Kingfisher Days

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

The actress Susan Coyne was five years old when she started a
correspondence with a fairy who lived near the family cottage in Kenora.
Princess Nootsie Tah, the granddaughter of Nuitziton who ruled Peru, was
in Kenora on a thousand-year exile from her home. To fill in the time,
presumably, she launched on a course of instruction to Susan about the
land of fairies and elves where meetings were held to decide whether
cats in Canada should learn French and where a kitchen could hold too
many cooks. She also hinted, when allowed, of the mysterious story of
her parents.

Susan showed these letters to her neighbor, Mr. Moir, who happened to
have an extensive library of books that told stories of Queen Mab,
Oberon, Ariel, and other fairies. Strangely, whenever Mr. Moir had to go
away, the letters from Nootsie Tah ceased.

It was Susan’s father who first suggested that a small fireplace
under a hedge may have been used by elves, but it was Mr. Moir who led
the child to the world of fairies as explored by such writers as
Shakespeare, Shelley, and Keats.

The cover of the memoir states that it is based on a childhood
correspondence with R.C. Moir. This news might have been kept for an
epilogue, which would have provoked the reader to struggle with many
questions throughout the story. That’s what courses of instruction are
about.

The memoir is short and small in the hand, simply written, and full of
country sights and smells, the curious exile of the Princess, and, of
course, the doings of fairies. The handwriting of the messages from
Nootsie Tah is reproduced

in perfectly legible letters and intriguing fragments of illustration
float along the sides of the pages.

Of course, a reader may not believe in fairies or may have qualms over
the deception of a five-year-old; such a reader may then have to make do
with contemplating the child at the heart of an actor.