In this house...I'll stay little forever

The house of my Czech grandparents has always been precious to me.

Spending Christmas over there made a good oportunity to capture the impression I always get of that place...like a magical house full of secret treasures, stories and memories.

So I spent my free time playing with my dad's camera. And this is the result

In this house...I'll stay little forever from Lucy Banana on Vimeo.

I remember as I got my first Narnia book for Christmas in that house and would spend the winter evenings covered in a blanket under the lamp light up in the attic and would watch the snow falling in the street lamp light through the window. Good times! Since then, Narnia has always felt somehow personal to me and through the pages I was getting closer to C.S.Lewis, always a huge inspiration of mine, but especially as the Narnian storyteller, who made every little word sound cosy and every cup of hot chocolate so contagious. You can imagine me reading it right there, in an old cosy room with an old wooden wardrobe filled with vintage coats, in winter.

It seems as ages now though.

There is a beautiful Postscript in my version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe written by Douglas Gresham about the childhood years when he and his brother (because of their mother being very sick) found their home in the house of Jack(as he preferred to be called by friends), a place which made him feel as near to Narnia as he could then imagine. "Jack and Warnie too were characters who might have been of Narnian origin. Men of immense kindness, goodness, charm, courage, and integrity. And Jack had an enormous sense of fun."

Douglas says he still comes back to that place and lets his mind carry him back to the Narnia of his childhood and adds: "As you read the Chronicles of Narnia, let them carry you too to a place that you know well and store it in your mind. There will be times when you will need to go back to your Narnia to seek the kindliness and comfort of this magical land; when you do, you will find Aslan waiting for you."

I was wondering whether I had any place like that but it wasn't until the last summer, when I was sitting at the attic window and quite overwhelmed needed to capture that special invisible something about the moment, I wrote into my journal that this, at last, was the place I had read about in the Postscript.I could see it this Christmas too.

It was snowing so much on Christmas Eve, we went outside and got almost blown away but it was beautiful. Then we watched White Christmas, musical from 1956 with Bing Crosby.

It was quite a needed time for me. I have surely found the kindlines and comfort of my magical land.

This picture was taken in the C.S.Lewis Reading room in Queen's University of Belfast.

I am Lucy.