Alice's Journey Home by Stephanie Schofield
“She’s a daydreamer,” her teacher had told her parents, “always staring out of the window, head in the clouds.” But Alice didn’t see why a Fairy Princess needed to know the capital city of France or what 4 times 7 was. The ‘real’ world was drab and grey; ‘real’ life like a spoon stirring treacle. Fairyland was overflowing with colour and light. Fairies danced round every toadstool, nymphs and dryads played by the brook, sylphs flitted through the air and climbed cobweb ladders to the cloud lands, whilst high on Hawthorn Hill, Alice found exotic Arabian djinn who could grant her wishes. Fairyland could be dangerous, she knew that. She knew to look out for the hags and witches who lived in tangled briars deep in the wood, knew to cast circles of enchantment round her palace to keep out all enemies.
“She’ll grow out of it soon.” She heard her parents explain, indulgently at first, then as the years passed, with growing exasperation.
But as Alice grew up, Fairyland grew with her. Its little dramas became vast sagas, populated by characters far more ‘real’ than her dull schoolmates. Until one day it was all suddenly over.
She had to get married. Everyone did, and Alice had never been a rebel. She should have been happy. Her new husband was considered a good catch. Ten years older than her, with a good job in a bank, he was solid and reliable, and when he asked Alice’s father for her hand in marriage, her parents were delighted. But he wasn’t her Fairy Prince, and as Alice stood at the altar in front of a sea of hazy faces, she realized with an awful certainty that the gates of Fairyland were clanging shut behind her.
Life rolled past in great waves of tedium. Housekeeping, cooking, socializing; dutifully she carried out the required tasks. She blocked out all thoughts of Fairyland, concentrating instead on her shiny new town house, and though at first she wept inside for the poor wilting flowers that struggled to grow in the nearby park, the shiny, white smile never left her face. And gradually, she stopped noticing the flowers, stopped seeing the beauty in a spider’s web and the magic in a bumble bee’s flight. Children came as they should – two girls and and a boy, all as solid and reliable as their father. Alice was lucky, she knew that. She had a big, smart house, a dependable husband, no money worries and perfect, well-behaved, polite children. But somewhere, deep inside, something vital was missing, something that Alice could never quite put her finger on.
Then one day her husband died. A day like any other, except that she woke up married and went to bed a widow. Her eldest daughter had immediately taken charge, moving Alice into a granny flat.
“She’ll never cope on her own.”
“He made all the decisions, paid the bills.”
“She’ll be devastated.”
But she wasn’t. She felt nothing. At the funeral she had pricked her thumb with the pin of her brooch. She had felt that, but inside, where she knew she should be mourning, she was numb. Fifty years had gone by. The world around her had changed beyond recognition, but none of it touched Alice. The Fairy Princess slept on inside her impregnable tower.
Until one cold winter’s day, just after Christmas, her 5-year-old granddaughter came to visit. She hadn’t wanted to come and had arrived grumbling and sulky that morning.
“Go and talk to Grandma, there’s a good girl. We’ve got grown-up things to talk about,” her father sounded weary.
Grown-up things. Alice was never included in these “grown-up-discussions” either.
“I didn’t want to come here.” The little girl scowled at her grandmother.
Alice looked round at the colour co-ordinated furnishings, the expensive television set and the collection of porcelain dolls displayed ostentatiously on the wall opposite.
“I wouldn’t want to either if I were you,” she agreed.
It wasn’t the response her granddaughter had expected. She looked curiously at the ancient creature in front of her and wondered if she was a witch.
“Shall I tell you a secret?” she whispered conspiratorially.
Alice was stunned. A secret! No-one ever told her secrets. At least, they hadn’t for a very, very long time.
“I saw a fairy at the bottom of our garden.”
And the spell that had imprisoned Alice, the Fairy Princess, for 50 years, was broken.
It took her daughter a few weeks to notice the change.
“I’m worried about Mummy.” Alice’s ears were sharp enough to hear the phone call. “I think she’s going a bit funny. She has these blank spells where she just sits staring into space. I’m afraid her mind is going.”
Family meetings were convened to debate the problem, more of those ‘grown-up’ discussions from which she was excluded.
But Alice didn’t mind one little bit. Daydreaming they had called it when she was little. Now she was old, it was senility or dementia. Her life in the ‘real’ world began to fade away, just as her childhood in Fairyland had done all those years ago. But curiously, as her memories of adult life became confused and dreamlike, those earlier once forgotten memories of her childhood grew clearer. They brought in doctors, gave her all sorts of curious pills and potions, but once a spell is broken, it’s broken. Alice, the Fairy Princess, was awake. It was hard at first. She had forgotten so much about how Fairyland worked and the constant intrusions of her daughter and those silly doctors made it so difficult. As she spent more and more time in Fairyland, she found it ever more painful to return to the ‘real’ world. In Fairyland her ankles weren’t swollen, her hip didn’t ache and the world wasn’t blurred and cloudy. She had even lashed out at her daughter once in annoyance. She was sorry afterwards. It wasn’t her fault. She just didn’t understand that Alice had been walking arm in arm with her Fairy Prince in their rose garden, didn’t understand that Alice had a ball to attend that night, a ball at which she was the guest of honour and where she would be reunited with so many long lost friends.
Finally they had given up. It was decided that Alice had to go into a Home. But that suited Alice just fine. The Home had a big garden nestled between rolling green hills and an old oak wood and beyond the waving foxgloves, a little brook sparkled in the sunlight. That last Summer, sitting out in her chair under the honeysuckle, it had seemed as though it was always warm and sunny.
But now Winter was coming. Not much longer to wait. Alice could see it when she looked into the mirror, her magic mirror. The face that looked out at her was very old, the years carved deep into her skin. But behind the eyes, Alice could see a light; a light which grew brighter as the face grew greyer and duller. She felt an excitement well up inside, like a little child on Christmas Eve. One day very soon her journey would be complete. She would wake up to a new, brighter dawn, on the day when she would be crowned Queen of the Fairies at last – the beginning of happily ever after.
