The Secret Book of Flora Lea

by Patti Callahan Henry

But Dot needed air and space. She needed to try to remember the past without all of these people staring at her, these people who claimed they loved her and knew her.

Now she is six years old on a red blanket and someone is calling her name. Not the name she carries now but her first name: Flora. “Flora!” She is asleep in the afternoon sunlight, a plaid wool blanket over her and Berry tucked under her arm, his fur resting on her cheek, when the familiar voice wakes her from a deep nap. Waking, rising to her feet, she moves toward the voice. But there is her starry river, the river her sister does not ever let her get too near. The river in her magical land of Whisperwood. She inches closer when she slips and Berry falls near the water. That voice, it calls for her again, and she stumbles, her green wellies not catching the ground.

She and Harry did not lose Flora. Their kiss had not made Flora disappear. Whisperwood had not taken Flora away in the river’s current. The magical land Hazel had kept hidden away for all these years—the one she’d feared had destroyed her life, her mum’s life, the Aberdeens’ life—had all along been working its magic, bringing them ever closer, until this day when they stood in the pasture land of Bridie and Harry Aberdeen. A heaviness Hazel had been carrying well over half her life lifted from between her shoulder blades, from the crevices of her heart.

“She stole me. She woke me and called me toward the river. I know I was only six, but that memory is clear. Nothing else around it makes sense yet, but that night… I’ve always thought it was a recurring nightmare and now I see it was true.”

“I thought my imagination was what doomed us.” “It wasn’t,” Harry said. Hazel felt the tears rising. “I see that now. It wasn’t my love that lost her, and it wasn’t my Whisperwood story that sent her away. All this time I’d believed both of those things to be at the bedrock of her disappearance.”

“But it wasn’t my love for Harry that had lost you, instead you were quite literally kidnapped by a nurse damaged from war, out of her mind, stalking and stealing a little girl.”

did exactly what Hazel had desired, longed for, and dreamed of for over twenty years—Flora Lea Linden threw her arms around her sister and held her close.

“Well it seems that there was one, and you told her the story and used it to calm yourself, to settle yourself. That woman, Maria, took the story back to America and told her sister, Linda, about it to help calm her little girl, Peggy, who had also lost her father in the war.”

“What a wonder,” Dot said. “What an absolute wonder. A story you told me helped me when I was sad and confused, and then it traveled across the sea to bring us back together.”

no matter her love for stories, there were some things beyond words.

this longing, as strong, was also different. For it had been forged through time and other men, through mistakes and grief and loss.

A young girl tells a story to an American volunteer. That woman carries the story across the sea for her niece, another child who has lost her father. That child grows to write the story and embellish it, to grow it to become more than it ever was before.” “And then,” Harry said. “That story lands on a table in the very store you were leaving that day.”

“You didn’t give up, Hazel. You never surrendered to anyone else’s idea of who and what you should believe and do.”

“I don’t know, but I do know this—I believe I’ve always searched for the feeling I had with us.”

“I’m not so sure it’s about getting anything back.” He looked to the sky and then back at Hazel. “It’s about having what is right here, right now, and not squandering what remains.”

She’d told Dot how horrific memories were blocked, how a lie told over and over becomes the truth of the past, but also how the mind holds that truth and how Dot’s subconscious had attempted to tell it to her over and over in dreams and hints and images until Dot would listen. The experts called it memory reframing, and Dot had been young enough for a lying adult to shift the cornerstone and bedrock of her early childhood.

If Dot’s dreams of drowning and being trapped returned, she would know what they were: a message to remember, not a premonition of the future.

She was still trying to figure out if deception negated the honest parts of her life.

Between the drug and the hypothermia and the childhood shock, Dot might never fully remember, many evacuees never did, but she would take the faded scraps of her memory and tell the truth.

It was clear: Hazel had spent so many years worrying about who loved her that she’d forgotten to consider who she loved. She’d been so damn troubled with whether the men she met wanted her she’d nearly forgotten to wonder if she desired them.

But love wasn’t as simple as a word tossed from casual lips.

