The One Without the Wardrobe

Stop trying to pretend, thought Lena Peterson, stop even trying to pretend to pretend! Things like that might have been fine when you were seven or eight, but now you’re ten going on eleven, and it’s not the same at all! 

     It wasn’t even as if she had been sent to stay with her Grandfather – Grandpa Godfrey, as she called him – because of the war. The war had been over for ten years! No, she hadn’t been evacuated for her own safety, but sent to the sanctuary of Grandpa Godfrey’s house in the country because her mum and dad were falling out all the time, and they needn’t think she was fooled if they shut up and pasted on false smiles the minute she came into the room. They knew that perfectly well! 

     And she didn’t have any brothers and sisters to keep her company. No, it was NOTHING like her favourite book (though sometimes, feeling vaguely guilty, she tried to persuade people she had grown out of it!) The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Even if she did have the same initials as Lucy Pevensie, the first of the children to go into Narnia.

     For a few minutes, well, not much more than a few seconds, really, Lena had felt her heart jump in joy and anticipation when she saw that on the second floor of Grandpa Godfrey’s house, in a room that wasn’t quite empty otherwise, but looked as if it hadn’t been used for years, there was a large, carved wardrobe. 

     Of course I don’t really believe in this, thought Lena, and I’m only doing it to finally make myself stop being so silly. But she still felt a pang of disappointment and disillusionment as she stretched her hands past rusty coathangers and clothes that weren’t exactly mouldy, but felt damp and smelled unpleasant, and it was hard to imagine anyone wearing, and touched a solid, unyielding wooden back. A back that felt grainy and unpleasant, or perhaps it only felt unpleasant because of what it wasn’t, not because of what it was.

     I suppose I should look at my schoolbooks, thought Lena. The summer holidays didn’t start for another 2 weeks yet, and she had promised that she would devote at least some of her time to studying. It wasn’t necessarily a hardship. But she knew perfectly well that she was devoting a disproportionate amount of her time to English and History instead of Maths and Geography! She liked the word disproportionate. Her English teacher believed in expanding the pupils’ vocabulary, and this word was, it seemed to Lena, rather useful. I won’t be disproportionate about this, she thought. 

     She liked Grandpa Godfrey, who was kind-hearted and had magnificent whiskers, but there was still something distant and distracted about him. But he wasn’t a professor like the children’s guardian in the book. She had been disappointed about that, too. He was a bank manager. Or rather he had been. He was retired now, but still seemed to be quite preoccupied with bank business. I expect that’s why Daddy is one, too, she thought. 

     She got on quite well with his housekeeper, Mrs Mulligan. Grandpa Godfrey called her “Mully”, and she was told she could do the same, but somehow it seemed disrespectful. There was nothing rosy-cheeked or floury-handed about Mrs Mulligan. Though she wasn’t one to offer confidences, and Lena was timid about hinting that she might like them, she had told Lena that she used to be a secretary.

     Grandpa Godfrey’s house might not be a sanctuary, but even he referred to Mrs Mulligan’s room as her “sanctum”. It wasn’t that nobody else was allowed entrance, but you most certainly didn’t just wander in and out.

     One day, when Grandpa Godfrey had asked her to run along to Mrs Mulligan with a query about when the electrician was coming, she noticed that the room was by no means as tidy as usual. “You’ll have to excuse this, Lena,” said Mrs Mulligan, who was such a neat and well-organised person that she even felt it was only right to apologise to a child about such matters. Lena almost said “It’s much tidier than my room is!” then hurriedly thought better of it and bit her tongue. 

     “I’ve finally got round to giving this room a bit of a tidy-up,” she said. “Long overdue. No point to hanging onto things when you don’t use them.”

     “I s’pose not,” agreed Lena, though she wasn’t sure if she agreed at all! Mrs Mulligan noticed that Lena’s eyes had been drawn to something. “My first typewriter!” said Mrs Mulligan. Lena realised with a start that though of course she knew what a typewriter was, she couldn’t recall ever actually having seen one. There was something almost magical about it – not as magical as a wardrobe that let you into a magic land, of course, but still intriguing, with those letters on little rounded platforms at the end of long metal rods, and that lever that could make the carriage move – and that little ribbon that helped turn thoughts into printed words. “It would be a shame to part with that,” she said, suddenly bold. “I – bet it has memories for you!”

