The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The narrator, dressed in a black suit and tie, gives a speech, then drives through the nearby Sussex countryside until he comes to the property where he grew up. The old house, torn down long ago, was replaced 30 years earlier, and the new house, recently enlarged, reminds him of his teenage years: “no good times, no bad times” (3).

The narrator drives along a road until it becomes a dirt lane, old and untamed, that ends at the brick farmhouse of the Hempstocks. He walks up to the house, wondering if they still reside there. The door, its latch broken, creaks inward, and he steps inside, calling out to know if anyone’s home. A thin, elderly woman appears. The narrator assumes it’s the aged mother of his childhood friend Lettie; the woman recognizes him. He asks if Lettie is there, but she shakes her head. He asks if he can visit the duck pond out back, the one Lettie called “the sea.” The woman indicates the way, and he steps outside, walks across the barnyard, and arrives at the pond.

The narrator sits on a bench and gazes at the pond. He remembers being seven and Lettie being older, at 11. He vaguely remembers her being in the water. He realizes Lettie didn’t call the pond “the sea,” but “the ocean.” This recollection brings his old memories back.

When the narrator turned seven, no one showed up for his birthday party. He’s sad, but gets a Batman action figure, a couple of Gilbert and Sullivan music albums, and a set of Narnia books. He goes upstairs and reads the books happily. His father brings home a kitten; the boy names it Fluffy, and it becomes a good companion. It waits each day for him to come home from school, but a month later, a taxi brings a guest and runs over the cat.

The guest is an opal miner, a tall man. He apologizes for running over the cat, and opens up a box to reveal a large, lop-eared replacement cat. The narrator tries to pet him, but the cat hisses and runs off to a corner. The boy goes upstairs and cries for his dead Fluffy. The big cat is named Monster, and he feeds it twice daily, but mostly it’s out in the garden, killing birds. Though he misses Fluffy, the boy can’t complain: His dead cat has been replaced.

The narrator’s family gets into financial trouble, and he must give up his room to paying boarders. He moves into his sister’s bedroom, where they argue a lot. The third boarder is the opal miner. He gives an opal to the boy and his sister; the narrator’s sister loves the gift, but the narrator “could not forgive him for the death of my kitten” (18).

One Saturday morning, the family discovers that their car is missing. The police call and report that it’s been found at the bottom of their lane. The narrator and his father arrive at the stolen car and find, in the back seat, the opal miner, dead from asphyxiation. He’d run a hose from the exhaust pipe into the car. In death, he looks red and waxy, and the narrator recalls going to Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks, where the wax figures of famous people “could not truly look dead, because they did not ever look alive” (23).

More police arrive, and they want to remove the narrator to a police car, but an 11-year-old red-headed girl who lives at the farmhouse across the way says he can visit her. She explains to the boy that the opal miner chose this place to die because it’s out of the way and no one would stop him.

The narrator and the girl walk to the farm’s barn. There, an old, skinny woman with wispy hair explains that the cow is milked by machine, and the milk is stored in large outdoor milk churns for daily pickup. The boy drinks a cup of fresh milk and loves its warm, rich taste. The old woman notes that the boy is hungry; she suggests the girl take him to the kitchen for some food.

The girl, Lettie, leads the narrator to a large kitchen, where she gives him a bowl of porridge and jam. It’s so delicious that he’s as “happy as I have ever been about anything” (27). Lettie’s mother, Ginnie Hempstock, walks in: She’s stocky and wears large boots. She tells Lettie to prepare tea because the police will be wanting some shortly. She tells the boy that the old woman is her mother, Old Mrs. Hempstock, and Hempstock Farm is recorded in the ancient Domesday Book.

Ginnie says the officers haven’t yet noticed the note that the opal miner placed in his breast pocket. The note explains that he gambled away his and his clients’ money and hopes they can forgive him. The narrator is surprised the family seems to know so much about the case, but holds his tongue. Lettie says she “nudged” one of the officers so he’ll look in the opal miner’s pocket.

Lettie takes the narrator to the pond, which she calls “my ocean.” She insists she traveled from the “old country” across the body of water when she was a baby. A fish floats dead in the pond; Lettie scoops it out, slices it open, and pulls a coin from its stomach, saying this is what killed it. She gives the coin to the boy, saying he can buy sweets with it, but he says it’s very old and businesses might not take it. She tells him to save it, then, for luck.

The narrator and his father return home. His father suggests he not talk to his sister about the morning’s events. The boy asks if a pond can be an ocean, and his father denies it.

The family car is sold, and a used Rover that smells like cigars takes its place. The narrator never gets letters, but on this day he does: It announces that he’s won a prize from the lottery bond that his grandmother bought him when he was born. The prize is 25 pounds, and the boy dreams of all the candies he can buy with it until his mother says she’ll put it in his account at the post office. Later that day, the gardener digs up a bottle filled with old coins. The boy cleans them, and the bottle of coins is placed on the dining-room mantle.

The narrator dreams of his grandfather and cronies chasing him, catching him, and holding him down while his grandfather shoves something hard and metallic into his throat. He wakes up choking on a coin. He gets it out, then goes downstairs, where his sister scolds him for throwing coins at her. The boy doesn’t remember doing this. He walks out to the road and finds Lettie standing there. She says he’s having bad dreams, and explains that someone’s handing out money but doing it badly, and it’s connected to the opal miner.

