THE DOOR IN THE WALL.

Lewis Carroll recognised an item that belonged in Wonderland when he saw it. He introduces the low door, you will remember, during the incident with the glass table, the golden key and the bottle labelled DRINK ME: “Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw.”

In 1911 (50 years later), HG Wells published what would become his most famous short story, “The Door in the Wall”. This took the form of a narrative related by Lionel Wallace, cabinet minister, telling an old friend how, as a five-year-old child wandering the streets of West Kensington, he once chanced across a green door let into a white wall. Entering it, he found himself in “an enchanted garden”. There were monkeys and tame panthers and a kindly girl and all the friendly playmates that, being lonely and motherless, were absent from his own existence.

The door in the wall haunts Wallace as he grows up. Over the years, he comes across it again as he hurries here and there, though it never seems to be exactly where he remembers, and he always sees it at moments when, for some reason, it’s impossible to stop. After relating this story to his friend, he declares his determination, if he ever sees the door again, to enter it without fail. Shortly afterwards, his death is announced. It’s reported that he inexplicably entered a door in a wall which opened onto the deep shaft of a building site, at the base of which his body was discovered.