Far Off Places

"It was a place where nothing, especially not the genuinely mundane, was allowed to be simply ordinary. Where a girl might arrive and find a doll's house awaiting her, perfect in every minute detail: with shingled roof, working lights and a kitchen with the same linoleum as in the beloved house. Where hospitals were strange resorts in which the only inconvenience was a perverse insistence by the staff on the eating of jelly. Where leather armchairs were inverted to become child-sized slides. And where ginger ale, placed in hollow-stemmed crystal glasses, became champagne." We built a sandcastle, went picking lemons and swam in the Canadian Pacific in Sarah Miles' moving tale of peeking behind the curtain.