will even end well, building in a level of suspense that makes this like no other fantasy I have ever read. Aside from "Coraline," this book was my first dip into the wide waters of Gaiman's writing, but I am certain that I have now been swept into their ocean.
    • 4/5
      Gott, war da viel Essen drin. Ich möchte bitte jetzt auch sofort ganz dünne Pfannkuchen die mit Zitronensaft beträufelt und dann mit einem Löffel Pflaumenmarmelade in der Mitte wie eine Zigarre eingerollt wurden. Danke.

      Desweiteren hat mir das Buch wunderbar gefallen. So gut, dass mir im Moment sogar kein einziger Kritikpunkt einfällt.

      Die Geschichte wird zwar vom Erzähler über 40 Jahre später geschildert, jedoch immer noch mit der Sicht seines 7 Jahre alten Ichs, das so einiges nicht verstanden hat oder die Erwachsenen kritisch beäugt, da sie sehr unlogische Dinge tun.

      Eine Besonderheit ist, dass der Erzähler nur mit der Geschichte mitgezogen wird. Er hat darin keine besondere Rolle als Dämonenbezwinger oder der Erwählte oder was auch sonst normalerweise der Fall ist. Er ist ein ganz normaler Junge. Der lieber ein Buch lesen würde als das Ziel eines Monsters zu werden, aber nun gut. Wäre es nicht für Lettie, die ihn unbedingt als Begleitung haben wollte, dann wäre ihm das ganze nie passiert. Und auch während der ganzen Zeit war er nur Zeuge und Opfer der Monster, die sich in sein Leben gewürmt haben.

      Schön war auch die Einführung der Hempstocks. Zuerst nur eine schrullige Familie wurden sie bald immer fantastischer und magischer bis ganz klar ist, dass sie mehr als nur die Magier vom Ende der Straße sind, die glauben, dass ihr Teich ein Ozean ist.
      Für Fans von:

      Der Sternwanderer von Neil Gaiman, Matilda von Roald Dahl.
    • 5/5
      Read aloud with the family - went in blind purely on the author's reputation. It stands with any of his others as a modern classic.
    • 3/5
      A fifty year old man reflects on his childhood through a fairy tale. I really liked the premise of this book but felt disappointed with what it delivered. The book is an easy and enjoyable read. It keeps you engaged. However, the fantasy element was not really my cup of tea. Interesting, but I was hoping for something more.
    • 4/5
      This is a terrific story, simple in the best sense of a fairy tale with a touch of horror can be. Very enjoyable read.
    • 4/5
      Fast-moving and imaginative, this novella is never less than a pleasure to read. It concerns itself with a man's reminiscences of a fantastic episode from his childhood wherein his household came under thrall from an evil governess with supernatural powers--interesting powers in that they largely were sited in an ability to cut through human veneers and give each person exactly what they wanted from life to bond them to her--from whom he could find solace only in a rather fey family who lived down the lane. This plot is quite involving, and the supernatural characters have a lot to say, or at least ask, about the human condition. It must be said that I didn't find our narrator particularly sympathetic--in many ways he was hardly more pleasant than his nemesis--and, if a fantasy story can have plot holes, this had a few, e.g., our hero seems to have been put under some sort of a forgetfulness spell after it's all said and done, yet he's telling it all clear as day as an adult. Enjoy the ride nonetheless.
    • 4/5
      Fantasy, horror, dreamscape, and alternative realityImaginative and intense,The Ocean at the end of the Lane is a sweet, yet scary, story of childhood innocence and imagination.
    • 4/5
      The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a part adult drama and part children horror fantasy. It started with a nearly middle aged man going over to his childhood home and then found himself at a farmhouse with a pond he remembered being called an Ocean. He remembered the time he was seven and started to reminiscing on the things he had forgotten.

      I've been reading The Ice Palace which was frankly a perfect novel written by an author in his sixties writing a POV of 11-years old girls perfectly. I can't say this much about Neil Gaiman because his child characters seems older than they seem. I don't think Gaiman could handle innocent and naive well. I kept forgetting the narrator's age but its not a primarily inner-character driven story so I could let it slide.

