Never stop believing

a fairy story

As a child, I was convinced I could see magic. I used to go down to the bottom of the garden and look for fairies. I’d imagine them shimmering between the trees, wings of pink and lilac, making mischief and spreading fairy dust. Keepers of secrets. Guardians of the woods. They lived between mosses and danced inside bluebells. There was one special day when a circle of mushrooms appeared on the lawn. I told my sister it was a fairy circle.

Just before I became a teenager, our darling nanny gave me a book on fairies. Inside she had written “Imogen, never stop believing”. Perhaps she knew that somewhere on the road to adulthood, I might lose my way, and I did. For a while, I thought magic was something silly. Something for kids. Stories to entertain and pass the time. Life lost its sparkle. It became grey and dreary. I thought I’d outgrown the enchanted world and assumed I could never go back.