Friday, 7 August 2026, 1:13 pm
Article: Gordon Campbell
This
week’s essay on classic children’s books features
Philippa Pearce’s great YA novel about memory and loss.
The image of Ely Cathedral is from circa 1881, and depicts
the landscape as it was not long before a key scene in the
book.
For anyone trying to write
about it, Tom’s Midnight Garden poses a significant
problem. The twist ending will be well known to anyone who
has read the book, but first-time readers would be justified
in wanting to kill anyone who spoils the surprise, which
provides one of the most satisfying finales in children’s
fiction. So if I seem to circle somewhat mysteriously around
aspects of Philippa Pearce’s classic novel, that’s
why.
Otherwise, the basic plot for Tom’s Midnight
Garden is simple enough. Tom Long, a young schoolboy,
has his summer holiday spoiled when his brother Peter
contracts measles. Tom is packed off to stay with his kindly
aunt and pedantic uncle who rent a boring house with an old
and erratic grandfather clock in the hall downstairs, and an
elderly landlady in the flat upstairs.
Unable to sleep
soon after his arrival, Tom hears the clock – at midnight
– strike 13, and curiosity drives him out of his bedroom
to investigate what time is showing on the dial. He finds
himself in a Victorian garden, some sixty or more years in
the past. Each subsequent night at the 13th hour, Tom has a
brief period of time to explore the garden, where he meets a
young girl called Hatty and strikes up a deep friendship
with her. Yet on each visit, what to Tom is merely the next
night is experienced as a period of months and years in
Hatty’s life, and she gradually grows up and away from
him, into a young woman.
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Tom’s sense of loss, and
his attempt to puzzle out the nature of the twin realities
he is inhabiting – is Hatty a ghost, and if this garden is
a dream, whose dream is it? – are merely one dimension of
this beautifully crafted story, which becomes a meditation
on time, memory and loss.
None of the deeper themes of
the book get in way of the enjoyment that younger readers
can take in Tom’s story. Pearce portrays her characters
and the physical setting so vividly that the fantastic time
travel/ghost story elements of the tale seem completely
credible. However, the elements of memory and nostalgia may
also explain why adult readers love the book so much. Even
at the time of its publication, the critic John Rowe
Townsend – who was not someone easy to please – had this
to say :
It is as near to being perfect in its
construction and its writing as any book I know. I think
only a woman could have written it ; girls should like it,
and adults, and thoughtful boys, but not the lovers of the
rough stuff.
The book has a profound,
mysterious sense of time; it has the beauty of a theorem,
but it is not abstract; it is sensuously as well as
intellectually satisfying. The garden is so real that you
can have the scent of it in your nostrils…I have no
reservations to make about it. If I were asked to name a
single masterpiece of English children’s literature since
the last war it would be this outstandingly beautiful and
absorbing book.
One
explanation for the precision of Pearce’s description of
the walled garden in her story is that – as a child – she
had played in it herself. Born in 1920 as the daughter of a
miller she was something of an “isolated” child, being
younger than her three siblings, and so sickly that she
didn’t start school until she was eight or nine.
The
garden where Tom and Hatty meet was inspired by the mill
house in which she lived, which also had a walled garden
with a sundial set into one wall. As she also explained in
the same interview, the family attachment to this
Cambridgeshire house went back for generations, and as a
adult she had lived in a cottage just across the road from
the same house. Like Tom, her father had once skated all the
way along the frozen river, to Ely
Cathedral.
Ingeniously plotted as it is, and resting
on solid memories for its physical setting, Tom’s
Midnight Garden would still have been nothing without
the skill that has gone into the deceptively simple writing.
Townsend was dead right about Pearce’s attention to the
sensuous texture of the world she created. Here for example,
is a passage from near the book’s beginning, where Tom
climbs a tree. Only someone who has climbed a lot of
trees could have written this passage:
The first
branches grew conveniently low, and the main trunk had
bosses and crevices. With the toes of his left foot fitted
into one of these last, Tom curved his hands around the
branch over his head. Then he gave a push, a spring and a
strong haul on the arms: his legs and feet were dangling
free, and the branch was under his chest, and then under his
middle. He drew himself still further forward, at the same
time twisting himself expertly; now he was sitting on the
bough, a man’s height above ground.
The rest
of the ascent was easy but interesting: sometimes along the
spreading outermost branches, sometimes working close to the
main trunk, Tom loved the dry feel of the bark on the main
trunk. In places the bark had peeled away, and then a deep
pink showed beneath, as though the tree were skin and flesh
beneath the brown. Up and up he went, and burst at last from
the dim interior into an openness of blue and fiery gold.