      Almost an autobiographical in nature, I however do think this book have the same universe as Neverwhere especially with the mythical elements in this book. Its not hard to draw parallel between Richard and George and Door and Lettie and the parallel between the hidden city like London Below and the hidden secrets in the country. Much of the book seemed to be influenced by employing Tabula rasa much like the Neverwhere's setting. If Hayao Miyazaki would want to work on another fantasy adaptation for his anime movies. I think this novel would find itself the same atmospheric league as Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle and Tales of Earthsea.

      I've decided for some time that Neil Gaiman's works are best in audiobooks or movie adaptations than reading his actual prose (plus Gaiman does edit it some of the chapters while reading). It does take me a while (several of his books, I mean) to handle his writing style (which tend to go on weird, flat and continuous until you listen to it) but I do think the adaptations of his work are more splendid than just reading them on paper. Plus, you will missed out on the character's intonation, the accents, the lingo, interactions etc and Gaiman does keep things out of his writings that are hard for him to put in his writings. Normally, reading this book would get a 3-star from me but the audiobooks does add more to the book. So if you want to read this book and appreciate its content more, you better get the whole audiobook and listen as Gaiman tell you his story in his own words.
    • 5/5
      A delightful little snack of a fairytale. Part of me wishes it was longer, but only because then I could have taken longer to read it. The rest of me thinks it's small but perfectly formed.

      In typical Gaiman style, much is hinted, little is explained outright, but there is ample allusion to myth and legend. Someone here wrote that reading his books should be approached like solving a puzzle - in that case, this is the back of the tabloid sudoku compared to the NY Times Crossword that is American Gods. Both are fulfilling to finish, in their own and quite different ways.

      What I have always particularly liked about Gaiman is his approach to children: These children are not stupid, they see what is happening around them, even if they don't understand all the context. They are not little angels, who are perfect and solve all their problems by magic, and they aren't small adults who solve problems in adult fashion. Children view the world in such a different way to the rest of us, and Neil Gaiman is one of very few authors who manages to capture it: The way their world is both matter-of-fact and pure magic at the same time, and the one doesn't ever have to get in the way of the other.

      I remember once a very long time ago now, waking up late at night from some parental instinct and finding my then 4 year old daughter sitting in her window staring out into the night. I asked her what was wrong and she turned to me with huge eyes full of tears and said "Oh mum, sometimes I just think too much about the moon" - and there it was, the moon, huge and bright, and seeming to fill the sky above forest. So we just sat and looked at the moon and listening to the waves of the Pacific Ocean crashing onto the shore below the house, until she was ready to go back to bed. I'm not entirely sure why that memory jumped to my mind when I closed this book, but it did, and I am glad. I think it might be because this book reminded me of how magical childhood is, although not always wonderful, and "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" reminded me of a moment when I as an adult was allowed a peek back into it.
    • 4/5
      The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a children's fairy tale made for adults. Like most of Neil Gaiman's books, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is so quirky and surreal that it is difficult to summarize and review. Reading this was like drifting off into a dream, or a long forgotten childhood memory. The story begins when a middle-age adult wanders back to his childhood home and visits the farm where he recalls some unusual events taking place when he was very young. As he reminisces on these strange happenings, a rather eerie fairy tale unfolds for the reader.

      I listened to this on audio which is always such a treat when Neil Gaiman is narrating his own stories. Gaiman so perfectly captures every nuance of expression and personality of his characters as well as creates an almost dreamlike atmosphere for the story itself. He is absolutely a master storyteller. The Ocean at the End of the Lane was quite short, not quite a novella but rather shorter than most novels, but it still managed to contain a complete and hypnotic story.

