Alice in Thunderland

[TW: Please be advised that the following story deals explicitly with the topic of sexual abuse.]

Alice in Thunderland

Six months ago (it was an invitation I couldn’t refuse), I went to New York to celebrate the centennial of the birth of the Reverend Dodgson, known all over the world as Lewis Carroll, and there I received an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Columbia.

It wasn’t like such ceremonies here in England, where the weight of the centuries hangs over everything. One might say it was a simple occasion, but impressive nonetheless. I realized that in that young country with so few traditions, he and, in a way, I too were receiving the acclaim of the world. I would remain forever in that book, which would continue to exist and have its own life for many centuries to come, and yet the story it told wasn’t true.

The first time Reverend D. photographed me, along with my sisters, occurred in the year we first met, when I was four and he was twenty-four. My mother agreed that we could be photographed. She was proud of her daughters and saw herself reflected in us as if in a mirror. At the time, photographs were a sign of one’s social standing, to be admired like trophies, and hung in living rooms in frames decorated with butterflies or flowers. Indeed, photograph albums had become an elegant amusement, an entertainment.

Reverend D. had started taking photographs in that same year, 1856, purely as a hobby, but, as with everything else he did, he devoted himself to it with great rigor and seriousness. He was a mathematician and had a lectureship at Christ Church, Oxford, where my father was dean. From the window of the library, where the Reverend Dodgson was also assistant librarian, he used to watch us playing in the garden.

My mother, who was thirty at the time, respected Reverend D. and appreciated his sense of humor and wit. I always assumed that it was her he wanted to photograph. Since he was almost a neighbor, he became part of our circle of acquaintances and occasionally came to visit us.

But he never did photograph my mother. Rather than my sisters, I was the one—when I was six years old—whom he chose to photograph most often.

That was how I started going to his house. I thought it was an extraordinary place. The walls of the living room were lined with bookshelves, beneath which was a row of cupboards. Inside these, especially the largest of them, were all kinds of toys and puzzles and clothes to dress up in. I discovered to my amazement—as if an unexpected door had suddenly been flung open—that everything there could be changed and become something else. I found this very strange and exciting, because I was used to a quiet, rule-bound life, where nothing unusual ever happened.

Reverend D. showed me his collection of wind-up toys that danced and played music. I used to watch, fascinated. He would let me hold them and play with them and look at anything I liked. Then he opened a cupboard and took out a big box of sweets wrapped in shiny paper. I ate first one, then another and another. He gave me a cold drink, like lemonade, and I drank it down in one. It had a strange taste, but it was nice. I felt happy. I felt like laughing and dancing. In fact, I had never before felt so happy.

He started laughing too, then pirouetted like a clown and performed a magic trick. I clapped because this was turning out to be a really enjoyable afternoon.

Then I felt slightly dizzy, as if the room were slipping away from me or as if I were about to fall down a deep well. But never having had such an experience before, I enjoyed that too; it was a very slow, gentle fall, and I had time to look around while I was falling and see the book-lined shelves, the glass I had drunk from, and the sweets. And when I landed at the bottom of the well, it didn’t hurt; it was as if my body were made of cotton wool.

He didn’t take any photographs that afternoon, saying that he simply wanted to look at me so as to get to know me better and work out what would be the most favorable light in which to photograph me and from which angle. We would start properly the next day. But no photographs were taken the next day either. I ate sweets, drank that same strange lemonade, listened to the music played by the wind-up toys, and laughed at the stories Reverend D. told me, and it seemed to me that I had known him forever and that he had become my best friend.

In fact, that was what he always said when he took me home: “We’re good friends, aren’t we, Alice, the very best of friends?”

I couldn’t say anything, I simply nodded, filled by a deep sense of warmth and happiness. I was proud to have a friend like Reverend D., a grown-up friend, who was far more intelligent and amusing than the other grown-ups, and who always treated me as if I were a grown-up too and as if I were the queen of that extraordinary house where toys played music and danced.

It did all seem very strange, but I liked that strangeness.

