James Baquet

In Neil Gaiman’s novella “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” an unnamed middle-aged narrator returns to his hometown for a funeral. Taking a seemingly-aimless drive during a break, he ends up down the road from his childhood home (now demolished) at the farm of his friend, Lettie Hempstock.

This releases a flood of memories of a supernatural incident that happened when he was aged 7. It began when a tenant in the narrator’s house stole his father’s car and committed suicide in the back seat.

This called an entity from the other world, which Lettie, her mother, and her grandmother were uniquely suited to combat. The word is never used but they are essentially witches — or goddesses (the grandmother was there “when the moon was made”).

In combating this other-worldly being, the narrator’s little body is taken over by a sort of worm. When he removes it with tweezers, it manifests as an impressive woman, Ursula Monkton. She becomes the nanny for the boy and his sister — and the mistress of his father, while his mother goes to work as an optometrist. (Ursula’s “gift” is to give people money in unpleasant ways.) Many scary encounters result.

In back of the Hempstock house is a pond which Lettie calls “the Ocean,” and as time passes the boy becomes convinced that, though pond-sized, it really is an ocean. After a climactic battle, the Ursula-monster is destroyed, and “hunger birds,” supernatural scavengers, are called to take away its parts. But too many come, and the water of the ocean must be used to remove them and restore the destruction they have caused.

As he finishes reviewing his memories of these events, the narrator comes back to his adult life and time, where he soon forgets all about the events of his childhood. At the end of his story Lettie had been lowered into the ocean in a healing trance, but he believes the old ladies’ cover story that she has moved to Australia. He is also surprised to hear that this is not the first time in the intervening years that he has come to visit — he forgets each such occasion, and will probably forget this one, too.

Vocabulary:

Which word above means:

1. animals that eat leftovers

2. a person who rents a room, apartment, etc.

3. without purpose

4. the place one originally comes from

5. a short novel

6. between, say, 40 and 60 years old

7. destroyed, knocked down

8. the act of killing oneself

9. at the final moment of a story

10. coming in between