      I would absolutely recommend this and every other book Neil Gaiman has written to anyone who enjoys an unusual and beautifully written fairy tale.
    • 5/5
      I don't normally write reviews. I tend to be effusive about the books I love or even just like, so I think I'm not taken seriously by those with a more "discriminating" eye. I'm even usually forgiving about books I didn't quite care for, as though I may hurt their feelings with an unkind word (because loving readers know that stories are living things and they might hold a grudge for an eternity). That said, I adore this book, I long to hold it in my arms and cradle it like a child. I want to give it little kisses on the forehead and tell it how happy I am that it was born and made my life more wondrous. I want it to feel the love I have for it so it will grow big and strong and always be there for those who will need it.

      Like I said, effusive, but it is heartfelt and true.
    • 4/5
      Review for the non-Gaiman fans: The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a story about a middle-aged man who goes back to the scene of his childhood, spurred on by the memories of a girl named Lettie Hempstock who once said the pond by her home was an ocean. The closer he gets the more he remembers, when a suicide led to a darkness stealing out of somewhere unknowable, and a darkness invading his life while he is helpless to stop it. He begins to recall the summer when he was seven and that darkness tied itself to his heart, with mysterious and wise Lettie as his only hope of protection.

      Gaiman writes myths and legends with a quiet sense of place, where you know those elements are greater than stated by the narration, and possibly greater than yourself. This is tied well because he can get into the essence of a child's head very well, their fears and methods of cognitive recognition, the compartmentalization of knowing a horrible evil thing wants to hurt you badly and yet the comfort of a kitten can become an immediate remedy. The child's soul is there even if he gives them a voice that is older than their age.

      Ultimately, it is more a story to see the details than get to the end of it, although he ties suspense in so well that you fear what may happen to the unnamed narrator. If you have never read anything of Neil Gaiman's this is a good start for a blend of dark fairytales and wonderment mixed with dread.


      Review for the Gaiman fans: A novella that retreads some of Gaiman's favorite subjects that seem to blend his juvenile work with his older novels, as indicated by the framing of the narrator as a middle aged man telling the story of when he was seven. At its heart showcases the mysteries of the universe with a keenly felt edge of childhood's perception. It is not Gaiman's strongest work, but it might be the one that is more his than any of the others; in fact, when you read about the narrator's lifelong search to make art, you might mistake it for Gaiman's own words.

      At the same time, there are elements in it that he has done better in other ways. If you wanted a story that encapsulated the fears and threats of a child protagonist, his work in Coraline is richer and more compelling in its gothic horror. The Graveyard Book surrounds its child protagonist with a more consistent setup of supernatural mentors in comparison the Hempstocks, who serve as protectors to this book's narrator, but often feel too mysterious to work as opposed to being Just Mysterious Enough to be both recognizable and not. For his interesting concepts of eternity, reality and other heavy philosophical questions, his work in Sandman and The Books of Magic state their positions (or lack of ones) in a more drawn out and nuanced way than the protagonist's revelations.

      However, for someone who wants a story that is equal parts fear lurking underneath your bed and wonder at what those dark alcoves mean in the sense of a greater understanding, this book is an engrossing read that you can finish in one sitting. Even Gaiman at his less than best can still deliver thoughtful and poetic narration that is a worthwhile experience, full of myth and wonder that would bring you back to his other works.
    • 5/5
      This is one of those reviews where I don't want to give away any details of the book to keep from ruining the surprises. I will say it is one of those rare books that I had to keep forcing myself to slow down my reading speed because I didn't want it to end. Neil Gaiman has such a wonderful way with words that you don't want to miss even one. An easy 5 out of 5 stars and a must read for 2013!
    • 5/5
      This work proves that Gaiman is a master storyteller. I don't say those kinds of things lightly so this is unique praise. The work is compelling throughout and the ending...well, it couldn't have happened any other way and yet so few authors would have thought to end it this way.
    • 5/5
      This is a book about a child, but not for children. It's a modern fairy tale.

    Book preview

    The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman

    INTRODUCTION

    It was only a duck pond, out at the back of the farm. It wasn’t very big.

