I was ten and wandering in the woods, exactly where I was told not to go.

It was the heady scent of flowers that drew me off the barely perceptible path I was on.

And there it was, a perfectly round field ringed by trees, mostly beeches and elms, seeming as precisely round as the rim of the moon.  Scattered across the field like shards of a rainbow were filigreed umbrellas of Queen Anne’s lace and fragile lilies of the field, jonquils, daffodils and bluebells.  But the heady scent was more than the sum of these flowers.  A faint breeze tousled the tops of the flowers and made a whispering noise that somehow seemed more like speech than the rustle of leaves or the buzzing of insects.  But what seemed curiously out of place were the broad stumps of trees that didn’t look as if a saw or axe had felled them.  These stumps were topped by what looked like the turrets of the castles in my books of fairy tales.

I felt I’d found magic and then magic found me, for standing on the stump nearest me was a diminutive figure, no taller than my child’s hand was broad.  He had his arms above his head and was frantically waving me away.

Although his lips weren’t moving I heard a voice in my heading crying, “Don’t move!” And then his voice was joined by an alarmed chorus, shouting, “Don’t move!”

So I stayed where I was and heard a gale of relieved sighs.

“You’re bigger than that fox that ran through here two hundred years ago and it took years to repair the damage.”

So, I stayed where I was and, one by one and month by month, the Filly Dills and I came to know one another.

First, naturally, was The King of Stumps who reigns over his Land of the UnderLeaf and his subjects the Filly Dills.

Sadly, when I just couldn’t contain my secret, I told people what I’d discovered.  Most ascribed it to my overheated imagination and my mother took my temperature and tucked me in, saying I must stop eating before bed, as it stirred up dreams.  My teacher said that what I needed was really a good dose of mathematics.

With time, the path to their land grew harder to find, until I couldn’t find it at all.

But the Filly Dills kept inhabiting my dreams and it was only when I was older that I realized that I’d surrendered to being sensible, as if “sensible” explained everything, when all it did was deprive me of the ability to believe in all the wonders one can never see.

I now go back to the Land of the UnderLeaf in dreams and bring back the wondrous Filly Dills to share my days, to inhabit that realm where dream melts into imagination.

Jim Peacock