Once Upon a Wardrobe
Patti Callahan
Dedication
With the greatest love
for
Bridgette Kea Rock
No matter your age, may you never, ever grow too old for fairy tales.
Mhamó
Epigraph
Sometimes fairy stories may say best what’s to be said.
C. S. Lewis
One
George Meets a Lion
December 1950
Worcestershire, England
George Henry Devonshire is only eight years old and he already knows the truth. They don’t have to tell him: the heart he was born with isn’t strong enough, and they’ve done all they can. And by they, he means the doctors and nurses, his parents, and his older sister, Megs. If they could save him, if they could give their own life for him, they would. He knows that too. But they can’t.
The December snow outside his bedroom window piles up like wave upon wave of white. George sits up in bed, propped against the forever-plumped-by-his-mum pillows. Next to him is a dark oak table with pill bottles and a glass of water and a gone-cold cup of tea that his mum left behind. Among all of that clutter is a book, just published, called The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. It has a lion on the cover, and George often looks to this lion as if it might hold the key to all he desires to know.
There is so very much he wants to know.
George once thought that if he lived long enough to be a grown-up, he’d have all the answers. Now he believes adults don’t know what’s what any more than he does.
But the man who wrote this book—this storybook that transports George out of his bedroom and into Narnia—this man knows something. What that something might be is a mystery.
“Long ago and far away” often begins the best stories, but this author began his book with just four names—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—and a magic wardrobe.
George is waiting for his Megs to come home for the weekend from university so he can tell her about this remarkable book, about this white land where it is always winter but never Christmas, where animals can talk and the back of a wardrobe opens to another world. He loves Megs more than all the words he has to describe the feeling.
Across George’s room is his own ordinary wooden wardrobe. He slides from the bedcovers and slips his feet into his fuzzy lamb’s-wool slippers. His breath catches as it always does when he jolts the weak muscle that is his heart. He waits as his heartbeat catches up to his plan and then shuffles across the floor. He places both hands on the thick handles and opens the heavy doors.
There isn’t a looking glass on the outside of this wardrobe like there is in the book, just carvings of trees and birds. The doors creak and George spies his few pieces of clothing hanging there. (A boy who lives mostly in bed doesn’t need very many shirts and pants.) He sees the family’s wool coats and clothes that don’t fit into his parents’ overstuffed closet. He knows there is no secret back to this wardrobe, and he can’t walk through it to find a snowy forest and a lamppost and a faun that will take him on a great adventure.
What he can do, is sit inside this space and close his eyes and take himself to that imaginary world, where he can have his own adventures, where he can escape the very real world, where his body won’t get old, and where his mum doesn’t cry in the kitchen. She thinks he can’t hear her, but he can.
He pushes aside the coats and shirts and dresses, then slips inside. He’s a small boy, not as big as an eight-year-old boy should be, but big enough to need to fold his legs up to his chest as he scoots to the very back of the wardrobe, never pulling the door all the way shut, just as Lucy in the book has taught him one should never close a wardrobe door while inside.
Darkness envelops him, and it feels quite fine to be surrounded by the aroma of his mum’s rose perfume, along with mothballs (just as in the book) and a faint woody scent hinting of a forest. As he leans into it, he feels the solid back of the wardrobe and lets out a long breath. He closes his eyes and conjures the image of a talking beaver inviting him for tea in a dam made of sticks.
George smiles.
He isn’t as scared as his family thinks he is. Nothing hurts, and he doesn’t expect it to hurt even when his heart stops beating. He’s just tired, and sleep isn’t so bad.
He’s read enough books (for what else is there to do in bed?) to know Narnia isn’t real, or not real in the way that grown-ups call real. (But then, what do they know?) The professor who wrote about this magical place, however, is real, and he lives only a train ride away in Oxford, where Megs attends school. This man would know the answers to George’s questions.
Where did this land of the lion, a white witch, and fauns and beavers and castles come from?
How did Aslan—as true as any living thing the boy has ever known—come to bound onto the pages of a book?
George feels sleep ease up on him as quiet as a lion on the prowl, and he tumbles into it, his hands wrapped around a mane of fur (really a rabbit coat of his mum’s). The ice-cold world of a snowy forest surrounds him in a story written behind his eyelids, sketched onto his mind, emblazoned on his dreams.
Two
Megs Falls into a Story
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 gleaming spires where this story and 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.