Telling Children's Stories: Narrative Theory and Children's Literature

14. “Time No Longer: The Context(s) of Time in Tom’s Midnight Garden

268 14 { “Time No Longer” The Context(s) of Time in Tom’s Midnight Garden angelika zirker In Tom’s Midnight Garden wishes magically come true: when Tom Long arrives at his aunt and uncle’s flat, he longs for a garden (his “longing” is even expressed in his name), and then he finds one; in a manner familiar from fairy tales, the wish for something leads to its appearance. Yet he can only enter the garden at midnight ; during daytime it is gone, and all that Tom finds in its place is a backyard with dustbins. In the garden he meets a girl whom he befriends, Hatty, who is slightly younger than Tom but who grows into a woman over the summer. Only toward the end of the story does he learn that Hatty is actually Mrs. Bartholomew, his aunt and uncle’s elderly landlady. She remembers and dreams of the garden of her childhood throughout the summer, and Tom is able to enter those dreams. In Philippa Pearce’s novel the realms of past and present, dreams and memories, the fantastic and reality are linked through the friendship between Tom and Hatty, which eventually overcomes time: in the garden the two children become friends; her dreams and the memories embedded in these dreams enable an old woman to return to the past and play with a boy in the garden of her childhood; in the end this boy meets the old woman in his Angelika Zirker { 269 “present reality.” Thus time is overcome not merely in the sense of a time journey but basically through memories. Time is a prevalent topic and motif in Tom’s Midnight Garden . The whole story is triggered by a grandfather clock that has magic qualities. It strikes thirteen times at one o’clock in the morning and thus opens the garden for Tom, which he can enter through a backyard door. In her study Children’s Literature Comes of Age, Maria Nikolajeva observes that passages between worlds are “most tangible in time fantasy. The passage is often connected with patterns like the door, the magic object and the magic helper” (124). The magic object in Tom’s case is the grandfather clock. In what Tom up to this point perceives as his real world, time stands still while he is in the garden. Time is fantastical in this novel: dreams and memories become reality; laws that govern time and place are suspended in the midnight garden, the fantastical world that Tom enters is a part of reality, namely, of Hatty’s past, and it is real to Tom, for he does not merely sleep and dream of the garden. Hatty’s dreams and memories are no longer subjective, but they become shared experiences, and they go beyond temporal and spatial limits. Hence, in Tom’s Midnight Garden different layers of time are interlinked. The fantastic lies in the coexistence of these layers; it magically joins together the boy Tom with both Hatty the girl and the old woman. Their friendship is represented as a relationship that comes about through magic and through magical wish-fulfillment but, at the same time, is real. Magic: The Grandfather Clock When Tom has to leave his family because his brother has fallen ill with measles, he is not very happy. He feels like a person in exile when he arrives at his Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen’s flat, which does not even have a garden. When he enters the house, he feels that its “heart [. . . is] empty—cold—dead” (9). But the house is not dead; there is a sound: “the tick, and then tick, and then tick, of a grandfather clock” (10). The clock immediately stirs Tom’s curiosity, even more so when he finds that although it keeps good time, it seldom chooses “to strike the right hour” (10), which he at first considers “senselessly wrong” (18). When at night he cannot sleep because he has been overfed by his aunt—who sees her vocation in spoiling him with food to make his stay more agreeable—he listens to the clock and counts, which has “become a habit with him at night” (19): “It’s one o’clock,” Tom whispered angrily over the edge of the bedclothes. “Why don’t you strike one o’clock, then, as the clocks would do at home?” Instead: Five! Six! Even in his irritation, Tom...