Tom’s Midnight Garden
Sent to his relatives in Castleford, a fictionalized Cambridge, whilst his brother has measles, Tom discovers a secret hour struck by the clock. In this time, he enters a changed version of his surroundings which echo the history of Hatty, a girl who lived there. Tom explores the secret garden in the hour that he is allowed and soon begins to play with Hatty, experiencing moments with her as she grows up. In her dotage, Hatty begins dreaming of her childhood, reliving her own story with her new companion.
In part it challenges ideas underlying the secondary worlds of Tolkien and Lewis in that the garden is a land of lost and unrecoverable time. It is an old lady’s dream of her own childhood which is shared with another child who feels like an outsider. For fleeting moments, the Late Victorian and post-war Worlds collide, allowing the past to be put to rest and for Tom to move on into his future. The Romantic ideas of a lost past are brushed aside in an extension of the real world and the acceptance of the past as part of history.
Hatty begins to question whether Tom exists in a fairy world where time acts. When Tom promises to see her the next night, one evening, she replies “You always say that, and then its often months and months before you come again.†(p 150) Tom does visit every night but it appears that not all the events are sequential as the fir tree crashes down one evening in flames but is then restored the next. As Hatty gets older, she notices the time more but begins to look to her own future with Barty when he gives her and Tom a lift home from Ely during the frozen winter.
A constant question for the two children is how real is the secret hour and the time shared? For both, it is very real in experience in that Tom shares Hatty’s time and he always leaves his own bed and version of the house. Tom finds that he can walk through doorways as though a ghost but is visible to Hatty and the gardener, Abel, as they begin to believe in the shared time.
The secret hour is about stories, shared through a temporary jostling of narratives. Neither child feels happy or wanted in their adopted homes. Hatty is an orphan and her guardian makes it abundantly clear that she is unwelcome. She even goes as far as to threaten to cut her own son, James, off if he considers marrying Hatty. Hatty makes up stories about her own position as she claims to be a princess and overlays the gardener Abel with the biblical Abel and his brother. As she becomes more comfortable with Tom, she declines in her own creation of fantasy outside of the dreaming. Tom feels unwelcome in the house as he really wants to spend the summer holidays with this brother, with whom he keeps in constant touch. He resents the enforced stay whilst his brother’s measles runs its course. Both children take comfort in each other’s company and explore it. When he is feeling better, Peter also shares in the experience but by this time, Hatty has grown up and is looking to the font and the future in Ely cathedral when he appears.
In the background, Pearce watches the decline of Britain’s imperial might and the country becoming a pale shadow of itself. Her cousins’ family business declines and Barty, Hatty’s husband, buys the house, though it is broken up into flats after the death of their sons in the Great War. Industrial pollution has changed the Say from the clear river when Tom experiences it in the dream and when his Aunt takes him to it.
The garden is created from Mrs Bartholomew’s dreams of her childhood as an outsider but Tom is able to access the dream world. The adult creates the world in which the children can play. The world is accessible to Tom only on Hatty’s terms and then his never fully formed, remaining a ghostly hallucination. However it cannot be fully controlled by Hatty in terms of time when months pass for her whilst only a day passes for Tom. Pearce appears to settle on the side of the fiction being an escapist construct which is created by an adult for their own purposes. Mrs Bartholomew tells Tom that it is her dream he has accessed which is why some of the events, like burning of the tree, happen out of order. He is trapped in reminiscences yet begins to navigate through his own temporary identity crisis as an outsider. In the real world, Tom feels like an intruder into his aunt and uncle’s life whilst his brother is ill, banished to an old nursery which still has bars on the windows. Unconsciously he is reliving and echoing Hatty’s childhood as also had that room, as the only spare one available. This time slip allows the echoes to move the story along in terms of explaining the echoes and allowing Tom to come to terms with his own displaced position and move away from the Late Victorian ripples which envelope him.
Tom’s Midnight Garden is a book which still has great resonance in its time slip. The hallucinatory, moonlit garden still enthralls as a portal world. The book develops the questions of place and identity present in children’s fiction at the time from T.H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose to Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes. Unlike White or Mary Norton’s Borrowers, Pearce focuses on the way that the child can gain agency over themselves through understanding the garden and the relationships of the people in it. By doing that, which nearly drives Tom to hysteria, he understands that it is something which will change and also end. Despite the fading grandeur around him, Tom realizes that world can be made magical through questioning it rather than accepting his own position as a temporary outsider.