In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the middle-aged narrator returns to a spot that was significant to him as a child: a farmhouse down the lane from his childhood home where his friend Lettie Hempstock lived. While he’s there, he’s suddenly overwhelmed by a whole slew of fantastical memories from a few days when he was seven. During this time, a supernatural being entered the mortal world and disguised itself as Ursula Monkton, a nanny for the narrator’s family who turned the narrator’s life into a nightmare. As the adult narrator tells his story, he pays close attention to the ways in which being a child at the time influenced how he experienced and interpreted these events. As a child, he constantly felt powerless, especially in the face of the authoritative—and sometimes outright tyrannical—adults in his life. However, as the novel unfolds, the narrator comes to see that seemingly all-powerful adults can feel helpless, lost, and scared, just like children.
The narrator makes it clear how powerless he is because of his youth in his early descriptions of his family, when his parents fell on hard times. Rather than making the whole family pitch in (for instance, by moving everyone to a home that cost less to maintain), the narrator’s parents instead decide to rent out his bedroom. The narrator’s bedroom is, importantly, something that he loves and that his parents designed just for him—in better times, they put in a miniature sink that is “just [his] size”—so as the narrator sees it, he’s the one who has to take the fall for his parents’ misfortune by moving into his little sister’s room. While this may seem like a relatively harmless indignity and something that isn’t entirely unreasonable to ask of a child, it’s extremely unsettling for the narrator. He makes it clear, then, that even small things like this can make a child feel unmoored, unsafe, and alone—and that there’s no real way for a child to push back when an adult authority figure makes a decision like this.
The narrator’s sense of powerless next to adults increases not long after, when a supernatural creature gets a foothold in the mortal world and disguises herself as the human woman Ursula Monkton, the family’s new nanny. The kind of nanny that the narrator’s family attempts to employ is, by design, an authority figure who is given broad power over the narrator and his sister, but as a supernatural being, Ursula takes this many steps further. In her new form, Ursula begins a reign of terror. As she draws the narrator’s parents into her web and becomes something of a cruel dictator, the narrator observes that “Ursula Monkton was an adult. It did not matter, at that moment, that she was every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh. She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win.” In other words, Ursula’s supernatural nature scares the narrator less than the fact that she’s an adult, a characteristic which imbues her with outsize power over children like the narrator. It’s also worth noting that, on the whole, the narrator is far more terrified of the suddenly untrustworthy adults in his life than he is of any of the supernatural occurrences he observes. To him, it’s nothing to mysteriously cough up a sixpence or pull a monstrous, nefarious worm (Ursula in another form) out of the bottom of his foot. What’s truly frightening is his father’s sudden, unpredictable anger and the narrator’s knowledge that his mother will always back up her husband, even if his behavior is cruel and out of line—as when the narrator’s father tries to drown him in the bathtub.
However, even though Ursula makes the adults in the narrator’s life seem scarier and more controlling than usual, other moments in the novel serve as reminders that adults aren’t that different than children. Most obvious is Lettie’s straightforward assertion that adults are just children in bigger, more powerful bodies, and that adults experience all the same fears and concerns that children do. Though this doesn’t make much of an impression on the narrator, there are many instances in the novel when this seems to be true. For instance, when Ursula confines him to his room, the narrator spends the day reading his mother’s old mystery books from when she was a child. In holding onto these books, it seems that the narrator’s mother is also holding on to a little piece of her childhood, even though she’s now an adult with children of her own. Similarly, it’s confusing for the narrator when Ursula cries as she finally meets her demise at the beaks of the hunger birds (great dinosaur-like birds that act as the universe’s vultures). The narrator, for his part, cries at several points throughout the novel, and crying in general is something he associates with children. Seeing an adult cry, even if Ursula is a monster, drives home for the reader (if not for the narrator) that adults can experience fear and react to it in the exact same ways that children do.
