But when the narrator goes to get it from the car, he finds that the car is gone. On the first day of the spring holidays, the narrator goes downstairs, excited for the SMASH! comic his father brought home. His taxi runs Fluffy over, and to replace the kitten, the opal miner gives the narrator a mean tomcat named Monster. He names the kitten Fluffy and they become best friends-until the opal miner, a new tenant, arrives. After this, the narrator immerses himself in the books he receives and is thrilled when his father brings home a black kitten. Not long after, the narrator celebrates his seventh birthday-but no one comes to his party. He and his sister fight about whether the door stays open at night (the narrator is terrified of the dark). The narrator is sad because the room is special to him, but he moves into his little sister’s bedroom. When the narrator is six years old, his parents fall on hard times to make money, they rent out the narrator’s bedroom. As the narrator sits by this pond, he remembers that Lettie used to call it her “ ocean.” Then, suddenly, the narrator remembers everything. Hempstock, Lettie’s mother, though she looks more like Lettie’s grandmother, Old Mrs. He greets the elderly woman in the farmhouse-she must be Mrs. He remembers that his friend Lettie lived here until she went to Australia.

The narrator drives down the lane and comes to the farm at the end. The house that’s currently standing is the new house his parents built it when the narrator was a teenager, after they knocked down their rambling old house. The adult narrator drives away from a funeral service and finds himself in front of the house where he grew up.

Gaiman the ocean at the end of the lane