The Girl Who Grew Up In The TARDIS (Wattys2014)

"It's time."

 How can you fight an enemy who the moment you look away and turn your back you can’t remember them? I still find it hard to picture the Silence, just thinking about those towering, long faced bulbous eyed creatures makes my flesh creep. And yet in the end it turned out they were not all that they seemed. But I’ll never feel the same way about the first moon landing again while the girl in the spacesuit haunted my dreams, another motherless child lost and alone. But even when the girls identity was discovered later on to be River, there was nothing the Doctor could have done to have changed it. River’s tragic beginnings were a fixed point in time. So for a time events just continued to get darker and more complicated for the Doctor and his companions, no one was what they seemed and the Doctor grew very secretive and manipulative but it was the only way he was going to survive. I was still recovering from the Universe nearly ending and then I was hit by the shock of Amy being a duplicate, while the real Amy had been kidnapped months ago and all this time she had been pregnant and soon after the birth her newborn baby girl was taken away from her. I had never seen the Doctor radiate as much anger as he did that day, he never actually gave way to it but it was there, his darkness and terrible rage waiting to take hold. But I could only imagine the agonising heartache of the Ponds losing their baby girl Melody but then the shock for them all when that same girl turned out to be River (the Doctor’s very own bespoke psychopath assassin) who had been raised by the self-righteous and sinister eye patched Madame Kovarian to kill the Doctor but I was yet to find out who the Doctor’s enemies really were and wondered if their insanity knew no bounds as they inexplicably tried to destroy the Time Lord. But they made a seriously bad mistake the day they chose to get to the Doctor through his friends and they made the fatal error of underestimating him. But not even his closest friends could have foreseen how the Doctor was going to escape his death and rather poignantly it just so happened to be on the day the Doctor found out about the Brigadier’s death that he decided to stop running but maybe not even the Doctor can run forever. Ah but again all was not as it seemed… I knew that the Doctor had not died, that all along he had been hiding in the Teselecta replica of himself and I’ll be eternally grateful for a sneak preview from the TARDIS because unlike poor Amy I didn’t have to go through the trauma of seeing the Doctor shot down and killed. And the deception played out by the Doctor but also by his companions to his younger self might have been difficult to watch but I’m afraid it was necessary. Though did his enemies seriously think the Doctor would accept his so called fate and walk meekly to his death by the hands of the woman who loved him? So the Doctor tricked his enemies and lay low (not for very long I hasten to add) but the Ponds never got to raise their daughter. I guess they paid the ultimate price, far more than any of the Doctor’s companions and relinquished a normal life the moment they stepped through those blue doors on their wedding night and continued on their travels with the Doctor. During this time there was so much confusion, it was impossible for me to follow events with any clarity as all reality and timelines were jumbled up, along with the Doctor’s and River’s “wedding” but with a kiss everything was set right in the end and the Doctor did not die beside the lake and was very much alive at the end of it all. For myself I was left deeply saddened by what had happened to Amy, I don’t know how I could possibly know what it’s like but I felt Amy’s pain at not being allowed to be a mother. She would have been a great mother and I never did find out whether she had another child but I guess she learnt to live with it and Amy was never alone as long as she still had her Rory. I later discovered that Melody had shared their childhood and had grown up alongside her parents (strange and mixed up but no more than my life), so at least Amy and Rory had known their daughter as they all grew up together.

