Peter walked through that door with the others. And inside, he found not darkness, but a green field, rolling forever. There was the Dawn Treader at anchor. There was Reepicheep, older now, but still twirling his whiskers. There was Digory Kirke, young again. And there, galloping over the endless hill, was Aslan.

He was fourteen again, firing an arrow at a wolf. His brother Edmund, pale and treacherous, had just been saved. The Witch’s spell of “always winter, never Christmas” had frozen Narnia’s heart. But the four thrones at Cair Paravel were empty for a reason.

The hardest tale, he thought, was not of battles or voyages. It was of Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole, two schoolchildren running from bullies. They fell into Narnia not through a wardrobe or a painting, but by standing on a cliff in a storm.