The Ocean at the End of the Lane

‘What does it say?’ asked Lettie.

‘Read it yourself,’ said the woman. I thought she was Lettie’s mother. She seemed like she was somebody’s mother. Then she said, ‘It says that he took all the money that his friends had given him to smuggle out of South Africa and bank for them in England, along with all the money he’d made over the years mining for opals, and he went to the casino in Brighton, to gamble, but he only meant to gamble with his own money. And then he only meant to dip into the money his friends had given him until he had made back the money he had lost.

‘And then he didn’t have anything,’ said the woman, ‘and all was dark.’

‘That’s not what he wrote, though,’ said Lettie, squinting her eyes. ‘What he wrote was,

“To all my friends,

Am so sorry it was not like I meant to and hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me for I cannot forgive myself.”’

‘Same thing,’ said the older woman. She turned to me. ‘I’m Lettie’s ma,’ she said. ‘You’ll have met my mother already, in the milking shed. I’m Mrs Hempstock, but she was Mrs Hempstock before me, so she’s Old Mrs Hempstock. This is Hempstock Farm. It’s the oldest farm hereabouts. It’s in the Domesday Book.’

I wondered why they were all called Hempstock, those women, but I did not ask, any more than I dared to ask how they knew about the suicide note or what the opal miner had thought as he died. They were perfectly matter-of-fact about it.

Lettie said, ‘I nudged him to look in the breast pocket. He’ll think he thought of it himself.’

‘There’s a good girl,’ said Mrs Hempstock. ‘They’ll be in here when the kettle boils to ask if I’ve seen anything unusual and to have their tea. Why don’t you take the boy down to the pond?’

‘It’s not a pond,’ said Lettie. ‘It’s my ocean.’ She turned to me and said, ‘Come on.’ She led me out of the house the way we had come.

The day was still grey.

We walked around the house, down the cow path.

‘Is it a real ocean?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes,’ she said.

We came on it suddenly: a wooden shed, an old bench, and between them, a duckpond, dark water spotted with duckweed and lily pads. There was a dead fish, silver as a coin, floating on its side on the surface.

‘That’s not good,’ said Lettie.

‘I thought you said it was an ocean,’ I told her. ‘It’s just a pond, really.’

‘It is an ocean,’ she said. ‘We came across it when I was just a baby, from the old country.’

Lettie went into the shed and came out with a long bamboo pole, with what looked like a shrimping net on the end. She leaned over, carefully pushed the net beneath the dead fish. She pulled it out.

‘But Hempstock Farm is in the Domesday Book,’ I said. ‘Your mum said so. And that was William the Conqueror.’

‘Yes,’ said Lettie Hempstock.

She took the dead fish out of the net and examined it. It was still soft, not stiff, and it flopped in her hand. I had never seen so many colours: it was silver, yes, but beneath the silver was blue and green and purple and each scale was tipped with black.

‘What kind of fish is it?’ I asked.

‘This is very odd,’ she said. ‘I mean, mostly fish in this ocean don’t die anyway.’ She produced a horn-handled pocket knife, although I could not have told you from where, and she pushed it into the stomach of the fish, and sliced along, towards the tail.

‘This is what killed her,’ said Lettie.

She took something from inside the fish. Then she put it, still greasy from the fish guts, into my hand. I bent down, dipped it into the water, rubbed my fingers across it to clean it off. I stared at it. Queen Victoria’s face stared back at me.

‘Sixpence?’ I said. ‘The fish ate a sixpence?’

‘It’s not good, is it?’ said Lettie Hempstock. There was a little sunshine now: it showed the freckles that clustered across her cheeks and nose, and where the sunlight touched her hair, it was a coppery red. And then she said, ‘Your father’s wondering where you are. Time to be getting back.’

I tried to give her the little silver sixpence, but she shook her head. ‘You keep it,’ she said. ‘You can buy chocolates, or sherbet lemons.’

‘I don’t think I can,’ I said. ‘It’s too small. I don’t know if shops will take sixpences like these nowadays.’

‘Then put it in your piggy bank,’ she said. ‘It might bring you luck.’ She said this doubtfully, as if she were uncertain what kind of luck it would bring.

The policemen and my father and two men in brown suits and ties were standing in the farmhouse kitchen. One of the men told me he was a policeman, but he wasn’t wearing a uniform, which I thought was disappointing: if I were a policeman I would wear my uniform whenever I could. The other man with a suit and tie I recognised as Dr Smithson, our family doctor. They were finishing their tea.

My father thanked Mrs Hempstock and Lettie for taking care of me, and they said I was no trouble at all, and that I could come again. The policeman who had driven us down to the Mini now drove us back to our house, and dropped us off at the end of the drive.

‘Probably best if you don’t talk about this to your sister,’ said my father.

I didn’t want to talk about it to anybody. I had found a special place, and made a new friend, and lost my comic, and I was holding an old-fashioned silver sixpence tightly in my hand.

I said, ‘What makes the ocean different to the sea?’

‘Bigger,’ said 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.





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 caravan, 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.