In Narnia, Right was right and courage came with clarity. Beauty abounded and Aslan, even across the sea, never felt so very far away.
That’s how they remembered it in England, at least. Three months gone and the edges were sanded down. Their children’s hearts remembered beauty and clung to victory. If you’re not an idealist when you’re young, there’s something wrong with you.
Peter said, and they all agreed, that their memories of Narnia were like books on a shelf. It was all still there, but filed away. To think of a particular summer dance or ship’s voyage, you had to pull the proper book from its shelf and turn the pages until you found the story you wanted. You could recall the events that way and it would be like any other memory: vivid but imperfect, bathed in old feelings and new, details intact but a fine mist of nostalgia covering the scene.
Their old skills were gone, but what use was swordsmanship in Britain? Most of the time, the Pevensie children scarcely noticed what they had lost. They played in forests and swam in ponds, went to the grocer’s and prepared for school to resume. They were children.
They thought of Narnia often, but it was as one remembers a glorious holiday by the seashore, or the most important novel you’ve ever read. It had changed their lives, but it was past, and memory; a secret language, and daydreams and play-battles out in the Professor’s woods.
Because they were children, the edges of their memories softened, they forgot the things that would have given them nightmares. Right was right in Narnia, after all. They did not remember the sticky, congealing mess of the Witch’s blood that clung to Aslan’s mouth after Beruna, when he had ripped her throat out and devoured her body. They forgot the visceral fear that Rabadash would manage to take Susan to wife by force, and what he would do to her if he did. They forgot the awful chaos of battle, the sickening stench of bellies hewn open and intestines spilling onto the sodden earth. They did not remember living to be twenty, thirty, fifty, sixty, growing old and aching with it, burying friends, and worrying about the succession. The burden of all those years would have broken any children so young.
After they were sent home for the last time, each of the Pevensie children found ways of remembering. Peter joined a fencing league, and soon found that old broadsword techniques would often flutter out of his memory’s pages and into his hands. Susan sketched until she didn’t, until she put away her pad full of fauns and castles and lions in a box of childhood nonsense—but it was many years before that happened. Edmund wrote pages and pages of reminiscences down, trying to externalize the books of his memory. Lucy daydreamed, and she dressed in bright Narnian colors, and sang Narnian songs, and a million other tiny things that scarcely anyone noticed. The Pevensie children found ways to remember. Narnia remained in their minds: a little distant, perhaps, but the ink never faded.
And one day, when he was ready, Edmund was trying to calm his father through the soldier’s panic that followed a car backfiring and he began to remember the feeling of having seen war. The book in his mind opened where the pages had been stuck together, and suddenly he knew how to help.
Lucy began to recall snatches of what it was like to grow old. She looked in on her grandparents more and more. “I know your knee isn’t what it used to be,” she smiled as she went to get the stepstool.
Susan held a classmate tight after a terrible, terrible night and trembled, remembering Rabadash’s hot breath on her face, the way he’d grabbed her forearms with bruising strength and demanded to kiss her. I understand, she whispered. It wasn’t your fault.
Peter, sitting in theology class, remembered the viscera around Aslan’s mouth and began to understand what justice meant.
The terrible parts came back in flashes as the children grew into young men and women. Memories of Narnia expanded to fit their older selves, old horrors and heartaches now many years past. Little by little, the Pevensie children grew back into themselves.
Two Lucys existed, one long past and one in the mirror. Two Edmunds, two Susans, two Peters. The present Lucy did not miss the woman she had grown to be in Narnia, except in rare instances. She had what she needed from her old self. She still had so much growing left to do.
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