 The TARDIS had been under attack before, I had always been safely shielded but I had never experienced anything approaching the blind terror I felt the day, her soul had been ripped away by a malevolent entity known as “House” and all that was left was an empty time machine with raw artron energy. How could this have happened? The Doctor had grown careless and he should have been protecting her. In that moment I forgave the TARDIS for everything she had done and all the things she had kept from me. The emptiness ripped me apart. I just wanted my mum back. There I’ve said it now, I am her child and it took me until I was nearly twenty one years to acknowledge it. How screwed up am I? I clung to the shadows and kept moving, I knew the TARDIS better than anyone else, even the Doctor. I was certain House would find me but they were preoccupied with chasing and torturing Amy and Rory. Thankfully the Doctor came to the rescue but he wasn’t alone, he’d had a little help… The TARDIS was with him but in a human’s body, a young girl but I knew straight away it was her, it was tragic for the girl who had died to be a host for the TARDIS but at the same time here was my TARDIS in human form, breathing and talking just like me, I would have loved to have met her that way, to have said hello but of course the TARDIS could not live in a body. And as soon as she was back in her control room, she soon sorted House out and even if there was the slightest chance that there were any TARDIS’ left in the Universe House wouldn’t be devouring anymore. Oh but the human version of the TARDIS was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and now whenever she “talks” to me I always see her that way now.

 Anyway you would have thought the Ponds had been through enough but they kept on travelling with their friend until it got too dangerous to be the Doctor’s friend. So the Doctor bought the Ponds a gorgeous house, sent them away to safety but somehow fate, enemies and River kept bringing them back together. I guess the Doctor couldn’t give his friends up either and Amy still needed her raggedy man. And the years went by for his friends but the Doctor didn’t notice or at least he pretended not to notice. But when you are a companion of the Doctor it cannot last forever and one day in 1930s Manhattan time caught up with Amy and Rory, or rather the Weeping Angels. The Doctor, Amy, Rory and River stumbled across their old enemies and made the horrific discovery that the angels were harvesting humans, cruelly keeping them trapped in apartments and feeding on all the potential time energy of their lives. Rory was to be one of their victims, until he and Amy jumped together from the roof of that building and created a paradox which poisoned the Angels. And I thought it was over, that the Ponds with their Daughter River would carry on with the Doctor, not forever, I’ve been fooled by forever before but I thought it wouldn’t end that day… It was a lone angel who got Rory in the graveyard and then for Amy there really wasn’t a choice as she finally left her Doctor because the TARDIS could not return to that point in time and rescue them for it would rip a great big hole in the fabric of reality…In time…or was it the rest of the Universe. I don’t know I was crying too hard to understand the implications. And so if the Doctor was unable to say it, then I will… Goodbye Amy and Rory. Once the angel touched Amy and sent her back in time to Rory their gravestone was filled in and in that moment Amy and Rory were dead to the Doctor. Because he could have gone back to a later time to have visited them, even if it was for one last time but once the Doctor had seen his friend’s gravestone then it was over for him, you see the Doctor doesn’t like endings and goodbyes were never his thing. The next time I saw the Doctor he was hidden away in his TARDIS, her interior had changed again, it was darker to match the Doctor’s state of mind, more clinical and polished but the time rotor on the central column was simply majestic as it rose up into the luminous domed ceiling. The Doctor meanwhile was high up in the clouds living the life of a recluse, he had turned his back on the Universe and was frozen in his grief. But I know him too well and I always knew he would come back but the time it took the Doctor to get over his little Amelia was quite rightly immeasurable.

 And then one night I had the most terrifying and thrilling dream, so vivid that it must have really happened. And even upon awaking the dream stayed with me so that I couldn’t function properly for days after, every time I thought of the dream my heart would pound and I could feel myself shake as my head would be flooded with images that I couldn’t forget. I don’t know how to explain it but… Gallifrey has survived!  It’s out there, somewhere in another dimension, a pocket Universe as far as I understand it. So the Doctor didn’t destroy his people but he saved them. This has made me so unimaginably happy. Don’t ask me how this occurred but it came to me in a dream, so many TARDIS’ flying to Gallifrey’s aid that I lost count but I know it was all my Doctors, somehow and impossibly in the same time and space, saving his home and I am grateful, honoured and so happy that the TARDIS let me see. And now I wonder what the Doctor will do next. Gallifrey is lost but if anyone can find it then surely the Doctor can?