‘Understanding make-believe: Some things we can imagine, but others we just know’

As I hurtle towards my eighth decade, I have to pinch myself. How can it be? I’m sure we all feel like this at some time. Isn’t it amazing that while our bodies may not be as supple, we are essentially the same people inside? Hopefully we have learned some lessons that have helped to untangle some of the cobwebs we’ve had to make our way through.

As a child I had a wicked imagination, which I’m sure got me through a troubled childhood. Up in my favourite tree I would imagine myself in the jungles of Africa hobnobbing with monkeys and other wild animals. I could be Rapunzel up in her tower, waiting to let down my hair so that I could be rescued. I had many adventures and often arrived home with soiled and torn clothes and my mother once more threatened to make a dress for me out of a hessian bag — in fact she did once and my skin itched for weeks.

Now that I am in these golden years, I haven’t forgotten these experiences and find many opportunities to let imagination run wild and sometimes my imagination becomes a reality. My grandchildren enjoy some of my stories, but I think there have been times when they have taken them too literally. One case in point was when my dog Molly was run over and my son buried her in my garden. A week later my gorgeous grandson rang and asked where Molly was. I told him that she was probably in doggie heaven. His response was, “She should be back by now. Uncle Simon put her in a recycle bag.” That took a bit of explaining.

We all manage our imagination in different ways. We only have to read our book reviews to see whose imagination has been piqued in some way. I often feel sad that social media breeds imaginations that only see negative and hateful images. I guess we are not all born with a glass half full.

Anyway, my imagination has come in handy as I have written children’s books for a couple of publishers over the years. Cambridge University Press published a series of my books 10 years ago and I had imagined that there would be more. It didn’t happen, so I put it to the back of my mind. Then, recently I had a phone call from the publisher at Cambridge asking my permission to publish these books in China.

I was very excited and dug them out from my cupboard as I’d forgotten what they were about. I was drawn to one called Make Believe and as I read through it my heart sang. Since these books had been published, I had lost the love of my life, my business had collapsed and I had suffered a breakdown of sorts, yet imagining I still had a future kept me going. I promised my husband that I would keep doing what we planned and I wasn’t going to let him down.

In my book I relived my childhood imaginations about what I believed — “What happens when you kiss a frog? It turns into a prince. That’s what I believe.” (Still I had to kiss a lot of frogs first.)

“I believe in dragons, I believe in lots of things … the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and dinosaurs with wings. All these things are magic, all these things are fun. But the best thing I believe in is the magic of the sun.” She goes on about the benefits of the sun but the last page says it all: “But I don’t have to believe in these; I just know.”

There it is. There are some things we can imagine, but there are other things that we just know.

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