What next, I would think, curious to find out what the next moment would bring, because being there was not so very different from leafing through a book of adventures, where each new page was more surprising than the last.

Reverend D. liked engravings and would show me books full of images of fantastical beings, fairies, elves, gnomes, and mermaids, animals that resembled plants and plants that resembled animals and that lived at the bottom of the sea or in forests where things had no name.

What next, I would think again, enjoying his stories immensely and taking another sweet from the box, although I knew I shouldn’t be so greedy. Not that Reverend D. cared; he didn’t even notice my excesses; there, I was allowed to go beyond the limits of what I was allowed to do at home, and no one would tell me off if I drank too much lemonade or ate too many sweets or put my feet up on the sofa.

Reverend D. would merely laugh and tell me secrets and show me, for example, how easy it was to play with words, and how they could mean whatever you wanted them to.

You can have a special relationship with words, he told me, sometimes they play tricks on you and turn up written the wrong way round. At others, they get lost, the way a pair of gloves might get lost (he almost always wore gloves but could never remember where he had put them and so was constantly looking for them). I noticed he had trouble with certain words, which stood trembling in his throat. I knew Reverend D. had a stammer, and whenever he paused for a moment, I would wait in suspense, conscious that he was about to attempt one of those difficult words on which he would slither and slide as if on an ice rink. He often suffered from headaches too and used cannabis to dull the pain. Poor Reverend D.

I would watch him from where I lay on the sofa, and I had the feeling that I was shrinking and floating. And what if I were to shrink so much that I disappeared completely like the flame of a candle?

But I wasn’t afraid. It was wonderful being there. Whatever happens, I thought, I want to be here.

He picked up a cup from the table beside him, a cup that was, apparently, magic, because it could grow and shrink. It was made of metal, not glass, and consisted of concentric rings, each one larger than the last, and each one slotting perfectly into the next. You could draw them out to form a cup, and then, when you pressed down on them with your hand, the cup squashed almost flat, small enough to fit inside a shallow box with a lid.

Reverend D. placed the cup in my hand so that I could make it grow again; then he filled it with lemonade and held it to my mouth. I drank it down in one gulp and the room again began to fluctuate in size, more quickly this time. A cup that grew and shrank. Could I grow and shrink like that too? Was there a book containing recipes for making people shrink and grow?

This time, Reverend D. did not answer. He had disappeared behind the tripod of his camera, his head beneath a black cloth. He came and went nervously, adjusting the hem of my dress, which never seemed to him quite the right length; he would raise it half an inch, then vanish again behind the camera, through which he would peer for a second, before rushing back to me like a caged beast; he would laugh and make puns and raise the hem of my dress another few inches, until, finally, he removed the dress entirely and laid me on my back, taking the dress with him and scurrying back to the camera.

Feeling slightly dizzy, I made myself more comfortable on the cushions. The room was spinning around me and I felt as if I were falling.

D-d-don’t move, he said from beneath the black cloth, and then a bulb exploded in the camera and he said again, breathlessly this time, Don’t move, and another bulb exploded and, almost simultaneously, it began to thunder and I was frightened by the peals of thunder and by the lightning flashes that seemed to come in through the windows and burst upon me, making far more noise than those bulbs,

and then Reverend D. emerged from behind the camera, looking quite mad, transformed into another creature,

and I started screaming and once more falling down that well; there was smoke in the room, perhaps from the bulbs, and I was falling and falling down a bottomless well.

I’m going home, I screamed, I want to go home.

But I was falling down a bottomless well and everything around me had become terribly large and strange. With some difficulty, I thought: If I stand up, everything will return to its proper place and I will be Alice again. If I stand up, with my two feet firmly on the floor, and put on my dress, I will be able to go home because I know how to walk and I know the way.

But the rain was pouring down in torrents on the roof of the house and on the garden; the lightning was scratching at the windows, and Reverend D. was still there behind the camera, telling me in that same breathless voice that I couldn’t leave, not right then, I just had to wait a moment longer, just-a-moment-longer…

And I was cold and I couldn’t find my dress. How could I go home without my dress and in the rain, even if I was Alice again?

