The Princess has been reading the Narnia books. The other night, I begged her to let me read the first chapter of “The Silver Chair” aloud to her. She very rarely lets me read to her these days as it is, of course, much slower than reading to oneself. The story begins in “our world” in a nasty boarding school. “Will they go to Narnia?” she asked me anxiously. “Yes, I imagine they will,” I say. They do. She interrupts me again, bouncing up and down on the bed in excitement “Do they meet Aslan, do they?” “I think they do,” I say. It was almost like reading the books yourself for the first time but with the added thrill of seeing something you love prove a delight to someone you love.
I told this to a woman at work the other day and she said to me: “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say something nice about having children.” I was somewhat abashed and I record it here in an attempt to balance the books.
It’s either C.S. Lewis or Enid Blyton’s fault that she said to me “Mummy, haven’t these hols gone on for ages?” Hols, hols? “Was it for this the wild geese spread/The grey wing upon every tide?”
