“Somebody Else’s Kids” – A true story by Hayden, L. Torey
Sphere Books Limited - 1984
With eyes out of focus and sound the only connection to
the physical world all around while my mind’s tightly held
in the eerie and elfin atmosphere of my story - I thank my
stars for the Lord of the CharCastle always presenting a
beacon of reality to whom I can swim back as soon as the
story’s magnetic attraction weakens such that I can let go:
The author, a specialist in child education and psychology,
is a poet at heart, her descriptions of emotionally disturbed
children flow like the finest silk threads woven into a poetic
whole, I’m only up to page 49 as making notes takes up a
lot of time and the shock of discovery of so much pain and
suffering is slowing me down, hoping to escape a charge
Of plagiarism I still have to quote some of the most ethereal
descriptions as on page 4: “a 7-year old magic looking child”
“with illusory realness about his expression seen in a dream,
eyes mystery green like an ever-changing soft cloudy sea”
p 5 – “voice high with undulating inflection” - and then the
wonderful references I find in the text, the brain-damaged
Lori with the same name of the girl living alone weaving
scarves in Paul Gallico’s “Thomasina” story, who came
to her senses when she woke up to help Mary-Ruadh,
p 12: “smiling in inward translucence” running around
“with graceful consistency to the motion” p 14 “it came
across as a transparent membrane over eye of reptile”
p 20 “a buoyant, irrepressible spirit”, p 23 “tears unfallen
gleaming like captive stars” p 28 “fairy dream child with
uncanny changeling beauty p 29 as if he were spirited
from a fairy space into a strange human world, beauty
lay upon him with the shining stillness of a dream” p 30
“a supernatural aura settled among us”
– and I’m still
Caught in this strange, supernatural sphere….
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