The Attic Child

by Lola Jaye

‘Have you heard of Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies?’ I shook my head. ‘She was a Nigerian girl given by a British captain as a gift to the noble Queen Victoria.

That house held so many secrets and a dark past I’d refused to face for so many years. Yet now a little boy I’d never met who was born in a different century was forcing me to do just that.

geography was a subject I could excel at – yet two weeks in, I had started to despise it. The large map on the wall of the classroom showed shaded sections occupied by the British. The map I had found in Sir Richard’s study may have been older, but I suspected no less relevant. Inside our books were pictures of what Mr Prentice referred to as natives and savages, people in desperate need to be civilized.

What did this man know about being tied? I was tied to a house and a country I no longer wanted, had never wanted, and every strength I had I would use to leave it. Yet the way he had shrugged his shoulders left me engulfed in a sea of hopelessness.

Once you become soaked in the nectar of education, it stays with you forever and is the best investment a man can make.’

Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.