It is often from one of these personal incidents presented in the Dickens original that the adapter finds the spine of their version of the story. In Steve Nallon’s Christmas Carol that image is the boy Scrooge and his imaginative world of play. On his visit to his boyhood school, Scrooge tells the Ghost of Christmas Past that he, the older Scrooge, can still conjure up in his mind all his favourite characters from his favourite childhood reading as if they were real flesh and blood. He can see in his mind's eye Ali Baba, Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday, just as he could when he was a boy. Here we see a man of real imagination yet, as Dickens tells us, not one of his colleagues would ever have considered there was anything of ‘fancy’ about Scrooge. The fascinating drama of the scene is that when the older Scrooge creates in his mind his boyhood friends, we are not seeing Scrooge as a boy but as the child reborn in the adult again able to see what a boy with ‘fancy’ could and can see. Once upon a time, Dickens shows us, this boy Scrooge had such a vivid imagination but somehow on his life’s journey to adulthood fancy, play and pretending were all stamped out.