“Happy Christmas,” Dad and I call out as we reach George’s sunlit room, where Mum is waiting.
“Happy Christmas,” he says, and he’s smiling, so pure, so bright. Then he holds up my notebook, which I’d left at his bedside table, and I see the list I’d made in the pub. “What’s this?” he asks.
“Oh.” I reach his side and kiss his cheek. “I was . . . I was trying to make a list to show where I thought each thing in the story came from . . . and . . .”
“Like a math diagram?”
I feel stupid. I should never have tried it.
“How did that work out?” he asks with a teasing voice.
“It didn’t, really,” I say. Our gazes meet and we laugh.
Dad perches on the end of the bed, picking up George’s sketchbook.
“These drawings are jolly marvelous.” Dad flips through the pages, and Mum and I walk behind him, peering over his shoulder to watch the sketches go by. Each page is a scene from Mr. Lewis’s life, and each page has a colored lion in the background: fierce, tender, curious, or protective. George has captured all of them in the expressions and stance of his lion.
“George,” Dad says, “it looks like you think the lion followed the author around for all of his life.”
George nods. “I think the lion follows all of us around. We just have to look for him.”
I scoot George over, wrapping my arm around his shoulder as I sit on the bed. “Well, how do we see him?” I ask.
George looks at me, then at Mum and Dad. He opens his hand and then rests his palm over his heart, leaving it there on his chest as his only answer.
After that, we’re all silent for a time.
“Dad,” George finally speaks, “I heard you in the kitchen. Please don’t be so hard on Megs. She did as I asked. There is no real answer. I never thought there was.”
“I maintain that there is an answer,” I say. “Or many answers.”
“And what are they?” Mum asks, either skeptical or curious, I can’t tell.
George looks to me and nods. He now trusts me to answer, and I want to keep every ounce of that trust.
“Maybe . . . maybe Narnia also began when Mr. Lewis sat quietly and paid attention to his heart’s voice. Maybe we are each and every one of us born with our own stories, and we must decide how to tell those stories with our own life, or in a book.” I stop and clear my mind, my heart, and my eyes. “Or . . . could it be that all our stories come from one larger story? Maybe Narnia also began before Mr. Lewis was even born in Belfast, Ireland. Maybe . . . Mr. Lewis’s tale already existed in the bright light where every story, legend, and myth is born.”
“Yes, Megs,” George says so quietly that Mum leans closer. George’s eyes alight not on any of us but on the wardrobe across the room. “Yes. The bright lamppost light where all stories begin and end.”
The End as The Beginning
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.”