She wanted him near; she wanted to make up for lost time; she wanted to be fifteen years old again and never leave Flora asleep; she wanted to find her way back to innocence.

Her pen moved across the paper, her heart opened, her breath evened out, and she returned to her first love, the love she’d once left in fear and guilt: story.

She wasn’t going to be here forever, she knew that. She felt her life growing with every word she’d written that morning in her notebook, with every recounting of the awful, beautiful, terrible, enchanting days of Binsey. But what better place to bide her time than Hogan’s?

Hazel stood quietly and thought of the day she’d found the parcel, of all that had happened over the weeks and how something as simple as a story could shift the world.

“I seek imagination and goodness, woodlands and magical creatures, and a river where stars flow to the sea.”

she would love for them to name their child Flora Lea Aberdeen.

He used to say that there are those who are collectors and those who have no idea what any of the fuss is about.

For a man who never did find out what happened to his own father, he is the finest man she’s ever met. Even when he was a boy, he was the finest man she’d ever met.

And each time Mum looks at Dot, Hazel sees Mum’s face shine with the sheer miracle of Flora’s existence in the world, here with them, alive as a woman with her own child.

It isn’t Linda’s fault that a poor young nurse, who’d been unable to save the most wounded of the war, had “saved” a young girl who didn’t need it.

She then catches Dot’s gaze and winks, for she knows that Dot, and her return, is the best story of all.

“And if such a place exists outside of Whisperwood, it exists here. This land is liminal, transporting… mystical, even.” She smiles. “And within every package that arrives here, there might be another adventure, another quest, another mystery. I know someone else might see the package as something simple: a rare book or signed illustration, but here’s the secret—nothing is simple.”

“Not very long ago and not very far away, there once was and still is an invisible place right here with us. And if you are born knowing, you will find your way through the woodlands to the shimmering doors that lead to the land made just and exactly for you.”

we are a myth-making people; it is how we make meaning of the meaningless and sense of the senseless. It is why we tell stories.

Often, for me, those stories that matter are born...

I was struck by a tidbit of 1939 British history. In Operation Pied Piper, children from large British cities were sent away from their families to protect them from the German bombs that were sure to come. With luggage tags around the children’s necks, gas masks dangling from their knapsacks, and a stamped addressed note for their parents when they found out where they...

Didn’t the British authorities know the fearsome legend of the Pied Piper? The original story dates all the way back to the Middle Ages, to 1300s Germany. Like most legends, it has shifted and morphed through time. But at its heart, “The Pied Piper” is set in a small German town called Hamelin. The children in the story are seduced by the flute of a brightly dressed piper who then leads them to drown in the River Wesser. Many versions of this story have appeared through time, from an 1803 poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Brothers Grimm stories to the 1842 poem by Robert Browning. Through numerous adaptations, musicals, operas, plays, and books, we reach present day, where even a young adult graphic novel by Jay Asher was published in 2017. It is a legend told in different ways over and over.

Why would the government name their safe-haven plan after a legend of drowned and disappeared children? I could only assume it was because they didn’t truly know the story,

The goal was to relocate children out of areas where bombing attacks were most likely, and to transport them to low-risk places. Some children were sent to the countryside (as my fictional sisters, Hazel and Flora, were sent to Oxfordshire), and some children were sent overseas to South Africa, Australia, America, and Canada.

In the end, over three and a half million children were relocated. There were extraordinary stories of children finding lovely homes in the country, and there were horrifying stories, too. Not all evacuees were safe. Seventy-seven children were killed when a ship carrying evacuees to Canada was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine.

Fairy-tale history is long, beautiful, and complicated, related to but different from mythology. I was fascinated by J. R. R. Tolkien’s statement that fairy tales are so vitally imperative to children’s inner lives, and that they offer what he calls “the consolation of a happy ending.”

I’ve always been fascinated with the unseen world, with the natural world as both salve and escape, and with the ability of children to survive with story in a world gone mad. I’ve been consistently fascinated with the metaphor of a river, with its final destination and its source.

words by Mary Oliver: “Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.”

I love you to all the moons and back—thank you for putting up with me while I live half in and half out of two worlds. I am yours.