     “You can be quite a curious child,” said Mrs Mulligan – and Lena knew that the word curious didn’t only mean “nosey” though perhaps she was being that, as well! Anyway, Mrs Mulligan didn’t sound annoyed. “If you like it so much, you can have it!” Somehow, if she’d said “You can play with it,” then everything would have been ruined and Lena would have lost interest,

     “It’s quite heavy,” said Mrs Mulligan. “Are you sure you can carry it?”

     “I’m sure, thank you,” Lena replied, though she was glad that she wouldn’t have to carry it up or down any stairs. Only at the last minute did she remember Grandpa Godfrey’s enquiry about the electrician!

     Once that duty was done she carefully carried it to her bedroom. It was like two rooms really – a bedroom and a little study all in one. Much bigger than her bedroom at home. But it was best not to think about “at home”. 

     Lena salved her conscience by reading a couple of chapters of Geography for Top Juniors though she ruefully thought it was as well that nobody would be asking her any questions on it! She was impatient to try out the typewriter. I need paper, she thought. She knew that nearly all letters that were sent on a typewriter were the same size, and she didn’t have any paper of that size. But she did have a sketchbook, and as she wasn’t much good at drawing, there was no shortage of blank pages! She carefully cut them to what she thought was about the right size, and after a couple of seconds, worked out how to get them into the typewriter. 

     She was quite mystified by the way the letters were laid out. Why on earth weren’t they in alphabetical order? That didn’t make any sense at all, and she wondered if it was only because it was an old typewriter. But gradually she decided that perhaps it did make sense after all. You hardly used a “Q” or a “Z” did you, so perhaps it wasn’t so crazy that they were in out of the way places, and letters you did use a lot were easier to get at. Making lots of errors and worrying about wasting her paper, she typed out her name Lena Margaret Peterson and then a few of her favourite words, her “vocabulary” words.

     Mrs Mulligan dropped in to see how she was doing, and was quite impressed. Lena was fairly sure it was genuine and not condescending. “Well, we might make a secretary of you yet,” she said, with a smile. “These might interest you!” She handed over some old typing manuals she’d had when she was at secretarial college, and Lena told herself it was just being mean to think that she could see why she didn’t use her proper first name when it was Gertrude. But her surname was still Mulligan, even though she called herself Mrs, which was a bit odd. She took Lena’s hands and placed them on what she called the home keys telling her it was easier to type with them in that position, and that she ought to try to learn how to touch-type. “We had to, at the college,” she said, “They put hoods over our keyboards! Drove us mad, too, but it’s still a useful skill to have.”

     Lena had mixed feelings about that. She agreed with Mrs Mulligan that it might be a useful skill to have, but it was hard enough typing when she could see the keys! She decided on a compromise. She tried to make a kind of covering for the typewriter keys with one of her cardigans, but it never quite worked and kept slipping off and getting in the way. In the end she settled for typing with her eyes closed sometimes and found that she was starting to be able to touch-type anyway. Well, a bit! She never did quite master all the numbers and punctuation marks. Mrs Mulligan confessed that she never felt entirely confident with them either, but was pleased that Lena had stuck to her advice on using the home keys, and didn’t jab at they keyboard with random fingers the way some folk did, “My boss, Mr Norton included,” she said, “Though funnily enough he could still get things done quickly and pretty accurately!”

     Lena decided she was confident enough in her skills to send her parents a typewritten letter!

“Dear Mummy and Daddy

I hope you are both well as I am. I expect you will be surprised to see this letter! You remember I told you about Mrs Mulligan the housekeeper who is very nice? Well she used to be a secretary and has let me have this? I love typing and am getting good at it! I want to be a secretary when I am grown-up like she was before she was a housekeeper.

     It is very warm and I have not had to put on a cardigan for days. Grandpa Godfrey sends his love.

     As do I,

     Your daughter Lena”

Then she decided that though she was very proud of the letter and didn’t seem to have made a single mistake, the end of it looked wrong. She got out her pen, and underneath, she wrote :

     Lots of Love Lena

She would have liked to put it in a typewritten envelope too, but her parents had kindly provided her with addressed envelopes with stamps on. She was quite happy about not having to pay for the stamps, either from her own pocket money or asking Grandpa Godfrey, but had been a bit insulted to be treated like a baby who couldn’t address her own envelopes!

