Philippa Pearce - Tom's Midnight Garden, etc.

[pete9012S]

Staying off topic for a moment.. (the book's in our 'restroom' since you ask!),

this thread about ghosts etc reminds me a little of the film 'The Amazing Mr Blunden'.....Based on the novel 'The Ghosts' by Antonia Barber

The family are told there is an opportunity to become the caretakers of a derelict country mansion in the Home Counties named Langley Park, which was gutted by fire years before, and is now in the charge of the solicitors. Mrs. Allen takes the post despite rumours that the house is haunted, her instructions to care for the property until such time as the heirs to the estate can be traced. The air of mystery deepens when the children see a portrait at the solicitors office of a man they believe to be Mr Blunden. The solicitor confirms this, but reveals that the portrait is of a man called Mr Blunden, but who has been dead for a hundred years.

After they have settled into the new post, Lucy and Jamie see two ghostly figures in the grounds of the house: a teenage girl, Sara Latimer (Rosalyn Landor), and her younger brother, Georgie (Marc Granger). They are two children who lived in the house a century earlier.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Mr_Blunden" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Regards

Pete

[timv]

With regards to Daisy's question about Monica Edwards' 'ghost' episodes in her books, I have read the books in question - these are 'Black Hunting Whip' (the first of the Punchbowl Farm series set at PF, but the second featuring the Thornton family) and 'Spirit of Punchbowl Farm' (the third book set at the farm). The farm in question and its buildings are all real, including the story in BHW of the lost/ demolished 'old wing' of the farmhouse. But they are more 'time travel' than about ghosts, though some of the scenes which the time-travellers observe look a bit misty and presumably if the people in them saw the watchers they might think them to be ghosts.
In BHW there is a search for a diary buried in the cellar of the old wing by a C19th boy who lived at the farm, which gives a clue to the whereabouts of the whip which he used on horseback while show-jumping and hunting; the children find it thanks to the diary clues. Elder boy Dion then uses it with his own horse at the County Horse Show, which the boy was prevented from doing; he lends it to a mysterious boy rider who stands a better chance of winning, but after doing so the boy and whip are never seen again. It is presumed the original owner 'returned' to reclaim it; but if so he time-travelled as he was flesh and blood and seemed 'normal'. In Spirit of PF Dion and his sister LIndsey see visions of the farm and its owners in (presumably) the early C17th from the big yew tree by the house, and L meets the family's boy out in the fields with both of them seeming natural if oddly dressed to the other. This is 'time travel', occurring after Lindsey has played a certain tune on her recorder.There is one 'ghost' incident of a spooky old cottage with strange spontaneous door-opening in ME's Romney Marsh book 'Summer of the Great Secret' ; this is explained as a secret mechanism to scare unwanted visitors but ME apparently based it on incidents at a cottage which she once owned. (Her interest in the paranormal came from her vicar father.)
The ME farm episodes have similarities to the sudden and unexplained transfer of a character from one century to another in a ancient building setting in Alison Uttley's 'A Traveller in Time', which features a C20th girl meeting Mary Queen of Scots. (I read the Green Knowe books when I was about ten and found the Tolkien-like hostile yew tree rather frightening.)

[Julie2owlsdene]

Going back to Tom's Midnight Garden, as I said, I first read this book just a few years ago. I wish I had read it as a child, as I may have had a different view of the book. But I really didn't get it! It's not a ghost story, as no one has died, but there is a different time year in the book, or I think there is, I really can't remember it, as I only read it the once. Maybe I should give it another read, and try and understand it a bit more.

[Courtenay]

Meanwhile, Minnow on the Say is getting unputdownable, except I had to because of work. But I'm going to squeeze in just a little more before I go to bed...

[Eddie Muir]

Minnow on the Say is another delightful book by Philippa Pearce.

[Courtenay]

Well, I finished Minnow on the Say this morning, but I'm surprised and sorry to say I found it a let-down in the end. I won't go too far into detail, but after a wonderful build-up around the middle of the book with lots of suspense and surprises, I felt the plot started to hinge on too many far-fetched elements (e.g. Mr Smith's reaction to hearing his full name and the reason why he wouldn't let his daughter be seen in the village) and it all just seemed to ramble and fizzle out towards the end, much though the ending was happy. I guess I was also disappointed that despite the book's title, the Minnow (the canoe) and the Say (the river) had hardly any significant role in the plot after about the mid-point of the story. I know there are others here who love the book, so I won't go on criticising it, but it's just an unexpected disappointment. However, I do have Tom's Midnight Garden to go on with next!

[Julie2owlsdene]

If I remember rightly, Courtenay, that's how I felt with Tom's Midnight Garden. I was enjoying it until the middle of the book, it kept me wondering, as I thought it was a ghost story. Then when I completed the book I felt I was left in mid air, and I couldn't put it into a catagory. It wasn't the ghost story I thought it would end up being, as that was the way I thought the book was leading. So that was the let down for me. It didn't quite make sense.

As I said in an earlier post, if I'd read it as a child, I may have thought differently.

[Rob Houghton]

Also, Julie, I believe you aren't really a fan of fantasy type books, so maybe this also has a leaning on how you view books such as Tom's Midnight Garden, which is generally a 'fantasy' book in a way. I know you aren't keen on The Faraway Tree etc, so I guess the genre just isn't to your taste.

