Like that inaccessible landscape, her childhood rhyme sheets vanished, over time, into the distance. Later, she would collect others, and put them up on her own children’s walls, but all her life Fitzgerald regretted the loss of those first ones. In old age she wrote to a fellow enthusiast: “I’m perhaps the last person alive who used to go to sleep as a child with a coal fire and the PB rhyme sheets on the walls.”

It’s true you know. The images and words we hang on our walls remain inaccessible landscapes. Look at the art around you. The images, are they not portals to some glorious worlds? This doesn’t change as an adult. In adulthood one forgets.

Penelope Fitzgerald knew this.

Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 31