Little Georgie Cottar screams that a policeman on the Down has entered the nursery; servants blame a gardener's tale, and the housekeeper soothes him while the household moves to Oxford and later to the country. At six Georgie discovers he can continue his mother's unfinished nursery tale in his own head, secretly naming himself prince and giant-killer and giving his dream princess the doubled name Annieanlouise. Every adventure begins at the same brushwood pile near a beach, then spills into impossible geography: cardboard ships, gilt railings that turn soft, and a steamer that carries him to stone lilies marked Hong-Kong and Java. At a performance of Pepper's Ghost he meets a lisping girl with Alice-in-Wonderland hair who tends his cut thumb, and she soon joins the brushwood country as Miriam without either child knowing they will meet again.
Ten years at public school discourage dreaming on paper but cannot stop the night country; George wins his growth under cricket, football, and paper-chases, rising from fag to head of school with the same grave responsibility he later gives the regiment. Sandhurst and a line commission send him to India, where loneliness, polo, and a major's library teach him profession while adjutants repeat the old lesson: know your men. Detached to a mud fort with twenty of the corps' worst soldiers, he replaces drunken riot with boxing gloves, torn-paper hunts, and village wrestling until the detachment marches home lean, sober, and loyal. A second detachment of worse devils returns the same way, and the mess begins to say women would give their eyes to catch Young Innocence, though Cottar calls tennis and garden-parties futile piffle.
The policeman on the Down arrived when Georgie was six and left him screaming before he could explain what he had seen. The servants blamed a gardener's tale told too close to bedtime, and the household moved on, but Georgie kept the image privately because it was true in a way that correcting it would not fix. By the time he was old enough to track where the dream began, he had mapped the brushwood pile at the path's start, the beach extending to the left, and the cardboard ships offshore whose gilt railings went soft if he tried to examine them too carefully.
He met the lisping girl at a Pepper's Ghost performance when he was nine, the age when a cut thumb and someone else tending it constitutes a sufficient introduction. She had Alice-in-Wonderland hair and occupied the dream geography as if she had always been in it and had simply been offscreen. He knew her as Miriam in the brushwood country for years without knowing that the name was hers in daylight, and she knew him as the Boy who ran the Thirty-Mile Ride without knowing who he would be when both of them woke up.