The sun was the gold, in a blue sky. All around him was a
spreading tufted surface of evergreen. He was on a level
with the tall south wall…
Towards the end of the
book, Tom and the now womanly Hatty go skating down the icy
river together. The sweeps of the prose mimic the blades on
the ice, and convey a vast sense of freedom – and of
contentment in each other’s company, and the joy of simply
being in the world together:
The skates were on,
and now Hatty and Tom were ready for the ice; two skaters on
one pair of skates, which seemed to Tom both the eeriest and
the most natural thing in the world. A new skill and power
came into him, as though these skates knew their work better
than the skater: he could skate as well as Hatty, because
these were her skates…
They did not skate
with linked hands, as many skating partners did, for fear of
the odd appearance being noticed but once they had left
behind the thick crowds of sociable skaters just below the
town, they skated abreast, keeping time together, stroke for
stroke. There was no wind at all that afternoon, and they
cut through the still air, faster and
faster.
Hatty had pinned her skirt up above her
ankles, for greater freedom of movement; and now she
abandoned the use of her muff, the better to swing her arms
in time with their skating. Their speed made the muff fly
out behind her on its cord, and at last a stroke gave it
such a violent fling that the cord broke and the fur ball
shot away and landed in the middle of a game of bandy and
somehow became part of the game and was never seen again.
Hatty saw it disappear, and neither stopped nor faltered in
her course but only laughed, as though she cared nothing now
for muffs or improprieties or aunts. They skated
on…
There
is something about Tom’s Midnight Garden that
brings out the best in the critics who have written about
it. Humphrey Carpenter for instance, in his book Secret
Gardens (about the golden age of children’s
literature) brilliantly likens Pearce’s novel to an
inverted version of Peter Pan.
To Carpenter, the book
is “a rewriting of Peter Pan from Peter’s point of
view” with Tom’s sorrow about losing the garden – and
Hatty – being akin to Peter’s fervent attempts to persuade
Wendy to stay with him in Never Never Land forever. However,
Hatty does grow up, falls in love and leaves Tom behind as a
ghost from her childhood. The last time he tries to visit
the garden it is no longer there. Paradise has been paved,
leaving behind only a yard filled with
dustbins.
Gardens do readily lend
themselves to symbolic purposes. In this case, the garden
feels real and tangible, although experienced with
dream-like intensity. Yet the story also carries its
symbolic meanings so un-obtrusively that I missed them
entirely on first reading. They are there though, in at
least two respects.
Firstly, from the book of
Genesis…it is not accidental that the grandfather clock
that serves as the gateway to the garden carries the image
of an angel, and Tom later dreams of the same angel barring
his way back to the garden with a flaming
sword.
Secondly, amidst the book’s insights and
ruminations about the nature of time – is it linear or
circular, or does it co-exist in parallel dimensions ?
–there is a quote from Revelations (Rev. 10: 1-6) about
the dissolution of time. Like a good Sunday school Victorian
girl, it is Hatty who first mentions this quotation. Later
on, the same point is picked up explicitly.
Tom
said: “We’re both real. Then and Now. Its as the angel
said: Time No Longer.”
This metaphysical
dimension is present, but not omnipresent. In interviews,
Pearce said that her own thinking about the nature of time
was inspired
by J.W. Dunne’s book An
Experiment With
Time which her brother and friends were
reading when she first started to write Tom’s
Midnight Garden. “I never understood it
properly, but it was a sort of theoretical base for the
book. ”
For all its poignancy, Tom Midnight
Garden is not pessimistic or maudlin. By means I can’t
divulge without spoiling the ending, Pearce finally manages
to portray the transition from childhood fears and desires
to adult compassion in an entirely positive
fashion.
In his Northern Lights trilogy, Philip
Pullman also likened this rite of passage to the Fall in the
book of Genesis. To Pullman, the Fall marks the positive
moment when humanity first started to think and act for
itself, and to live in a world where happiness and pain are
our own responsibilities.
By the end of this book, Tom
is finally able to do likewise.
For this essay,
Gordon Campbell drew upon material contained in volume 9 of
the Children’s Literature Review and volume 129 of the
Something About the Author series – most notably, the
interview with Philippa Pearce by Roni Natov and Geraldine
DeLuca published in The Lion and the Unicorn, volume 9,
1985.
Previous essays in this series: The
Moomins by Tove Jansson; Goodnight
Moon by Margaret Wise Brown; Badgers
Parting Gifts by Susan Varley; The
Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford;
Harriet
The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh; The
Indian in The Cupboard by Lynne Reid
Banks; The
Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper; The
True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, by
Avi; Abel’s
Island by William Steig; Mrs
Frisby And The Rats of NIMH by Robert C.
O’Brien; Homecoming
by Cynthia Voigt; The
Hunger Games by Suzanne
Collins
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