And then I wept a whole pool of tears, but I didn’t leave. I had lost my house and the way home. All the certain and familiar things had moved far away, and I remembered with a pang my cat Dinah’s soft fur. Because everything—my house, my lessons, my dresses, my hair ribbons, and my cat Dinah—all belonged to yesterday, to before now, before I ever came to that house and to that other forbidden place.

Except that nothing was forbidden there. It was all puzzles, theater, magic tricks, sleights of hand, and puns. Nothing was either forbidden or allowed. There was no right or wrong. And I didn’t really understand what had happened.

This is a place where nothing makes sense, I thought. And it frightened me to think that.

(If you weren’t mad, you wouldn’t be here, but now that you are, you’re part of the story. We’re all mad here. And you’re stuck here. Forever.)

But I didn’t want to be stuck there, and I cried while the thunder boomed and the rain fell even harder. I don’t want to stay here.

Reverend D. had returned from behind the camera, apparently his usual calm self, and he sat down before me, stroking a Cheshire cat.

I’ll take you home now, he said, smiling, when the thunder had passed and the rain eased. I’m going to London tomorrow for a week, but I’ll come and see you when I get back.

And I thought, terrified:

I won’t tell anyone what happened to me.

I didn’t tell anyone, and I continued to visit Reverend D.’s house, because I was no longer myself. I was another person, whose emotions and thoughts no longer fitted perfectly together as they used to. I was a strange person, still called Alice, but different. On the other side of the looking glass.

The looking glass wasn’t a mirror. It was a lens through which Reverend D. was looking. On the other side of that lens was a world where everything was the other way round. Everything has a moral, if you can find it. But there’s no moral to find here, because nothing makes sense. We can take off our clothes and sit quite naked. But who are we?

I floated adrift in that void, in that utter meaninglessness, in the emptiness that Reverend D. filled up with words, telling stories:

Look, Alice, you wanted to come here. You were in the garden with your sister and you saw a rabbit pass by, and instead of staying where you were, you ran after him and fell down a hole and ended up somewhere else, and then things started to happen. The truth is, you could have stayed in your garden, but you didn’t. Your curiosity got the better of you. Because nothing was happening in your garden or in your house and you wanted something to happen. You were too intelligent, too precocious. You wanted to discover new things. You were ready to take a risk, to experience something different. Your wish was granted. You experienced something different.

And now you’re in another world, behind a glass, behind the lens through which I’m looking at you. The lens is a glass for looking through and that is how I see you, through a looking glass.

You’re at the mercy of my gaze, like an insect, an object to be admired, studied, analyzed, something that only takes on life and acquires a name through my gaze.

But I am also your prisoner, Alice, and I exist through you. We are in each other’s dreams. Forever.

This is another world, Alice. The world of the darkroom where I take you and let you watch your own image gradually emerging as I slowly move the negative about in the acid bath. It’s a kind of magic I’m showing you, a dark, secret magic. The room is dark and secret too, the room in which all is revealed and where no one may enter. That’s why I lock the door from the inside. But I let you in and reveal to you things you’ve never seen before and whose existence you did not even suspect.

That is where you meet the other Alice. Dressed as a beggar girl, your gaze vacant. Holding out your cupped hand in which any nameless thing might fit, a kiss, another hand, a nose, an ear, or any part of the body that can shrink or grow. Like you. You’re simultaneously very small and very big and you don’t fit inside yourself anymore because you’re both a child and, suddenly, a grown-up, and you’re looking for yourself, but have lost your way, and there’s no road home.

But there’s no need for you to go home, Alice. Here you are the queen and only the things that you want to happen will happen.

You were the one who wanted it, right from the start. Look at your cupped hand, your beggar’s hand. You were asking for it, Alice, asking for what happened.

