Martin Handford

Why did I search for you?
Your absence echoing your presence back to me, a single chord, sublime in its simplicity, haunting in its resonances.

Was it loneliness, then? The summer stillness of my childhood room? A world outside for the children who loved soccer and music and insects; a world closed to me by gates invisible yet solid as steel?

Or, perhaps, empathy? Your eternal stare reminded me of my father, leaving a handful of notes on the table as my parents went out to dinner. Your ability show more to disappear so quickly, so guilelessly, was that of my mother in a crowded room. Anybody but me, it seemed.

Was it ownership? To an intellectual boy in a dusty town, so little is his own. Something tangible. A place to write my name. "This Where's Wally book belongs to...".

Fantasy, sure. Any of my long string of child therapists would have drawn this conclusion from the top of the deck. The Cake Factory. The Odlaw Swamp. The Mighty Fruit Fight. These were places into which one could comfortably retreat, like well-worn memories from a time one had never lived, like something passed down in the songs of hope and woe sung by the balladeers who kept my ancestors' souls warm throughout those long, medieval winters.

Obsessive-compulsiveness, said one therapist - of the newer school - but my lack of interest in cataloguing the exact time on every clock in The Corridors of Time sent that theory spiralling rapidly toward the bin. She became the latest on the list of rejected specialists, quickly reduced to "the one with the Miss Piggy garbage bin" in family anecdotes.

For my own diagnosis, perhaps it was fear. Fear. For if I could not even find Wally and Wenda and Woof, how was I ever to find a future? The world would always be off-brand Lego and movies taped to VCR from the television and sitting politely on the sofa while adult guests enjoyed pâté and cheese, every so often deigning to ask me a question to which they had no interest in the mumbled answer.

Loyalty? I had long fancied myself to be noble. I had followed Wally and friends through four weighty tomes; what kind of a Sancho Panza would I be to abandon them at this juncture?

Looking back, from somewhere further down the mountain, I delude myself into the notion that my search was born of love. (The stroke of death, says Shakespeare, is as a lover's pinch, which hurts, and is desired.) The feeling came much easier to me then. A quick wit, an innovative outpouring of words and ideas, and emotion arose. Not to the surface - "never to the surface" is on my family crest - but somewhere close beneath. The bubbling cauldron, the fiery furnace, the precarious rope-bridge of human sentiment which was tamped down amongst my human companions but could dance effusively between the pages of a book.

With hindsight, I may never know why I searched. Why I still search. As the fires and floods claim our land, however, I am drawn to an undeniable truth. The worst of nature will ravage us. The worst of corporations, the worst of anger and hate, the worst of human evil - all will have their fill. But what they claim is only ever corporeal, ephemeral, at heart physical. What they must leave behind are memories and ideas. The two greatest innovations of our species.

Perhaps it was enough to know that I would carry Wally with me. Forever would I know that no matter how lost Wizard Whitebeard became (his chronic shoelessness a source of great concern to my younger self), no matter how many cunning plans Odlaw devised, how many hills and dales were scoured by Wenda and Woof, they would all end up together, on the final page, waving their farewells. I knew that some companions will never leave us. Some ideas will never be destroyed by folly. Some memories must remain.

Because the secret of this life is that we never find that which we seek. We find so much besides that the journey replaces the destination. We all must begin with a list of items to search for. But we all must learn that the real search begins when we reach the end of the list.

It is the knowing how to search that will save us.

And by Wally I was saved. show less

In the years that followed, we often spoke of our experiences with Wally in hushed tones. Of the ladies on the grand staircase in gay Paree. The boiling oil pouring from the turrets during the Crusades. The question of our hero's loitering "fans", the imitators, expecting us to find them even while we were searching for someone superior.

The experiences followed us wherever we went. Those quiet moments in the cinema, absorbing an adult world through our childish eyes. The laughter behind the show more school buildings. They were echoed in the trees of the woods just outside town limits and reflected in the water of the swimming pool from three metres up on the diving board.

We had been drawn in initially by our fascination with the subject matter: Ancient Egypt, the Vikings, 18th century piratical ways. We had remained because we weren't just searching for Wally. Yes, there were his traveller's accoutrements and, in later editions, his queer group of pals (we pre-"special edition" children would soon have many an axe to grind).

But in our travels through Old Japan and the Gold Rush, the quest took on a vigour beyond that of youths with their puzzles. We were sharing an experience, haunted by questions we might never answer, figures who might remain forever shrouded in mist. Like the wealthy figures in Gay Paree looking on baffled at a scruffy hobo drinking good wine in their midst, we analysed the world through the prism of our culture and our youth. Much that others knew was still unknowable to us.

