I am rather taken with unexpected doors, doorways, gates, stairs leading nowhere, bricked up entrances… and this one; it’s a door in a wall that I walk past several times a week in our village. The wall is neat and well-maintained, but it is too high to see the house beyond it. I’m sure there must be another entrance, but I’m in no hurry to look for it, I prefer to imagine that this is the only one and there is some mystery as to why it is so rarely used that ivy has grown across it and round it, and squeezed through the gap between the hinges.
I think it stems from stories I read as a child, ‘The Secret Garden’, ‘Tom’s Midnight Garden’ and of course the Narnia stories… and others which I cannot clearly remember except that they involved doorways which were sometimes there and sometimes not, gates that were invisible except under certain circumstances, and mysterious ways which would appear only to the right people.
Lois Elsden 