the secret garden

I've been thinking about this book for months. Out of nowhere remnants of the story came back to me - wasn't there a boy in a wheelchair? Roses? A robin? A spoilt girl from India? Perhaps it was something to do with living in Tokyo for the year: Tokyo being the antithesis of Frances Hodgson Barnett's Victorian English idyll that drew me to the book. That, and struggling with my own waves of homesickness.

"Then I will chant," he said. And he began, looking like a strange boy spirit. "The sun is shining - the sun is shining. That is the Magic. The flowers are growing - the roots are stirring. That is the Magic. Being alive is the Magic - being strong is the Magic. The Magic is in me - the Magic is in me. It is in me - it is in me. It's in every one of us. Magic! Come and help!"  - Colin's Spell.

The Secret Garden is a manual on how to raise children. Burnett advises fresh air, exercise, company, and, no matter how far away, a loving mother. Added to this - or the sum of these things - is the 'Magic' of nature. God's presence in other words, which cures all ailments. Ailments of the body (muscular atrophy, rheumatism, jaundice) and the mind (hysterics, depression, grief) and even defects of character (selfishness, greed, general unpleasantness).

The garden cures the lame Colin - whose disease is all in his mind - and the sour Mary - whose ugliness comes from being a spoilt colonialist's daughter, made 'yellow' by India. The children are in today's terms 'traumatised' by neglect and abuse. No one cares for them: their mothers dead. Dickon, the 'angel' of nature', is blessed not only with a loving mother, but with a house-full of siblings, and the creatures of the Moor, with whom he communes and who brings him closer to the 'Magic' - to God.

A secret garden I discovered yesterday....

Burnett spends an awful lot of time on the physical recoveries - rounding faces, tight stockings, popping buttons; the exercise programmes they devise for themselves; and the food they eat. In fact, Colin and Mary reject the 'fine' food of the estate's kitchens and have cream, milk, bread and buns sent to them from Dickon's mother. Presumably this food is imbued with a mother's love, and its simplicity equates to 'naturalness', and so hurries on their strengthening muscles and rosy cheeks.

Colin starts off as the best character in the book: hidden away in a dark corner, truly going mad with solipsistic illusions of deformity and death. He has terrible tantrums and black moods where he is convinced he is going to die at any moment. He cannot even look at his mother's portrait. The garden cures his paralysis and atrophy, but it doesn't cure his personality. Instead, he ends up being rather dull, serious, preaching 'curate'-like figure, who is bent on scientific discoveries.

Although very of its time with its interest in science, it is difficult to understand why Colin suddenly introduces the word 'scientific' - in the secret garden of all places - where surely 'Magic' and the unfathomable work and spirit of God are king. Another slightly odd thing about the book - which often gets picked on - is how the end never delivers a full summary of Mary's development. It's completely cut short in favour of a close description of Colin's relationship with his father...

The secret garden itself - the roses, delphiniums, daffydowndillies, crocuses - and the Red Robin who observes all, is a paradise of meditation and new awakening. (By meditation I mean the kind of clarity of thought that sometimes steals up on you when you go walking or running or swimming). And Niseko too, I believe, promises this same kind of awakening.

I'm now willing to be transformed by nature and my own secret discoveries - I want to be made 'ruddy', red-cheeked, dishevelled by the outdoors. I want to go round marvelling at nature, running and jumping* and skipping (where did I put the skipping rope again?). After spending so long in classrooms and commuter trains and apaato's in Tokyo, I want to go outside and see the Magic for myself. Experience it like Mary experienced it - take it as medicine for the soul.

For all its old-fashioned values, The Secret Garden offers a vision of how we could choose to live our lives - positively, energetically, simply and full of hope (even if I'm not sure if gardening can really cure advanced rheumatism...)

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throw's ones head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stand still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising sun - which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so.

* In reality, this involves me huffing and puffing uphill on a bike, wishing that I had just for God's sake taken the effing car....