And then he would smile: It’s all dreams, stories, fantasies. Nothing happened, Alice. Children have too much imagination. You were in your garden at home and you fell asleep, and when you woke up, everything was just as it was before, and you were the same person, exactly the same. The other Alice never existed except in dreams. Stay like that for a moment longer, half asleep, with your head resting in your sister’s lap, then you can get up, go home, and carry on with your life, day after day, with the same hair ribbons and the same frilly dresses, with your lessons and your books and your cat Dinah. Everything is just the same. Nothing happened, Alice, nothing happened.

And I didn’t know what to think, as if one bit of my body had grown enormously and could no longer be a part of me, as if I no longer fitted in the house, but bumped my head on the ceiling and had to stick my giant arm out of the window.

And so I continued for some years, lost between two worlds, so that even my family found me odd, as if I had been infected by the eccentricity or madness of Reverend D. I would panic whenever there was a thunderstorm and hide in a closet. And when they expressed alarm and asked me what was wrong, I tried to explain why I needed all those clothes around me to feel safe, well, I don’t know quite what I told them really, but there was a big argument between my family and Reverend D. This was after my mother suffered a kind of fainting fit and had to be carried up to bed, and after my father was forced to tear himself away from Ancient Rome and his Greek-English lexicon and go and sit beside my mother, looking anxious.

I was forbidden to return to Reverend D.’s house, and he, in turn, was forbidden to enter our house. I was also forbidden to speak about him to other people or even mention his name. Although my mother never said as much, she clearly felt that if I talked about Reverend D., I would ruin any chances of marriage I might have later in life.

My mother tore up all the letters he had written to me and started the rumor, told in shocked tones, that he had fallen in love with Miss Prickett, our governess, and that this was the reason our family now kept its distance from him.

That, at least, was the version of events she spread around, but I knew it was wrong. What would be so shocking about him falling in love with Miss Prickett? It wasn’t Miss Prickett who haunted his dreams. It was me.

But they were dreams, only dreams, nothing actually happened, or so everyone said, although not in so many words, as if, like me, they were forbidden to speak about the matter. Reverend D. was filed safely away, once and for all. Reverend D. is a man of the church, an outstanding mathematician, a university lecturer, respected and highly regarded, not just in Oxford, but throughout England. And he is, above all, a reverend.

Life, apparently, went back to being the way it was before: my mother resumed her day-to-day existence, my father went back to his encyclopedic work and to life in classical antiquity, from which he only returned on special occasions, such as church services or parties or family meals.

And relations with Mr. D., so suddenly interrupted, were reestablished six months later, although on a cooler, more formal basis.

Normality had been restored, except that I was all alone in the world, surrounded by a deafening silence, and I had been told to deny everything; nothing had happened, I was the same Alice, there was only one side to things not two. Time would resolve my anxieties, my fear of thunderstorms, my nightmares about growing and shrinking and changing size and not knowing who I was.

Meanwhile, the most amazing thing went entirely unnoticed: I had transformed Reverend D. into the famous writer Lewis Carroll. I was the one who had asked him to tell us a story, to me, Edith, and Lorina, on that July afternoon in 1862, when we were coming back from a picnic in a boat. And he told a story I already knew, because I had experienced what he was telling us and—more importantly—what he wasn’t telling us. That’s why I asked him to write it down: the story belonged to me, it was my property. Even its darkest, most absurd aspects.

And yet, spoken out loud, in the presence of Lorina and Edith, while we rowed down the river, the story seemed to me immensely troubling. For many months afterward, I felt imprisoned in a whirlwind of emotions: fear, shame, guilt, anger at him and at myself. I regretted ever having asked him to write it down; it should never have been written down so that other people could read it.

My fear of thunderstorms grew worse until, the following summer, my mother finally realized that something odd was going on, and that was when we severed relations with Reverend D., who was only readmitted to our circle later on because the family felt that was the best way of maintaining appearances.

In November 1864, when I was thinking, with relief, that he never would write the story down, he brought me the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.

The earth trembled beneath my feet when I received that poisoned present; the subterranean world and its secrets were made real in my hands in the form of sheets of paper.