    Lettie Hempstock said it was an ocean, but I knew that was silly. She said they’d come here across the ocean from the old country.

    Her mother said that Lettie didn’t remember properly, and it was a long time ago, and anyway, the old country had sunk.

    Old Mrs. Hempstock, Lettie’s grandmother, said they were both wrong, and that the place that had sunk wasn’t the really old country. She said she could remember the really old country.

    She said the really old country had blown up.

    PROLOGUE

    I wore a black suit and a white shirt, a black tie and black shoes, all polished and shiny: clothes that normally would make me feel uncomfortable, as if I were in a stolen uniform, or pretending to be an adult. Today they gave me comfort of a kind. I was wearing the right clothes for a hard day.

    I had done my duty in the morning, spoken the words I was meant to speak, and I meant them as I spoke them, and then, when the service was done, I got in my car and I drove, randomly, without a plan, with an hour or so to kill before I met more people I had not seen for years and shook more hands and drank too many cups of tea from the best china. I drove along winding Sussex country roads I only half-remembered, until I found myself headed toward the town center, so I turned, randomly, down another road, and took a left, and a right. It was only then that I realized where I was going, where I had been going all along, and I grimaced at my own foolishness.

    I had been driving toward a house that had not existed for decades.

    I thought of turning around, then, as I drove down a wide street that had once been a flint lane beside a barley field, of turning back and leaving the past undisturbed. But I was curious.

    The old house, the one I had lived in for seven years, from when I was five until I was twelve, that house had been knocked down and was lost for good. The new house, the one my parents had built at the bottom of the garden, between the azalea bushes and the green circle in the grass we called the fairy ring, that had been sold thirty years ago.

    I slowed the car as I saw the new house. It would always be the new house in my head. I pulled up into the driveway, observing the way they had built out on the mid-seventies architecture. I had forgotten that the bricks of the house were chocolate-brown. The new people had made my mother’s tiny balcony into a two-story sunroom. I stared at the house, remembering less than I had expected about my teenage years: no good times, no bad times. I’d lived in that place, for a while, as a teenager. It didn’t seem to be any part of who I was now.

    I backed the car out of their driveway.

    It was time, I knew, to drive to my sister’s bustling, cheerful house, all tidied and stiff for the day. I would talk to people whose existence I had forgotten years before and they would ask me about my marriage (failed a decade ago, a relationship that had slowly frayed until eventually, as they always seem to, it broke) and whether I was seeing anyone (I wasn’t; I was not even sure that I could, not yet) and they would ask about my children (all grown up, they have their own lives, they wish they could be here today), work (doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all). We would talk about the departed; we would remember the dead.

    The little country lane of my childhood had become a black tarmac road that served as a buffer between two sprawling housing estates. I drove further down it, away from the town, which was not the way I should have been traveling, and it felt good.

    The slick black road became narrower, windier, became the single-lane track I remembered from my childhood, became packed earth and knobbly, bone-like flints.

    Soon I was driving, slowly, bumpily, down a narrow lane with brambles and briar roses on each side, wherever the edge was not a stand of hazels or a wild hedgerow. It felt like I had driven back in time. That lane was how I remembered it, when nothing else was.

    I drove past Caraway Farm. I remembered being just-sixteen, and kissing red-cheeked, fair-haired Callie Anders, who lived there, and whose family would soon move to the Shetlands, and I would never kiss her or see her again. Then nothing but fields on either side of the road, for almost a mile: a tangle of meadows. Slowly the lane became a track. It was reaching its end.

    I remembered it before I turned the corner and saw it, in all its dilapidated red-brick glory: the Hempstocks’ farmhouse.

    It took me by surprise, although that was where the lane had always ended. I could have gone no further. I parked the car at the side of the farmyard. I had no plan. I wondered whether, after all these years, there was anyone still living there, or, more precisely, if the Hempstocks were still living there. It seemed unlikely, but then, from what little I remembered, they had been unlikely people.

