The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

‘They have surrendered,’ she whispers – and she doesn’t care at all for the outrage of our friend, for the money she must pluck from the till and return to his hands. The soldiers she is staring at are happy now, and it is the most incredible thing.

And when she finally stood on the platform, ticket in hand, she understood why: the world cared nothing for a single runaway daughter. It had seen the story so many times.

It was a revelation to know that, after all the pious staring of the last six weeks, she was a nobody again.

It was important to be brave. She had been brave when she stepped out of the back door, brave when she took the train and knew there was no going back, but bravery, she supposed, could not end there. Now that there was somebody else lurking inside her, she would have to be brave every day. Brave in the little things, as well as the big.

when Mrs Hornung touched her hand and whispered, ‘Are you sure about this, girl?’ The question caught her off guard. ‘It wouldn’t be too late for you to go back … wherever it is you came from. You could make up a story. Whoever it is, they’d understand.’

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

until you’ve seen the dark, you don’t really know the light?’ ‘I hope you never see that dark, Kaspar, not for all the magic in the world.’

No, I’ve seen this before. London loves its toymakers from the frozen East … until it doesn’t. Love and hate, they are such very similar things.’

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.

‘That isn’t soldiers, killing each other just because they ought to. That’s people, helping each other just because they can. Isn’t it a beautiful thing?’

But Kaspar, if you go on like this, there isn’t a happy ending. There’s just more of … this. I had to find a new way to be. I found my boys and I took them into new lands and I made something for us there. I made this Emporium.

Running away, she remembered now, was not like it was in the stories. People did not try and stop you. They did not give chase. The thing people didn’t understand was that you had to decide what you were running away from.