The Toymakers: Dark, enchanting and utterly gripping'

by Robert Dinsdale

All are welcome at Papa Jack’s Emporium, for everyone was once a child, no matter what they’ve done or whom they’ve grown up to be.

Most of the time it wasn’t mothers or fathers or monsters or villains; most of the time you were running away from that little voice inside your head, the one telling you to stay where you are, that everything will turn out all right.

Running was easy, she decided; but every runaway had to arrive, and arriving seemed the most difficult thing of all.

Only a child could understand how one day might last an eternity, while another pass in the flicker of an eye.

‘You see, it’s all about perspective. You can do the most extraordinary things if you keep the perspective of a child. That’s how our papa’s training us – to never lose that perspective. To make a toy, you’ve got to burrow into that little part of you that never stopped being a boy. Because, hidden down there, are all the ideas you would have had, if only you’d never grown up.’

It propelled him on – for there had never been such sounds in his Emporium, not this place he had created as a bulwark against the bitterness, the darkness, that was adult life.

Night crystallised. On the plain the blackness was never absolute, for the stars whose light was smeared across the heavens were reflected in grain fields and hedgerows dusted in snow. A fox, silver as the moon, darted across Jekabs’ path and in its eyes was the promise of something Jekabs would never feel again: freedom.

If you’re going to make a toy, you have to hold one truth as inviolable above all others: that, once upon a time, all of us, no matter what we’ve grown up to do or who we’ve grown up to be, were little boys and girls, happy with nothing more than bouncing a ball against a wall.

The most terrible things can happen to a man, but he’ll never lose himself if he remembers he was once a child.’

Mightn’t it be, Cathy, that, until you’ve seen the dark, you don’t really know the light?’

Smells, she decided, were like the pine-bark ballerina hidden safely in her pocket. They could make you feel five, six, seven years old again.

‘I’m saying I’m an Emporium girl, through and through.’

Laughter fell around Emil like a deluge of rain.

When you are young, what you want out of toys is to feel grown-up. You play with toys and cast yourself an adult, and imagine life the way it’s going to be. Yet, when you are grown, that changes; now, what you want out of toys is to feel young again. You want to be back there, in a place that did not harm nor hurt you, in a pocket of time built out of memory and love.

‘And maybe, just maybe, all we are, every last one of us, is a toy brought to life.’