Alice

On the top floor of a bookshop the book I have requested in on the system but not on the shelf.

'This is really going to annoy me now', says the shop assistant when I tell her not to worry.  She has a nose-stud and bronze earrings in the shape of eagles.  Under her black uniform shirt she is wearing a green t-shirt.  'Perhaps someone put it in the Biography section'.  She looks to no avail.  'Usually they turn up', she says and goes back to scan the Poetry again.  By now I have found something else that I am taken by.  'Here it is', she says holding it aloft, 'I knew it would be here somewhere'.  Because I have a book token, I decide to buy both.

'My sister chose it for me', she explains when I ask my question, 'she's five years older than me'.  she tells me that she was named after Alice in Wonderland.  'It was her favourite book at the time', she says.

(Lewis Carroll wrote an acrostic poem for the seven-and-a-half year-old who inspired the Wonderland on a boat-trip down the Isis near Oxford.  It appears at the end of Alice Through the Looking Glass and in it is hidden another middle name... 

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July–

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear–

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream–
Lingering in the golden gleam–
Life, what is it but a dream?)