     The reply came within a couple of days, and though it was signed Mummy and Daddy she knew that her mother had written it, and not just because she recognised her handwriting. Her mother was glad that she was doing well and that Mrs Mulligan was such an agreeable person. Lena had to smile at that. Her mother was one of those people who thought the word “nice” was to be avoided at all costs, even though that same English teacher who believed in her pupils extending their vocabulary said that though, like every word, using it too much wasn’t a good idea, there was absolutely no need to force yourself to say “agreeable” or “pleasant” or “amiable” just to prove a point! As for being a secretary, well, they hoped she would be a teacher, but there were years and years to decide that yet. She couldn’t help getting the impression that her mother wasn’t at all keen on secretaries ….

     She was so taken up with her new hobby that she had almost forgotten about her notions of finding somewhere like Narnia in Grandpa Godfrey’s house. She had accepted that the wardrobe in the nearly empty room was just somewhere where old clothes were kept, and that was that. But she couldn’t help being fascinated by the little china figures in the glass-fronted cabinets in the parlour. Mrs Mulligan had admitted that she’d been a bit worried for their fate, but told Lena that she was relieved to find that she wasn’t a child who always had to be told not to touch. There were princesses and Spanish ladies, and little whimsical (another of her “vocabulary” words!) fairies and dainty kittens. Though Lena loved cats, she wasn’t quite sure about them having flowers on their coats! They were interspersed with houses and baskets of flowers, but sometimes the baskets of flowers were bigger than the houses.

     In one of her moments of confiding in Lena – and they seemed to be increasing – Mrs Mulligan said, and it was no great surprise, “It wasn’t your grandpa who collected them. It was your Grandma Hannah.” Lena knew that Grandma Hannah had passed away before she was born. She had seen a photo of her, of course – a sweet-faced woman, but with a certain strength there, too. Her clothes looked old-fashioned now, of course, but Lena suspected that even in her lifetime she had never been that bothered about whether what she wore was fashionable or not. 

     That night Lena had a dream where the porcelain figures in the glass-fronted cabinet came to life. It wasn’t a nightmare, nothing like that. But nor was it some babyish fairytale. It was as if they were – well, going about their business the way that everyone else did, but in a world where flower baskets could be taller than houses and where if they fell down they wouldn’t just graze their knees but might be shattered to pieces. Come to think of it, there was something a bit like a nightmare about that. 

     Lena was the kind of child who was quite interested by her dreams, but didn’t dwell on them, and prided herself on the fact that she had never once written a story which ended with the words “Then they woke up and discovered that it had all been a dream”. But somehow this was different. She wanted to get it out of her mind, and yet at the same time she didn’t. 

     She decided to practise her typing. She was sure she hadn’t left paper in the typewriter overnight, Mrs Mulligan had impressed on her that that was not a good thing to do, though she could never quite work out why. Maybe because it might get dusty or because it represented a job half done, and Mrs Mulligan had plenty to say about dust and jobs half done. Still, anyone could be remiss. As if to make up for her earlier fault, she was about to carefully remove the sheet with the rollers, rather than rip it out, but she stopped in her tracks. The page was not blank, nor did it contain any of the typing exercises she had been doing. There was a story on it, or the beginning of one, and it was all about Princess Priora and Donna Carmen, who lived in a world where they picked giant flowers that somehow fit perfectly into their tiny little homes. Sometimes they spoke longingly of the world that they called Beyondglass, but mainly they were very happy. They played gently and carefully with their kittens, who sometimes shook themselves and swirled in circles the way that kittens do, and scattered flowers onto the glass that shone more like silver when the sun came through the window. There was a wise woman who told them that there was more glass beyond the glass, but did it in a gentle and poetic way, and though sometimes the people sighed, nobody was scared. There were swings that moved, held by fragile-looking metal chains, but the ladies seemed to play on them more than the children. 

     Lena wondered if she had walked in her sleep somehow, though so far as she knew she never had, but that would only explain the tiniest part of it. She was someone who always tended to skip and to get ahead of herself when she was reading, and she did now. “The wise woman looked directly into the eyes of the large person who would still have been considered little in her own world. “It’s not so often this happens,” she said, in a quiet, calm voice, “But we have nothing to fear and neither do you. But I will tell you this, Lena. Only those who are born with the gift to tell tales and to believe in what not everyone sees is granted a glance into our world. So make good use of that gift, and remember I will always be watching over your and encouraging you.” And she smiled then, a sweet smile. “How do you know my name?” the child asked. “I think you know the answer to that,” the Wise Woman replied. “And I think you know mine, too.” “

     And Lena did, of course. Her name was Hannah.