And the following year, the worst possible thing happened: he published it as a book, with the title Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Everyone knows what happened to the book and to Carroll’s career. But Alice in Wonderland was the author’s only real success. After that—as I left his dreams and became an adult—his books declined. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, published when I was nineteen, is a farewell to Wonderland, a nostalgic goodbye to a lost Alice. The boat trip reappears, the dazzling moment when he became a writer—because I was the catalyst for his new existence, I made him what perhaps he wanted to be, but never would have been without me.

First and last, he celebrates Alice and his sadness that our “fairy tale” was over. But the fairy tale only existed from his point of view. I was left with the “breath of bale” that affected me for years. And “bale,” according to the dictionary, means woe, mischief, sadness, injury, disaster.

His last books, the two volumes of Sylvie and Bruno, met with only average success. They lacked the impetus, the dubious charm of Alice.

And when he got caught up in a scandal over, among other things, photos of naked children, his career as a photographer ended, from one day to the next, in 1880 (the year of my marriage). That was the end of his adventures with successive Alices whom he befriended and then photographed nude, while I was growing up and he was losing me forever.

His death, at sixty-six (when I was forty-six) left me unmoved, as if he had never meant anything to me.

It was discovered then that the volumes of his diary written during the period from when I was six until I was ten were missing, and the pages for July 27 to 29, 1863, which was when we broke off relations with him, had been cut out, giving rise to many doubts and interpretations. However, neither my family nor I broke our silence on the matter.

As regards Wonderland, people accepted the false premise on which it is based, with Alice remaining entirely untouched by the perverse nature of that strange world. They failed to realize that the unspoken seductive power of the book lies in the fact that everything in it points to something that is never told. It is lit by a very somber light; it is not a dream, but a nightmare. But no one chose to notice this. People could quote whole pages; they knew the book by heart.

Suddenly, at the age of thirteen, I was famous, a celebrity.

Who wouldn’t like to be in my position? Who wouldn’t give their right arm to have Alice as a daughter? I was very lucky to have been photographed by one of the great English photographers, who was now also the most celebrated children’s author in the Empire.

And if I were to have declared out loud that my adventures underground had been quite different and that Reverend D. was not what he seemed, no one would have taken me seriously because they were all adults, and it’s adults who decide what is real and what is not, and words only mean what they want them to mean. Children just invent things and dream wild dreams. Or else tell lies, even when they haven’t the slightest intention of lying, because their small brains are not yet sufficiently developed and seem to grow or shrink depending on the circumstances.

I had some fantastic, but harmless adventures from which I always emerged victorious. That is what people wanted to read.

Nor did they understand the significance of that useless un-kingly king or the fat, pompous old queen, who handed down sentences before the verdicts had even been given and who was constantly issuing absurd orders. They didn’t want to see that they, the readers, were her subjects and that she was actually seated on the throne of England. They preferred to read the book as a collection of witty puns.

Or perhaps they sensed that if they began to look more closely into the book or question it, the world in which they lived would fall about their ears. And that is why whenever anyone voiced a doubt or started asking questions, there would always be someone who would interrupt and say:

I’ve got a splendid idea: why don’t we change the subject.

And so, the game went on. I was the only one to unmask them all and tell them they were nothing but playing cards. Because in the book, unlike in real life, I had a voice. In real life, I didn’t speak, couldn’t speak.

Meanwhile, the king and queen were as eternal as playing cards. Croquet was immortal too, as was cricket. England would collapse if people stopped playing cricket.

Later on, I discovered that cricket really could be important and, indeed, become one’s whole raison d’être. At twenty-eight, I married Reginald Hargreaves, a cricketer who had a brilliant career and whose batting and bowling averages are well-known. Indeed, cricket is an essential component of certain families, where generation upon generation speak of little else but wickets and overs and innings and runs. (My sister Edith, who died at twenty-two, was also going to marry a cricketer. And my three sons—all of whom were educated at Eton, of course—turned out to be cricketers just like their father.)

