It was a sunny day on Nether Oak Close, and down at the end of the cul-de-sac, behind the hawthorn hedge, through a small child-shaped hole, you might have seen three children sitting in a sun-dappled hollow.
The children were Sarah, 11; Millie, 7; and little Paul, 5. They were the kids of Hugh and Margaret Fitzsimons from number 16, the house that ended the cul-de-sac on the left, with the magnolia tree at the gate.
Sarah was sitting on a log, book in hand, reading to her two siblings. The book was House at Pooh Corner, a favourite of all three. She had just finished the story where Roo falls into the Poohsticks River and is rescued when Pooh discovers the North Pole, gives it to Christopher Robin, and Christopher Robin uses it to rescue Roo.
Unbeknownst to them, they were being watched by a female figure sitting in the Y-fork of a large birch tree nearby. Just as the story finished, she smiled, wiggled her fingers, and muttered under her breath.
Sarah turned the page and, as she did so, the hawthorn hedge rustled, and a group of familiar figures appeared in the glade.
Pooh Bear was humming a Very Useful Hum when Piglet came trotting up. Piglet was a Small Animal, and when Small Animals feel they might be late for something important, they trot.
“Pooh!” Piglet panted. “Roo says you’ve lost something!”
“Indeed, I have,” said Pooh importantly. “I have mislaid the morning.”
Piglet blinked. This was bigger than he’d expected. “Where did you last see it?”
“That’s the difficulty,” Pooh said, scratching his head. “I was having it only a little while ago. A delicious sort of morning. And then, suddenly, I wasn’t having it at all.”
Roo bounded onto a stump nearby. “Mother says mornings don’t go missing. She says mornings are for Getting On with Things.”, his friends nodded this sounded very like something Kanga would say.
Eeyore poked his long face through a bramble bush at that very moment. “Typical,” he said, in the unmistakable voice of one who is looking forward to folding twenty loads of laundry. “Lose a morning and expect the rest of us to find it for you. Don’t mind me.”
“We don’t, Eeyore,” said Pooh kindly, “because you are Very Good at noticing things.”
“No I’m not,” Eeyore sighed. “But I suppose we’d better look anyway.”
And so, they set off: Pooh thinking in a thoughtful sort of way, Piglet trotting nervously, Roo leaping from stump to stump, and Eeyore trudging behind with the air of someone prepared for disappointment.
The two younger Fitzsimons children looked at Sarah. She shrugged and whispered, “This is not me.” The three children got up and followed the animals further into the copse.
They searched beside the log where Sarah had been sitting. They searched under a pile of leaves, where Piglet found a beetle who was Not a Morning At All. They searched up in a tree, because Roo thought mornings might climb.
But nowhere was there any sign of a missing daybreak.
Pooh sat down and sighed a polite, puzzled sigh.
“Perhaps,” Piglet said timidly, “it didn’t go anywhere at all. Perhaps you only thought it was lost?”
“Nonsense,” said Pooh. “I had it. I remember because I said to myself, ‘Pooh, what a fine morning this is.’ And then I sat down to think about honey, and when I looked up, it was gone.”
“Pooh,” Eeyore said, in that tired-but-kind voice, “you can’t lose a morning by looking away. It’s still there. You just forget to notice it.”
Roo perked up. “Is that like when I forget to notice peas at dinner?”
“Exactly,” Eeyore said, rather pleased to be understood for once. “Mornings and peas. Very similar.”
Pooh thought about this. “So the morning is still here? Even though I forgot to notice it?”
“Of course,” said Piglet, growing braver. “You’re sitting in it right now.”
Pooh looked around. Sunlight dappling. Leaves shimmering. Breeze rustling like a soft whisper.
“Oh!” he said, delighted. “There you are, morning! I wondered where you’d got to.”
And the morning, being a forgiving sort of thing, shone warmly over them all.
“Well,” said Eeyore, “since the morning’s been found, and never really lost, I suppose that’s that.”
“But I felt as if it were lost,” Pooh said. “And that was a very real feeling.”
“Feelings usually are,” said Eeyore. “But feelings aren’t always facts. Which is bothersome.”
Roo hopped close and tugged at Piglet’s paw. “Does that mean if you think something is gone, but it isn’t, you should look again?”
Piglet nodded. “And maybe… maybe ask your friends to help you look properly.”
Pooh beamed. “A splendid lesson. A Very Good Lesson indeed:
‘Things aren’t gone just because you stopped noticing them. And friends help you notice again.’”
The three human children nodded. It was a good story… very Pooh.
Just then a breeze rippled through the birch leaves above them. The children, Sarah, Millie and Paul felt the hairs on their arms lift as if a story were taking a deep breath.
The woman in the Y-fork of the tree stepped out of the branches as lightly as a falling feather. Her eyes were bright; her smile was like candlelight in a quiet room.
“I think,” she said, “that you children read very well indeed.”
Sarah’s jaw dropped. Millie squeaked. Paul clutched the book.
“I am Bríd,” the woman said, “goddess of being clever, and of stories told properly. When a story is spoken with care, when it is lived instead of mumbled, its characters wake up. They step through hedges. They ask unexpected questions.”
“Like when Christopher Robin asks, ‘Have you seen a silly old bear?’” Paul whispered.
Bríd winked. “Exactly like that.”
She knelt on the leaf-litter before them.
“Listen to me now. If you practise reading… and telling stories… and imagining what might be just behind the next tree…” She tapped Sarah’s book lightly.
“…then even when you are as old as your parents, adventures will still come looking for you.”
Then she straightened, and the sunlight shimmered around her like a page turning.
“Tell them Well,” she said. “Tell them properly. And the stories will live.”
With that, Bríd dissolved into a flutter of birch leaves, and the copse became quiet again, except for the whisper of Pooh and Piglet and Roo and Eeyore fading back into the world from which they’d come. Pooh, it seemed, needed some honey.
Sarah looked at her siblings.
“Shall I keep reading?”
Two heads nodded, enthusiastically.
And the morning, still very much there, seemed much brighter than before.
Now this, this is wonderful.