Chapter 1
The Aunt and Amabel
by E. Nesbit
Lewis enjoyed the writings of E. Nesbit from the time he was a child. When he began writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he told a friend that he had begun a children's book "in the tradition of E. Nesbit."
"The Aunt and Amabel" prefigures Lewis's first Narnia adventure in that
the young girl Amabel enters another world by means of a wardrobe, finding therein a magical train station called "Bigwardrobeinspareroom." In chapter 2 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the faun Mr. Tumnus similarly speaks of "the far land of Spare Oom" and of "the bright city of War Drobe."
"The Aunt and Amabel" was first published in Blackie's Children's Annual (1909), and collected in The Magic World (1912).
It is not pleasant to be a fish out of water. To be a cat in water is not what any one would desire. To be in a temper is uncomfortable. And no one can fully taste the joys of life if he is in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. But by far the most uncomfortable thing to be in is disgrace, sometimes amusingly called Coventry by the people who are not in it.
We have all been there. It is a place where the heart sinks and aches, where familiar faces are clouded and changed, where any remark that one may tremblingly make is received with stony silence or with the assurance that nobody wants to talk to such a naughty child. If you are only in disgrace, and not in solitary confinement, you will creep about a house that is like the one you have had such jolly times in, and yet as unlike it as a bad dream is to a June morning. You will long to speak to people, and be afraid to speak. You will wonder whether there is anything you can do that will change things at all. You have said you are sorry, and that has changed nothing. You will wonder whether you are to stay for ever in this desolate place, outside all hope and love and fun and happiness. And though it has happened before, and has always, in the end, come to an end, you can never be quite sure that this time it is not going to last for ever.
"It is going to last for ever," said Amabel, who was eight. "What shall I do? Oh whatever shall I do?"
What she had done ought to have formed the subject of her meditations. And she had done what had seemed to her all the time, and in fact still seemed, a self-sacrificing and noble act. She was staying with an aunt-measles or a new baby, or the painters in the house, I forget which, the cause of her banishment. And the aunt, who was really a great-aunt and quite old enough to know better, had been grumbling about her head gardener to a lady who called in blue spectacles and a beady bonnet with violet flowers in it.
"He hardly lets me have a plant for the table," said the aunt, "and that border in front of the breakfast-room window-it's just bare earth-and I expressly ordered chrysanthemums to be planted there. He thinks of nothing but his greenhouse."
The beady-violet-blue-glassed lady snorted, and said she didn't know what we were coming to, and she would have just half a cup, please, with not quite so much milk, thank you very much.
Now what would you have done? Minded your own business most likely, and not got into trouble at all. Not so Amabel. Enthusiastically anxious to do something which should make the great-aunt see what a thoughtful, unselfish, little girl she really was (the aunt's opinion of her being at present quite otherwise), she got up very early in the morning and took the cutting-out scissors from the work-room table drawer and stole, "like an errand of mercy," she told herself, to the greenhouse where she busily snipped off every single flower she could find. MacFarlane was at his breakfast. Then with the points of the cutting-out scissors she made nice deep little holes in the flower-
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