Work Text:
The letter first tried to be delivered to Ralph when he was five. However, although he mostly knew the alphabet, he really couldn’t quite make out what the writing was all about. He went and asked his Mummy. She took one look, and said it was nonsense, and where had he got it? When he said that he had found it on his pillow, she smacked him for telling lies.
The following year, Ralph was able to read the letter for himself. Whether he understood what it meant is a whole other thing. He did, of course, know about magic journeys in fairy tales. His mother had heard the maid telling him about “Jack and the Beanstalk”: the maid had left that afternoon.
When Ralph was seven, he came home from his first term away fascinated by his friends’ accounts of Christmas. His mother lectured him on the pagan origins of the holiday, and made sure that, throughout the holidays, he attended Bible classes at the Brethren Meeting House. That year, the letter may simply have gone astray—or been found by the new maid.
By nine, Ralph delighted in tales of adventure, war, and heroism. The summer had been spent in the Lake District, and he had learned to sail a dinghy. That term, he read all the other boys’ books about sailors and soldiers and explorers; and he spent much of the holiday reading his father’s old Henties. He was rather less familiar with books like Alice and Peter Pan: his mother had banned them, since their tales of marvellous lands are quite untrue. Untruth is lie; and lying, of course, is wrong. Like any proper English boy, Ralph abhorred a liar.
Home for the hols at eleven, it occurred to Ralph that the letter’s message of a world beyond might refer to Heaven. But his concern at school was not to seem different from the other boys. It did not do to seem pi.
The following year, once again, the letter waited on his bed. Ralph almost didn’t bother to open it.