The narrator and Lettie walk to her house to have breakfast. On the way, she points at houses, describing the strange things happening to the occupants. One man sees, in his mirror, fingers sticking out from his eyes. Another, who has money in her mattress, and whose perception has broken from reality, won’t leave her bed for fear of losing the money. The boy asks how she knows this, and she says one gets to know stuff after a while (41). He asks how old she is, and Lettie says she’s 11. He asks how long she’s been 11, and she smiles.

The narrator and Lettie pass the Caraway Farm, where a couple is arguing. Lettie says the man dreamed his wife made money doing bad things, and when he woke, he found a lot of cash in her handbag; the woman doesn’t know how this money got there. Lettie says the opal miner’s death led someone or something to cause trouble, but these problems can be sorted out.

At Lettie’s house, she makes thin pancakes and rolls plum jam into each. The children eat hungrily. The narrator says he feels scared, and Lettie promises to keep him safe. Old Mrs. Hempstock appears with an apronful of daffodils that seem to glow. Lettie shows her the coin that choked the boy; Old Mrs. Hempstock examines it, even licks it, then declares that, though it reads 1912, it’s brand-new. She mumbles something about electron decay, and how electrons look “smiley” and neutrons frown.

The narrator asks how old Old Mrs. Hempstock is, and she says she remembers before there was a moon. He asks if the ghost of the opal miner is causing all the recent trouble; the Hempstocks laugh and say ghosts can’t make things and can barely move them. The boy helps Old Mrs. Hempstock put her daffodils in vases, and she takes his advice on where to place them. She gives him a slice of honeycomb covered in cream. Ginnie Hempstock arrives and complains that her mother will rot the boy’s teeth, but Old Mrs. Hempstock insists that being tough on the bacteria “wigglers” in the mouth makes them want to please you.

The Hempstocks discuss the problem connected to the narrator’s coin, and they argue about whether or not to bring him along. Lettie begs to bring him, and her grandmother relents. Lettie promises he’ll be safe.

Lettie breaks off a small branch from a hazel thicket, splits it into the shape of a “Y,” and holds the ends of the Y. She wants to find something blue; the narrator locates a bluebell flower under a table. From there, Lettie swivels around until she says “black,” and they walk down the lane until they reach a bit of black cloth on a fence. She turns and turns, says “Very red,” and they cross a meadow to some trees, where they find a small, dead animal lying amid bright-red blood.

Lettie tells the narrator to take her arm and not let go. He does so, and they walk through dense woods, waiting for a storm. They reach a meadow and hear thunder in the distance; Lettie turns again, and they keep walking. The boy feels “a throbbing going through me, holding her arm, as if I were touching mighty engines” (50). They cross a small stream; Lettie stumbles, then says the thing they’re searching for knows they’re coming and doesn’t want them searching for it.

The sky darkens, and wind whips at the children. Suddenly, Lettie makes them crouch down, and a thing that resembles a flat, furry rug flies over them, its mouth filled with sharp teeth. It floats for a moment, then flies off. Lettie calls it a “Manta wolf.” She loses her trail and has the narrator place the choking coin on the “V” of her stick. She turns slowly; the end of her stick begins to smoke, then bursts into flame. Lettie douses it on the grass and has the boy retrieve his coin.

Lettie discards the smoking stick, and the pair walk into the forest. She holds the narrator’s hand and warns him again not to let go. She explains that they’re still on the farm, which they brought with them when they moved, and the farm contains “fleas,” or bits of supernatural things. The boy looks at the orange sky and metallic plants and decides they’re not in the normal world at all.

The children come across a large, tent-like thing that’s the size of a building. It turns, and its eyes stare down at them. The narrator whimpers. Lettie asks for its name; the tent-thing says “I am the lady of this place” (55), and she’s been there since before humans sacrificed one another. A being approached it with a plea to give money to its fellow creatures (the opal miner), and it consented. It warns Lettie to leave, then asks who the boy is. Lettie warns him to say nothing. She threatens to bind the tent-thing if she won’t tell them her name. The tent bends toward them, as if examining the boy. Lettie begins speaking and singing in an unknown language; the tune sounds like a familiar nursery rhyme. The earth writhes, and worms erupt from the ground. A football-sized object, “a flapping, writhing mass of cobwebs and rotting cloth” (58), flies at the pair from the tent. Instinctively, the boy reaches out with both hands and grabs it. As he does so, he feels a sharp pain in his foot. Lettie knocks the object from the boy’s hands, and it hits the ground and dissolves. She takes back his hand.

The narrator remembers later dreaming of the language Lettie used, and how it gave him the power to heal. Somehow, he understands her words, which force the protesting tent creature to the ground until only scraps of fabric lie unmoving. They walk away through a beautiful woods and over an ornamental bridge, past rows of corn to a field planted with furry reeds. The boy pulls on one and it scratches him angrily: It’s a black kitten. He apologizes to it, and it jumps onto his shirt, where he pets it. Lettie says it’s a “she.” He wants to take the kitten home, but Lettie advises against it.

The children return to the lane, where everything seems normal again. Lettie says if she’d known how dangerous the tent creature was, she wouldn’t have taken the narrator with her. She asks if he’s okay, and he says what his grandfather always says: “I’m fine. Not to worry. I’m a brave soldier” (62).