I've always enjoyed books like that - Faraway Tree, Narnia books, the Enchanted Castle and Phoenix and the carpet, as well as The Children of Green Knowe and Bedknobs and Broomsticks etc, but I know many people find such things a bit weird!

[Courtenay]

Yes, I was just going to say too, I think it's often down to one's personal tastes, whether one enjoys a particular book or not. As I've said before, I'm not a great believer in the "you always love a book most if you read it as a child" theory — a number of my favourite Enid Blyton books are ones I only ever read as an adult! There are some children's books I've tried reading as an adult and haven't taken to, but some of them are ones I originally tried as a child and couldn't get into them then either (including Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows).

With Minnow on the Say, the disappointment wasn't that there was a twist that took the story in a direction I didn't expect; it was mainly that the events in the last third or so of the book didn't feel as convincing and believable to me as what had come before. But I'm sure there are many others who've always found the book perfectly satisfying all the way through, so there it is.

When I first read Tom's Midnight Garden, I think I did wonder for a while if it was a ghost story, but that's the way the plot deliberately builds up — Tom himself wonders whether Hatty is a ghost, until the two of them have a heated argument on the subject and he has to concede she's not. That was one of the most appealing aspects of the book to me — the fact that the whole mystery of the garden isn't explained until right at the end (though there are little hints about it along the way, which I've only picked up on later re-readings), and then it turns out to be something that I certainly found more satisfactory than a ghost story would have been. But again, that's just me.

[Julie2owlsdene]

Quite right, Rob, I'm not a lover of fantasy books, but I don't think I'd categorize TMG as such a book. But as I said, I've only read it the once, I must give it another go when I can.

[Courtenay]

Just looking back at the start of the thread, Julie, you mentioned you were disappointed that the book turned out not to be about ghosts but about dreams instead:

*SPOILER WARNING FOR TOM'S MIDNIGHT GARDEN*





I've just finished reading this book, and when I first started it, I was enjoying it. Then I got halfway through and worked out exactly who Hatty was - the elderly lady living upstairs. So then I realized it wasn't a book about a 'ghost'! It then started to lose it's appeal, as I thought - What's it all about then?

Sorry to give away the plot if anyone hasn't read this, but for me it was just a book about complex dreams, and it was just sheer imagination which I found slightly disappointing.

(FURTHER SPOILERS FOLLOWING! )

I remember when I first read the last couple of chapters of Tom's Midnight Garden years ago, I did at first wonder, while I was reading, whether this meant that Tom, perhaps while asleep himself without knowing it, had simply been entering into the old lady's dreams as she dreamt them and their adventures had only happened in his or her imagination all along — a slightly more sophisticated version of the "and then I woke up and it was all a dream" cliché that some improbable stories end with. I would have found that a big let-down too.

But when you read those final chapters carefully (I've just confirmed this on re-reading them!), it does gradually become clear that although Mrs Bartholomew's dreams were somehow the means by which the garden from her childhood appeared every night, Tom wasn't only entering into these dreams she was having as an old lady — he was genuinely stepping back in time into her real life as a young girl, becoming the mysterious playmate that only she (and the gardener) could see, and who came and went at different times throughout her childhood but started to fade away as she grew up and was less in need of a secret friend. So when they finally meet at the end of the book, she's not recognising Tom merely as a figure who appeared in the dreams she's recently been having — she's recognising him from her actual childhood, as the same boy who became her friend in the garden all those years ago. That for me was what made the story so moving — the idea that because both of them (Tom in the 1950s and young Hatty in the late Victorian era) were lonely and longing so deeply for a friend, somehow that longing brought them together in a friendship that transcended time.

[Julie2owlsdene]

I've forgotten most of that, Courtenay, regarding the dreams, so I guess I should give the book another read.

[Courtenay]

Hope I haven't spoiled it for you, Julie! Of course you might still not like it after a second reading, but it's fair enough to give it another go a few years later.

[Courtenay]

I spent yesterday afternoon in the villages of Great Shelford and neighbouring Little Shelford (just across the river) — both just nice, quiet, ordinary places with a mixture of old and new houses and an excellent cafe/delicatessen in Great Shelford, but of course I was most interested in seeing if I could spot Kings Mill House, Philippa Pearce's childhood home on which the house and garden in Tom's Midnight Garden were based. It's not open to the public, but you can see a fair bit of the house from the lane. It's a very picturesque spot and I wish I could have seen more of it, but will have to be content with the photos of the garden from the Daily Mail article I posted earlier from when the house was last sold. Anyway, it was nice to think that that is the real place that inspired one of my favourite children's books and it's still there today.

I had a look online for more about Philippa Pearce and found her obituary from the Guardian (she died in 2006, aged 86) and also an interview with her when she was 80. Very interesting to read some of her own comments on her writings and what inspired them!

[Eddie Muir]

I’m pleased to hear that you were able to visit both Great Shelford and Little Shelford yesterday afternoon, Courtenay. You must have been thrilled to see Kings Mill House if only from the lane.

Thank you for posting the Guardian links. Most interesting.