Of course, some claimed they had found everything. These toffee-nosed few announced their triumphs on the monkey bars although few brought with them spreadsheets to prove their claims. The Gold Rush picture felt especially fitting. We were all rushing headlong towards a site of untold riches, if only we could uncover them, but aware that a desperate fate awaited those who sought but did not find. Many came away with only a fraction of the promised booty, and made do with a life half in shadow. Others found the central prize but failed to take note of the joys that lay in searching beyond that. Some suffered the inverse fate: they found all the fans, all the kit, but never Wally himself. Like the child on Christmas morning spoiled with luxury but denied the much-wished-for pony, they carried on aware that they would appear to those around them as life's winners, but would be dogged forever by an impermeable sense of loss.

A few did find everything, it's true. But by the time that work was done, weeks had passed. Months. They returned to the schoolyard, haggard and drawn, weeping when they meant to laugh because the former had become grim habit. They shared their victories with us and we congratulated them but our voices were soft and limpid, our eyes had no sparkle. We had found other loves in the meantime, and only now did we realise this poor soul had been left behind, on a carnival ride destined for the wrecker's yard.

Many years later, there would be Special Editions and the unforgivable replacement of the Crusades page with a generic Medieval scene. Video games were designed, a television series came and went. New generations had our experiences, and we had to remind ourselves they were no more ours than anyone else's. For we had heard the chimes at midnight.

All along, we now knew, we had not really been searching for Wally.

We had been searching for ourselves. show less

When the final war came, we could not say it was a surprise. We had been warned for years, even decades, that our world was becoming divisive. Splinters of opinion running down the very spine of our culture. Yet we remained largely unprepared.

In those days after the satellites came down, we lost the internet, our connection, telecommunications outside of our own continent. Space was a battlefield now. Those of us who could help the refugees from burning countries did what we could, while the show more children of the coastal cities were sent inland to seek sanctuary.

It's the songs that I remember most. Who knows where the first voice came from, but as the war stretched on, the singing was the key to our resilience. At first millions fought on each side, but the soldiers of the oppressors realised gradually - hundreds first, then thousands, then many more - that they were fighting for their own demise. Soon it became the many resisting the few, and yet somehow the few still seemed triumphant. They had prepared such an intricate web that they held on to so much of what we needed: the fuel, the industries, the media, the deeds to so many of the homes. The battle to reclaim our land was hard-fought and hard-won. And what greeted us at its conclusion was rawness and pain. A world to rebuild. A cycle to begin again.

When we returned to the ancient texts, however, we discovered the depth of our existing knowledge. How much we had learned from our hunt for Wally, even if the Americans did insist on calling him Waldo, a translation barrier that caused no small fracas during the transition.

We realised now that our enemies were no more than Dracula with a teddy bear. That we must fight with the continued vigour of an underwater cat. That we must make it through the majesty of an dragon cave chase. We had been given the gifts and insight we needed to complete the race of life, and find ourselves at the great gluttonous feast of chapter 1.

And we discovered, too, as we shared songs and fellowship around the campfire, that we had all been beguiled and bewildered by that final Land of Wallies, haunted by the sense of our very self as one of a seething mass, guests at a dreamlike parade in which we are both the spectacle and the spectator.

We know at last that what is to come can never be like it was before. We emerged with hopes not dashed but becalmed, honour restored, glory resisted in favour of contentment.

We know where Wally is now, but we keep him just out of sight. To keep the journey going by choice without need for reward.

We are home. And to know that Wally is nearby, scampering behind a mermaid or a dwarf or a bespectacled waiter is all we ever needed to know. show less

When Wally returned, we knew he was not as before. His clothes were the same, that memorable striped livery, but in his eyes, in his smile, lay the ravages of time.

Was it the fame which had changed him? Perhaps. He had become a star of the screen, an international totem, a universal Rorschach test - representing hopefulness, frustration, the eternal quest... what you will.

We welcomed Wally in with that delicate mix of awe and disdain with which old friends greet newfound celebrity. We found show more in him a figure changed, but not by fame and fortune. His dry wit and natural compassion were unaffected, his world-weary eyes still sparkled when he saw dancing girls or clowns or the other novelties which seemed to flourish in his presence. Instead, it was clear he was yet another victim of that old common arbitrator: Time.

When one has seen the world, they say, one finds the path home. For Wally, though, that path had always seemed opaque. He had made a life in the margins. He was the human lacuna, the man in the mist, the faithful companion never quite within reach. And now, after so many years, he felt no more sure of where his journey would end. Worst of all, it was our fault. His attempts to form a détente with Odlaw forever dashed because of the public's demand for a recognisable villain. Their desire to remove the influence of that old straight white man, Wizard Whitebeard, rejected due to a misguided sense of tradition. And that eternal beating of the drum, calling Wally, Wenda and their friends to disappear into the crowd once again.

To disappear but never to be forgotten: that, ultimately, was what had changed our friend so powerfully. The knowledge that no party, no panorama, no amount of pandemonium could allow him true anonymity. They would always be there - searching for him, calling his name, demanding to discover him. To millions, he was merely an object, a riddle. When would he ever just be Wally?

I pray only that one day the streets will empty, the world go silent, and that peace descends just long enough for him to wander, unspotted, unnoticed, through this vale of tears. show less