    The stench of cow muck struck me as I got out of the car, and I walked, gingerly, across the small yard to the front door. I looked for a doorbell, in vain, and then I knocked. The door had not been latched properly, and it swung gently open as I rapped it with my knuckles.

    I had been here, hadn’t I, a long time ago? I was sure I had. Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good. I stood in the hallway and called, Hello? Is there anybody here?

    I heard nothing. I smelled bread-baking and wax furniture polish and old wood. My eyes were slow to adjust to the darkness: I peered into it, was getting ready to turn and leave when an elderly woman came out of the dim hallway holding a white duster. She wore her gray hair long.

    I said, Mrs. Hempstock?

    She tipped her head to one side, looked at me. "Yes. I do know you, young man, she said. I am not a young man. Not any longer. I know you, but things get messy when you get to my age. Who are you, exactly?"

    I think I must have been about seven, maybe eight, the last time I was here.

    She smiled then. You were Lettie’s friend? From the top of the lane?

    You gave me milk. It was warm, from the cows. And then I realized how many years had gone by, and I said, No, you didn’t do that, that must have been your mother who gave me the milk. I’m sorry. As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time. I remembered Mrs. Hempstock, Lettie’s mother, as a stout woman. This woman was stick-thin, and she looked delicate. She looked like her mother, like the woman I had known as Old Mrs. Hempstock.

    Sometimes when I look in the mirror I see my father’s face, not my own, and I remember the way he would smile at himself, in mirrors, before he went out. Looking good, he’d say to his reflection, approvingly. Looking good.

    Are you here to see Lettie? Mrs. Hempstock asked.

    Is she here? The idea surprised me. She had gone somewhere, hadn’t she? America?

    The old woman shook her head. I was just about to put the kettle on. Do you fancy a spot of tea?

    I hesitated. Then I said that, if she didn’t mind, I’d like it if she could point me toward the duck pond first.

    Duck pond?

    I knew Lettie had had a funny name for it. I remembered that. She called it the sea. Something like that.

    The old woman put the cloth down on the dresser. Can’t drink the water from the sea, can you? Too salty. Like drinking life’s blood. Do you remember the way? You can get to it around the side of the house. Just follow the path.

    If you’d asked me an hour before, I would have said no, I did not remember the way. I do not even think I would have remembered Lettie Hempstock’s name. But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me. Had you told me that I was seven again, I might have half-believed you, for a moment.

    Thank you.

    I walked into the farmyard. I went past the chicken coop, past the old barn and along the edge of the field, remembering where I was, and what was coming next, and exulting in the knowledge. Hazels lined the side of the meadow. I picked a handful of the green nuts, put them in my pocket.

    The pond is next, I thought. I just have to go around this shed, and I’ll see it.

    I saw it and felt oddly proud of myself, as if that one act of memory had blown away some of the cobwebs of the day.

    The pond was smaller than I remembered. There was a little wooden shed on the far side, and, by the path, an ancient, heavy, wood-and-metal bench. The peeling wooden slats had been painted green a few years ago. I sat on the bench, and stared at the reflection of the sky in the water, at the scum of duckweed at the edges, and the half-dozen lily pads. Every now and again, I tossed a hazelnut into the middle of the pond, the pond that Lettie Hempstock had called . . .

    It wasn’t the sea, was it?

    She would be older than I am now, Lettie Hempstock. She was only a handful of years older than I was back then, for all her funny talk. She was eleven. I was . . . what was I? It was after the bad birthday party. I knew that. So I would have been seven.

    I wondered if we had ever fallen in the water. Had I pushed her into the duck pond, that strange girl who lived in the farm at the very bottom of the lane? I remembered her being in the water. Perhaps she had pushed me in too.

    Where did she go? America? No, Australia. That was it. Somewhere a long way away.

    And it wasn’t the sea. It was the ocean.

    Lettie Hempstock’s ocean.

    I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.

    I.

    Nobody came to my seventh birthday party.

    There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.

