The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

my father. “An ocean is much bigger than the sea. Why?”
    “Just thinking,” I said. “Could you have an ocean that was as small as a pond?”
    “No,” said my father. “Ponds are pond-sized, lakes are lake-sized. Seas are seas and oceans are oceans. Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic. I think that’s all of the oceans there are.”
    My father went up to his bedroom, to talk to my mum and to be on the phone up there. I dropped the silver sixpence into my piggy bank. It was the kind of china piggy bank from which nothing could be removed. One day, when it could hold no more coins, I would be allowed to break it, but it was far from full.

III.
    I never saw the white Mini again. Two days later, on Monday, my father took delivery of a black Rover, with cracked red leather seats. It was a bigger car than the Mini had been, but not as comfortable. The smell of old cigars permeated the leather upholstery, and long drives in the back of the Rover always left us feeling car-sick.
    The black Rover was not the only thing to arrive on Monday morning. I also received a letter.
    I was seven years old, and I never got letters. I got cards, on my birthday, from my grandparents, and from Ellen Henderson, my mother’s friend whom I did not know. On my birthday Ellen Henderson, who lived in a camper van, would send me a handkerchief. I did not get letters. Even so, I would check the post every day to see if there was anything for me.
    And, that morning, there was.
    I opened it, did not understand what I was looking at, and took it to my mother.
    “You’ve won the Premium Bonds,” she said.
    “What does that mean?”
    “When you were born—when all of her grandchildren were born—your grandma bought you a Premium Bond. And when the number gets chosen you can win thousands of pounds.”
    “Did I win thousands of pounds?”
    “No.” She looked at the slip of paper. “You’ve won twenty-five pounds.”
    I was sad not to have won thousands of pounds (I already knew what I would buy with it. I would buy a place to go and be alone, like a Batcave, with a hidden entrance), but I was delighted to be in possession of a fortune beyond my previous imaginings. Twenty-five pounds. I could buy four little blackjack or fruit salad sweets for a penny: they were a farthing each, although there were no more farthings. Twenty-five pounds, at 240 pennies to the pound and four sweets to the penny, was… more sweets than I could easily imagine.
    “I’ll put it in your post office account,” said my mother, crushing my dreams.
    I did not have any more sweets than I had had that morning. Even so, I was rich. Twenty-five pounds richer than I had been moments before. I had never won anything, ever.
    I made her show me the piece of paper with my name on it again, before she put it into her handbag.
    That was Monday morning. In the afternoon the ancient Mr. Wollery, who came in on Monday and Thursday afternoons to do some gardening (Mrs. Wollery, his equally ancient wife, who wore galoshes, huge semi-transparent overshoes, would come in on Wednesday afternoons and clean), was digging in the vegetable garden and dug up a bottle filled with pennies and halfpennies and threepenny bits and even farthings. None of the coins was dated later than 1937, and I spent the afternoon polishing them with brown sauce and vinegar, to make them shine.
    My mother put the bottle of old coins on the mantelpiece of the dining room, and said that she expected that a coin collector might pay several pounds for them.
    I went to bed that night happy and excited. I was rich. Buried treasure had been discovered. The world was a good place.
    I don’t remember how the dreams started. But that’s the way of dreams, isn’t it? I know that I was in school, and having a bad day, hiding from the kinds of kids who hit me and called me names, but they found me anyway, deep in the rhododendron thicket behind the school, and I knew it must be a dream (but in the dream I didn’t know this, it was real and it was true) because my grandfather was with them, and his friends, old men with gray skin and hacking coughs. They held sharp pencils, the kind that drew blood when you were jabbed with them. I ran from them, but they were faster than I was, the old men and the big boys, and, in the boys’ toilets, where I had hidden in a cubicle, they caught up with me. They held me down, forced my mouth wide open.
    My grandfather (but it was not my grandfather: it was really a