Childhood Remembered: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I remember my own childhood vividly...I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them.” – Maurice Sendak, in conversation with Art Spiegelman, The New Yorker, September 27, 1993

I have begun just as Neil Gaiman did, with this quote from Maurice Sendak, because it serves the same purpose. It reminds us of what it felt like to be a child. What it actually felt like, unvarnished by the comforting fuzz of nostalgia and half-remembered memories.

It’s important to remember because The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a story about that childhood, real childhood, told by an adult who never quite forgot his own, at least, not completely.

It begins with the death of an opal miner, the one living in the unnamed protagonist's bedroom at the top of the stairs, the one with the tiny yellow washbasin that was just the right size. He commit suicide.

“Do you think he killed himself,” the child asks.

“Yes,” Lettie Hempstock, the 11-year-old girl who lives on the farm at the end of the lane, replies. “Do you like milk? Gran’s milking Bessie now.”

And that’s the last of it. It’s not the last of the opal miner, but it’s the last we hear of his death. The child has more important concerns – his breakfast of burnt toast replaced by blackberry-stained porridge, thick with cream, grandmotherly affection and the wonder of warm milk straight from the cow.

Of course, this wouldn’t be Gaiman if things didn’t start to get a little strange. Like all of his work, most notably 2001's American Gods and 2005's Anansi Boys, The Ocean at the End of the Lane has the flavor of myth. To paraphrase the book itself, it’s not an adult story and it’s not a child’s story. It’s better than that. It simply is.

And maybe that’s why it feels so real, why it rings with the truth of childhood, even if there is no childhood where monsters can attack doorways to other dimensions directly to your heart, or where hunger birds can devour the very fabric of this reality. The child does not question what he sees. It simply is to him, becomes part of his reality just as much as shepherd’s pie in the Hempstock’s kitchen and the tiny washbasin in his bedroom.

But even he recognizes the strangeness of it all. And he knows with the certainty of childhood that this was a problem grown-ups had no hope of solving.

“I knew enough about adults to know that if I did tell what had happened, I would not believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe me when I told the truth anyway. Why would they believe me about something so unlikely?”

And the truth of the matter is, they wouldn’t. No adult in the world would believe in portals and ancient, terrifying magic and an ocean that shrinks itself down to fit in a pond at the end of an unassuming flinty road in Sussex, England.

Not even the child himself believes what happens to him after he grows up. He doesn’t even remember what really happened, not until he sits down by Lettie Hempstock’s ocean and lets the magic of that place fill him again.

And although we will never have the chance to dip our feet into Lettie Hempstock’s ocean to feel the magic of that place, at least we have something close. We have Neil Gaiman, whose ocean of words helps us remember what it felt like to be a child, even if it’s just for a moment.