Beyond

The Custodians of Kew

A Retrospective, Set Down with Due Modesty and a Certain Private Amusement

 

There are memories which age gently, softening at the edges until they resemble nothing so much as pleasant fiction. And then there are those which do not age at all, but wait—patient, intact, and faintly amused—until one is finally old enough to understand that forgetting them was never truly an option.

I was seven years of age in the summer of 1977 when my grandmother took me to Kew Gardens.

She was a woman of quiet certainties and impeccable resolve, the sort who believed that children, when listened to properly, often knew more than adults preferred to admit. I, for my part, was an earnest child, serious in the way only the very young can be, and inclined to notice things others stepped around without comment.

We were walking among the ordered abundance of the gardens when I saw it.

It lay half-concealed in the grass, no larger than my small clenched fist, metallic and unmistakably fashioned. Not made, I should say—fashioned—as though intention itself had been folded into its multifaceted design. The object was warm. Not sun-warmed, but internally alive, as if it remembered heat rather than borrowed it.

When I touched it, understanding arrived fully formed.

This was not an object. It was a vehicle. It had travelled across space and time and had come to rest precisely where it must, waiting—not passively, but expectantly—for me. Within it lay an alien essence, dormant rather than dead, requiring a particular touch to revive it. Mine.

I turned to my grandmother and told her exactly this.

She did not laugh. She did not correct me. She knelt beside me, examined the object with care, and asked the only sensible question there was to ask: what we ought to do next.

I explained that there would be those who might seek to take it—men with instruments and intentions, eager to prise it open and name it something small and untrue. That the object required protection. Custodianship. A vow.

My grandmother agreed without hesitation.

There, amid the botanically labelled order of Kew, we spoke our promise aloud: to keep the object safe, to ask nothing of it, and to act only in its interest. At the final word, the object responded. It glowed—briefly, politely—in hues that do not appear on any chart and belong to no sky we recognise. We stared at one another, sharing that rarest of human experiences: mutual astonishment without doubt.

I placed the object into my pocket.

We returned home by way of the post office where my parents lived and worked, the day proceeding with all the respectable banality such a place demands. Tea was made. Stamps were sold. A spacecraft slept quietly in a child’s jacket.

Now, nearly fifty years have passed.

From time to time, I recall that afternoon and find myself smiling, shaking my head with what appears to be fond disbelief. An observer might suppose I am amused by the extravagance of childhood imagination, indulged by a grandmother of generous temperament.

They would be mistaken.

For as I smile, I open my hand.

 

And there, glowing softly—patient as ever—rests the traveller from another world, waiting still, exactly as it always has, for the moment when it will once again be time to move.

 

Author: The Editor