    When it became obvious that nobody was coming, my mother lit the seven candles on the cake, and I blew them out. I ate a slice of the cake, as did my little sister and one of her friends (both of them attending the party as observers, not participants) before they fled, giggling, to the garden.

    Party games had been prepared by my mother but, because nobody was there, not even my sister, none of the party games were played, and I unwrapped the newspaper around the pass-the-parcel gift myself, revealing a blue plastic Batman figure. I was sad that nobody had come to my party, but happy that I had a Batman figure, and there was a birthday present waiting to be read, a boxed set of the Narnia books, which I took upstairs. I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories.

    I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.

    My parents had also given me a Best of Gilbert and Sullivan LP, to add to the two that I already had. I had loved Gilbert and Sullivan since I was three, when my father’s youngest sister, my aunt, took me to see Iolanthe, a play filled with lords and fairies. I found the existence and nature of the fairies easier to understand than that of the lords. My aunt had died soon after, of pneumonia, in the hospital.

    That evening my father arrived home from work and he brought a cardboard box with him. In the cardboard box was a soft-haired black kitten of uncertain gender, whom I immediately named Fluffy, and which I loved utterly and wholeheartedly.

    Fluffy slept on my bed at night. I talked to it, sometimes, when my little sister was not around, half-expecting it to answer in a human tongue. It never did. I did not mind. The kitten was affectionate and interested and a good companion for someone whose seventh birthday party had consisted of a table with iced biscuits and a blancmange and cake and fifteen empty folding chairs.

    I do not remember ever asking any of the other children in my class at school why they had not come to my party. I did not need to ask them. They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.

    I made friends slowly, when I made them.

    I had books, and now I had my kitten. We would be like Dick Whittington and his cat, I knew, or, if Fluffy proved particularly intelligent, we would be the miller’s son and Puss-in-Boots. The kitten slept on my pillow, and it even waited for me to come home from school, sitting on the driveway in front of my house, by the fence, until, a month later, it was run over by the taxi that brought the opal miner to stay at my house.

    I was not there when it happened.

    I got home from school that day, and my kitten was not waiting to meet me. In the kitchen was a tall, rangy man with tanned skin and a checked shirt. He was drinking coffee at the kitchen table, I could smell it. In those days all coffee was instant coffee, a bitter dark brown powder that came out of a jar.

    I’m afraid I had a little accident arriving here, he told me, cheerfully. But not to worry. His accent was clipped, unfamiliar: it was the first South African accent I had heard.

    He, too, had a cardboard box on the table in front of him.

    The black kitten, was he yours? he asked.

    It’s called Fluffy, I said.

    Yeah. Like I said. Accident coming here. Not to worry. Disposed of the corpse. Don’t have to trouble yourself. Dealt with the matter. Open the box.

    What?

    He pointed to the box. Open it, he said.

    The opal miner was a tall man. He wore jeans and checked shirts every time I saw him, except the last. He had a thick chain of pale gold around his neck. That was gone the last time I saw him, too.

    I did not want to open his box. I wanted to go off on my own. I wanted to cry for my kitten, but I could not do that if anyone else was there and watching me. I wanted to mourn. I wanted to bury my friend at the bottom of the garden, past the green-grass fairy ring, into the rhododendron bush cave, back past the heap of grass cuttings, where nobody ever went but me.

    The box moved.

    Bought it for you, said the man. Always pay my debts.

    I reached out, lifted the top flap of the box, wondering if this was a joke, if my kitten would be in there. Instead a ginger face stared up at me truculently.

    The opal miner took the cat out of the box.

    He was a huge, ginger-striped tomcat, missing half an ear. He glared at me angrily. This cat had not liked being put in a box. He was not used to boxes. I reached out to stroke his head, feeling unfaithful to the memory of my kitten, but he pulled back so I could not touch him, and he hissed at me, then stalked off to a far corner of the room, where he sat and looked and hated.

    There you go. Cat for a cat, said the opal miner, and he ruffled my hair with his leathery hand. Then he went out into the hall, leaving me in the kitchen with the cat that was not my

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