When I married Reginald in Westminster Abbey, I thought my life would change forever and that its darker side would be left behind. I can’t deny that, over the years, I often felt very happy, hearing my sons running about on the lawn and playing in the sun. I, Alice, was now a mother sitting in the garden with a book in my hand, a book I never read because I was far too busy being happy. I was finally living the life I had dreamed of ever since I was a child.

However, things are never as they are in dreams, and love stories have their thorns that prick our fingers and make them bleed. Not that we show pain or despair or tears, having been brought up to show self-control and never to lose our composure. Impeccably coiffed and dressed, we remain sitting in the garden and smile at our beloved husband who always comes to take tea with us promptly and who we know is unfaithful to us, but we still smile even though the unspoken words burn our mouth:

You always get home so late, my dear, you were particularly late last night, I heard you go into your room, I couldn’t sleep until I heard you arrive and slowly close the door of your room, and I know you didn’t spend the evening at your club or playing cards with friends.

But I pick up my cup and take a sip of tea and look at the man sitting opposite, to whom I don’t say what I would like to say for fear of what I might hear in response, although I know he’s a gentleman and would never use coarse language, so I say the words to myself in my head.

Dear Alice, I say, while he spreads butter and jam on a scone,

don’t be such a victim, you know perfectly well what men are like, especially rich men from good families, especially sports heroes who win championships and are admired by other women,

and besides, Alice, you’re not a young woman anymore, don’t forget you were already twenty-eight when I married you,

I was your savior, my dear, if it wasn’t for me, you would have grown old alone, a wallflower,

you can’t deny that it was pretty brave of me to marry you, I silenced the gossips who continued to murmur against you,

and you know perfectly well what I mean, that scandal with Reverend D. when people found out he was taking photographs of naked young girls, as well as certain other matters that were remarked upon at the time,

of course your family did all it could to present a different version, they even encouraged or perhaps invented a flirtation between you and Prince Leopold, when he was a student at Oxford,

and as regards Reverend Dodgson, all the social niceties were observed in order to maintain an appearance of normality,

he even sent you a wedding present and his congratulations with the blessing of family and church, well, it was expected and assumed that he would—he was a family friend, a good friend—but you know what gossips are like, so you should be grateful to me, Alice,

after all, you have everything you were in danger of never having, a husband, a position in society, a beautiful house set in enviably large grounds, two marvelous children who are the joy of your life,

so don’t blame me, my dear, if I demand my freedom, that’s what we men are like, as you well know.

And now, having finished eating his scone some minutes ago, he is ready to leave, tea-time passes so quickly when there’s pleasant conversation

(Would you care for some tea? If you don’t, you could at least make polite conversation.)

and he kisses me on the cheek and says,

goodbye, my dear,

and walks away across the lawn with his springy, sportsman’s step, and, as always, I’m left alone, and that is when I again pick up the book I never finish reading and think to myself that I, too, was a character in a book, in the most famous children’s book in England, not that this ever made me happy.

And because Reginald walks away across the lawn, leaving me alone, and because the thoughts I attribute to him wound me deeply,

I think about the man who invented me and placed me in his dream, and for a moment, as I sit there in the garden, I allow him to become the man in my dream,

and suddenly that is a secret we share, those furtive adventures in the strange house he lived in. Now those memories have the intense flavor of a forbidden fruit, which I put in my mouth and devour, feeling the juice run down my chin and choke me. A secret that I will jealously keep, the subterranean place where I go to meet a man who desires me and trembles with love for me, a man who understands about words and books and takes me to a place where nothing makes sense. Now, though, I let myself be carried along. We are in each other’s dream, in a darkroom to which only we have the key and whose images are known to us alone. It is our secret. We have made a pact of silence.

No one else will ever find out what goes on there, and the slowly emerging images will never be revealed.

I don’t care anymore about Reginald’s escapades or his amorous adventures. I smile when I watch him playing cricket, as if hitting a ball had any importance in the great scheme of things.

