The Ocean at the End of the Lane Excerpt Lettie Hempstock Memory 🌿

An excerpt from The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. Fan post and re-enacted. 🌸

Note: POV of the narrator, the main character who is seven years old.

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Lettie led me to a hazel thicket beside the old road (the hazel catkins were hanging heavy in the spring) and broke off a branch.

Then, with her knife, as if she had done it ten thousand times before, she stripped it of bark and cut it again so that now it resembled a Y. 

She put the knife away (I did not see where it went) and held the two ends of the Y in her hands.

‘I’m not dowsing,’ she told me. ‘Just using it as a guide. We’re looking for a blue … a blue bottle, I think to start with. Or something purply-blue, and shiny.’

I looked around with her. ‘I can’t see one.’

‘It’ll be here,’ she assured me.

I gazed around, taking in the grass, a reddish-brown chicken pecking at the side of the driveway, some rusty farm machinery, the wooden trestle table beside the road and the six empty metal milk churns that sat upon it. 

We walked together in the direction she indicated. Across a meadow and into a clump of trees. ‘There,’ I said, fascinated. The corpse of a very small animal – a vole, by the look of it – lay on a clump of green moss. It had no head, and bright blood stained its fur and beaded on the moss. It was very red.

‘Now, from here on,’ said Lettie, ‘hold on to my arm. Don’t let go.’ I put out my right hand and took her left arm, just below the elbow. She moved the hazel wand. 

‘This way,’ she said.

‘What are we looking for now?’

‘We’re getting closer,’ she said. ‘The next thing we’re looking for is a storm.’

We pushed our way into a clump of trees, and through the clump of trees into a wood, and squeezed our way through trees too close together, their foliage a thick canopy above our heads. 

We found a clearing in the wood, and walked along with the clearing, in a world made green.

Lettie shouted, ‘Get down!’ and she crouched on the moss, pulling me down with her. She lay prone, and I lay beside her, feeling a little silly. The ground was damp.

Lettie walked and I walked beside her. We held hands now, my right hand in her left. The air smelled strange, like fireworks, and the world grew darker with every step we took into the forest.

‘I said I’d keep you safe, didn’t I?’ said Lettie.

‘Yes.’

‘I promised I wouldn’t let anything hurt you.’

‘Yes.’

She said, ‘Just keep holding my hand. Don’t let go. Whatever happens, don’t let go.’

Her hand was warm, but not sweaty. It was reassuring.

‘Hold my hand,’ she repeated. ‘And don’t do anything unless I tell you. You’ve got that?’

I said, ‘I don’t feel very safe.’

She did not argue. She said, ‘We’ve gone further than I imagined. Further than I expected. I’m not really sure what kinds of things live out here on the margins.’

She opened a five-bar gate, and we went through it. She let go of my hand. We were at the bottom of the lane, near the wooden shelf by the road with the battered silver milk churns on it. The world smelled normal.

I said, ‘We’re really back now?’

‘Yes,’ said Lettie Hempstock. ‘And we won’t be seeing any more trouble from her.’ She paused. ‘Big, wasn’t she? And nasty? I’ve not seen one like that before. If I’d known she was going to be so old, and so big, and so nasty, I would’ve left you behind.’

I was glad that she had taken me with her.

Then she said, ‘I wish you hadn’t let go of my hand. But still, you’re all right, aren’t you? Nothing went wrong. No damage done.’

I said, ‘I’m fine. Not to worry. I’m a brave soldier.’ That was what my grandfather always said. Then I said, ‘No damage done.’

She smiled at me, a bright, relieved smile, and I hoped I had said the right thing.

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