Through Lettie’s insistence that adults and children aren’t so different, it’s possible to see that what she really advocates for is compassion. This idea may be beyond the seven-year-old narrator—adults like his parents, he suggests, remained unknowable until he was well into his twenties. But the novel nevertheless proposes that it’s essential to treat everyone, adults and children alike, with compassion and with the understanding that although adults are have authority, they may still feel powerless, afraid, and lost just like children do.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Childhood vs. Adulthood ThemeTracker
Childhood vs. Adulthood Quotes in The Ocean at the End of the Lane
If you’d asked me an hour before, I would have said no, I did not remember the way. I do not even think I would have remembered Lettie Hempstock’s name. But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me. Had you told me that I was seven again, I might have half-believed you, for a moment.
I missed Fluffy. I knew you could not simply replace something alive, but I dared not grumble to my parents about it. They would have been baffled at my upset: after all, if my kitten had been killed, it had also been replaced. The damage had been made up.
I wanted to tell someone about the shilling, but I did not know who to tell. I knew enough about adults to know that if I did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe me when I told the truth anyway. Why would they believe me about something so unlikely?
I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.
Adult stories never made sense, and they were so slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn’t adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?
Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.
“Your parents can no longer afford this place,” said Ursula Monkton. “And they can’t afford to keep it up. Soon enough they’ll see that the way to solve their financial problems is to sell this house and its gardens to property developers. Then all of this”—and this was the tangle of brambles, the unkempt world behind the lawn—“will become a dozen identical houses and gardens. And if you are lucky, you’ll get to live in one.”
“I’ve been inside you,” she said. “So a word to the wise. If you tell anybody anything, they won’t believe you. And, because I’ve been inside you, I’ll know. And I can make it so you never say anything I don’t want you to say to anybody, not ever again.”
I watched as my father’s free hand, the one not holding my sister, went down and rested, casually, proprietarily, on the swell of Ursula Monkton’s midi skirted bottom.
I would react differently to that now. At the time, I do not believe I thought anything of it at all. I was seven.
Then, swiftly, he picked me up. He put his huge hands under my armpits, swung me up with ease, so I felt like I weighed nothing at all.
I took the box of matches from the mantelpiece, turned on the gas tap and lit the flame in the gas fire.
(I am staring at a pond, remembering things that are hard to believe. Why do I find the hardest thing for me to believe, looking back, is that a girl of five and a boy of seven had a gas fire in their bedroom?)
As I ran, I thought of my father, his arms around the housekeeper-who-wasn’t, kissing her neck, and then I saw his face through the chilly bathwater as he held me under, and now I was no longer scared by what had happened in the bathroom; now I was scared by what it meant that my father was kissing the neck of Ursula Monkton; that his hands had lifted her midi skirt above her waist.
Ursula Monkton smiled, and the lightnings wreathed and writhed around her. She was power incarnate, standing in the crackling air. She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty. She winked at me.
Lettie Hempstock’s hand in my hand made me braver. But Lettie was just a girl, even if she was a big girl, even if she was eleven, even if she had been eleven for a very long time. Ursula Monkton was an adult. It did not matter, at that moment, that she was every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh. She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win.
She said, “I don’t hate her. She does what she does, according to her nature. She was asleep, she woke up, she’s trying to give everyone what they want.”
“Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.”
I said, “People should be scared of Ursula Monkton.”
“P’raps. What do you think Ursula Monkton is scared of?”
“Dunno. Why do you think she’s scared of anything? She’s a grown-up, isn’t she? Grown-ups and monsters aren’t scared of things.”
“Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters.”
“I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
She had started to cry, and I felt uncomfortable. I did not know what to do when adults cried. [...] Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.
I wondered if Ursula Monkton had ever had a mother.
“They need to finish this up. It’s what they do: they’re the carrion kind, the vultures of the void. Their job. Clean up the last remnants of the mess. Nice and neat. Pull you from the world and it will be as if you never existed. Just go with it. It won’t hurt.”
I stared at him. Adults only ever said that when it, whatever it happened to be, was going to hurt so much.
I had stood up to worse things than him in the last few hours. And suddenly, I didn’t care anymore. I looked up at the dark shape behind and above the torch beam, and I said, “Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?” and I knew as I said it that it was the thing I should never have said.
There was silence. The shadows seemed to have become part of the night once again. I thought over what I’d said, and I knew it was true. At that moment, for once in my childhood, I was not scared of the dark, and I was perfectly willing to die (as willing as any seven-year-old, certain of his immortality, can be) if I died waiting for Lettie. Because she was my friend.