You are merely a cricketer, I could say to him (although naturally I don’t say anything). I am Alice, the main character in a book. Yes, he loved me, he must have loved me to have invented me. And it’s true that I must have loved him too, because I kept going to see him. Despite everything.

And now I’m pregnant again, Reginald, and you continue to leave me on my own, as if this third pregnancy were a kind of accident. I have decided that if it’s a boy, I’ll give the child his name or an echo of his name: Caryl. And you won’t even notice, Reginald, because you will, as usual, be too busy hitting balls and attracting the attention of other women,

and if you do happen to notice, I will, of course, deny that the names are related at all: what an absurd idea.

Well, isn’t that what I’ve always done: said nothing, pretended, lied, erased, concealed?

The name Carroll didn’t mean anything, I’ll say, it didn’t exist, it wasn’t even his name, but a pseudonym, invented, along with everything else, including me.

But one day, the war changed the world. You cannot hide from a war, not even in dreams. The bombs burst over our lives and shattered us.

I died in the war, along with my two sons. I died twice—under bombardment, under fire. No explosion can compare with that. There is no worse pain than that of losing a child.

The Alice who remained was different. She forgot she existed, she forgot about the garden and the lawn, she sat staring out at the rain, as if, beyond the windowpanes, it would never stop raining.

I had grown older, as had Reginald. He no longer felt the same enthusiasm for cricket; his career had finished early and he ended up as a vice-president of Hampshire County Cricket Club. He used to sit with me more often, drinking tea and, like me, looking out through the window. I felt reconciled with Reginald. We had been through so much together. We were a family. And we still had one son.

My husband’s death, years later, was a very hard blow.

I did not, as I said at the time, sell Carroll’s manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground in order to be able to cover the cost of maintaining our house, Cuffnells. I wanted to free myself from the wretched book that had pursued me all my life.

The original of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground was put up for auction at Sotheby’s, who placed a reserve price on it of £4,000. It sold for £15,400 and was eventually taken to America.

That high price afforded me secret pleasure. I savored it as an act of revenge, as if the auction were a trial and Mr. D. had been obliged, even after death, to pay me a large amount for the damages done to me, and which, after all those years, had still not lapsed.

But despite the original manuscript crossing the Atlantic and having another owner, the book continued to follow me, like my own shadow. My son Caryl became its most fervent admirer, collecting all kinds of Carrolliana, and proving very skillful at exploiting it commercially.

And then, six months ago, I went to the University of Columbia on the centennial of Carroll’s birth.

When the ceremony was over and I looked at myself in the mirror, with no academic gown, no speeches, no audience, no applause, I saw that I couldn’t just leave myself in the book like that. I had lived and suffered and grown old, and there I was at eighty years old: Alice on this side of the looking glass.

I’ve thought about this a great deal since I returned to England. I cannot resign myself to the idea that death will hold me captive forever in that subterranean world, while little Alice continues up above, imprisoned, in turn, in a false story. Two false Alices, one above ground and one below, as if the earth were a mirror or a lens separating two worlds.

To free us both, I will have to face the truth and tell the true story myself. I have decided, therefore, to write my own version. I will leave the manuscript sealed, with a note indicating that it should only be opened fifty years after my death. Because I want to protect those I love: my son Caryl, who was always asking me questions and to whom I always gave the censored version imposed on me,

and my granddaughter, Mary Jean Alice, who was born last year and is the great joy of my life. In fifty years’ time, Caryl will be dead and Mary Jean Alice will be middle-aged.

My ashes will be at peace, next to Reginald’s, in Lyndhurst cemetery, under a headstone bearing the name Mrs. Reginald Hargreaves.

I made all these decisions while sitting here in the garden, so that my life will have the ending I choose. Free at last from the book that occupied my place and space in life, and was always there, instead of me.

I will tell the story as I experienced it. I ask only that God gives me sufficient time and health to write it down.

“Alice in Thunderland” from Prantos, amores e outros desvarios. Porto, Portugal: Porto Editora, 2016.

Image by Antonio Carrau.