Fifty years of the lion
Once upon a time, a little boy said: “Mother, there is a lion in the meadow.” And New Zealand turned over a new page in its literary history, with the publication of Margaret Mahy’s first book, A Lion in the Meadow. Next year, it turns 50. We asked novelist Elizabeth Knox and poet Paula Green to tell us what they think the little boy grew up to do.
ELIZABETH KNOX
Some of what happened to the boy was just what happens to children. The powerful and gentle friend of his childhood slowly changed its shape, gradually becoming less clear and near, less someone you could nestle into, not so gentle and not so powerful, since small children are better at imagining powerful friends than older children, and much better than adults.
The boy's mother, that sensible woman, remained easy-going about lions and what-have-you. She chose to see her son's belief in “the lion which IS there” as a sign of stickability. She encouraged his interests and didn't try to interfere with them again. What was the point of trying to make a boy like that see that the way to check whether a matchbox was empty was by shaking it, not looking inside?
The boy kept the matchbox and remembered the lion and dragon. He didn't talk about them to many people, just a few friends when he was at university, where it came up naturally in discussions they were having about the Double Slit Experiment and why photons might be particles or waves depending upon whether anyone was watching them.
Those conversations about how, maybe, there was something mysteriously sentient and verifiable by experiment, at the foundations of existence. He studied physics but was impatient with pure theory and became an engineer, eventually working in the tunnels of that great experimental machine in Switzerland. He was one of the engineers who, whenever the thing was shut down, would go in to fix the detectors.
He’d carry the matchbox with him, tucked in his everyday pants pocket and encased in his protective suit. The matchbox was mostly a good luck charm but he would always slip it a little open, just in case it might tempt any contaminating dragon into it and out of the tunnels. Out of the picture. He’d pinch the box closed in his pocket before he emerged and always remembered to open it for a moment in his own little garden.
The cottage where he, his mother and younger sister lived had stayed in the family. One summer the family gathered there. He and his wife had taken a long leave to spend time getting to know their grandchildren. On his first night there, the man remembered he had the matchbox and that it had been closed for months — after a problem the collider was having had mysteriously resolved itself when he and his fellow engineers had gone in and come out again without really having done anything.
When the man put the matchbox on the windowsill of his bedroom in the cottage and slid it open nothing happened. Nothing, as usual. The bedroom curtains kept on puffing in and out. The night stayed as quiet as could be expected when it was full of frogs in the flax swamp and the lowing calves in a paddock down the road. The next morning, his 2-year-old granddaughter was out in the yard in her jolly jumper and she wouldn’t stop staring and laughing like a drain. She was swinging her whole body around to follow something with her eyes, something moving across the meadow, still high and flower-filled, though some goats were working their way through one corner of it. The goats were unperturbed, but the child swivelled and stared and then jumped and cackled.
Her dad and grandad sat down beside her and managed to work out that what she was so delighted by was “tails”. She pointed: “There and there. Chasing.” The man’s son said that it seemed an affinity with invisible things had skipped a generation. The man said, “Have I ever told you the story about your grandmother and her dragon in a matchbox? And the son, with the gentle smile of a son who is now a father answered, yes, he’d heard the story.
“The one with the big, roaring, whiskery, yellow lion. The lion that WAS there.”
The two men went on watching the wind passing through the grasses and the branches of the old apple tree, while the little girl laughed at the great beasts, her laughter by and by bolder as she got up the nerve to shout out that SHE was there too and to summon them.
PAULA GREEN
Once he told his mother there was a great big, yellow, whiskery lion in the meadow and she gave him a matchbox.
He carried the little matchbox until he was a man. He filled it with dreams: the day he dreamt of flying around the world in a hot air balloon to see life from a new angle. The time he dreamt he stood before the ancient pyramids and felt wonder.
His head began to fill with pictures of houses. He drew astonishing houses when he was a boy and then learnt how to make them at university. He learnt how to calculate weight and balance and to draw shapes and dreams. He wanted to make houses that were full of light and warmth and imagination.
He built a house that looked like a tall hat covered in flowers. He would climb the stem of the tallest flower and sit in the comfy chair and dream of more fabulous houses. But everyone laughed at the hat house in the paddock.
He built a house that looked like a hedgehog. He would light the fire and watch the spines glow in winter. But everyone laughed at the hedgehog house in the street. “What an eyesore,” they would say.
He built a house that looked like a pineapple. He would watch the pineapple light dance on the walls. But everyone laughed at the pineapple house in the paddock. “Who would live in that?” mocked the neighbours.
But one day he built a house that looked like a cloud on the side of the hill. There was enough room for his partner, who was a mountain guide, and his son and daughter, and his mother, who came to stay. Nobody laughed at this house because everyone loved the beauty of it on the hill and the way they filled it with light and warmth and imagination when they went inside.
One day the man gave his children matchboxes to store their dreams in. “If anyone laughs at who you are,” he told them, “open your matchbox and breathe in your dreams.”
Paula Green runs Poetry Box, a poetry page for children. nzpoetrybox.wordpress.com
‘‘ If anyone laughs at who you are, open your matchbox and breathe in your dreams.