Before there was
London Holiday, there was London Halliday.
The former...well,
even after all this time, I still don't know what the right term is for her. Starting
with the question of if she’s real. What defines real? I don’t know
anymore.
As for the latter,
she's real. Flesh and blood and down-to-earth. Call her Doni, for one thing.
Even for those of us who knew all the details, sometimes the similarity in
names got confusing.
Where do I get the
right to tell the story? I was there when London Holiday was born. In a sense,
I was the midwife. Using that analogy, Doni was as close to a mother as London
Holiday would ever get. Doni and I were cousins -- our mothers were sisters.
Her parents were killed in a mine explosion while researching a book, when she
was nine. The Hallidays thought we, the Longfellows, were just plain weird.
From their point of view, "weird" was lower in rank than
"common," and if they had thought they could get any profit from
Doni, we never would have known Aunt Lenore and Uncle Thaddeus were dead.
(Yes, my last name is
Longfellow. And no, we're not related to the poet. Granddad was an orphan, one
of the many orphans through the generations who arrived from nowhere on the edge
of town and landed in the Neighborlee Children's Home. He loved poetry, so he
chose Longfellow when someone gave him the chance to choose his own last name.)
The Hallidays didn’t dump Doni on us when her parents were killed. That would imply some effort to make sure she ended up on our doorstep, which they most certainly did not.
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