The Secret Garden was published in 1911. Colin and Mary are ten, we are told, and Dickon, the appealing Yorkshire animal-whisperer, is 'about twelve.' Maybe Colin escapes active service in World War One by the skin of his teeth, but I always think the age of characters is fixed at the moment the author starts writing, which is usually about a year earlier. That would make Colin old enough to be called up in 1917. Perhaps he falsifies his age and goes a year earlier. While Dickon would have gone two years earlier, in 1915.
What remained of 'the magic' that got Colin on his feet again when he or Dickon crouched in rat-infested trenches, among mud and blood and lice, with the guns going off? Were they able to hold onto even a spark of the joy that Burnett preached, or even remember the moor, the garden, the birds and beasts and their friendship? Or did Colin crack up again, and end the war on the pages of Regeneration? Perhaps Dickon tamed a rat or two - but there wouldn't have been time. Did either survive, either physically or psychologically? And Mary, what about her?
The Secret Garden' leaves us at that moment when Colin and his father stride happily back towards the house with Colin walking 'as strongly and steadily as any boy in Yorkshire.' As a child, reading it, I noticed the omission of Mary from this scene, and understood, with hurt and indignation, that Colin, being a boy, was supposed to be more significant. And in the latter part of the book, Mary fades behind Colin, while the story focuses more and more on his restoration to health and mastery.
Mary's transformation from an ugly little girl who nobody likes, to a child who is healthy, happy, and pretty - and nurturative, as girls were meant to be in that era - is carried out, it seems, mainly for the sake of Colin - and yet I rather like Mary's spikiness. I think she gets a raw deal from her author right from the start, actually. 'Nobody had ever taken any notice of her' says Hodgson Burnett, 'because she was disagreeable.' Which is an appalling thing to say, when you think about it. Nobody ever loved her, not even the Ayah who took care of her, so how could she be agreeable? It's not her fault. And - thinking about the Ayah - Kipling, brought up by Indian nurses, adored India, and it was when he came back to England and dumped with a harsh, uncaring woman that he was desperately unhappy. Mary remembers the Indian chanting song her Ayah used to sing her to sleep with - and yet she's never allowed to miss her. Of course, I can see why. It's racism. England stands for happiness, beauty, health. India is death, unhappiness, and spoilt, monstrous children. It is only in England that Mary may find her salvation.
But in the same way that I want Mary to have cared for her Ayah, I also want her to retain some spikiness. How did she react to the War, with its flood of death, she who hid in the Indian bungalow while everyone died around her? I thought at first that she might become a nurse, but she was too young to be a VAD; they had to be eighteen. So maybe she joined local women scraping lint and knitting things for the troops, while every day she stood supportively beside Archibald Craven and shared his dreadful anxiety as they looked at the casualty lists together. And maybe she raged at having to do so little.
If Colin could have cracked up, Mary could have hardened up again. I think that she was fundamentally tougher than Colin, and I can imagine her, after the war, cutting her hair, dressing in short skirts, even finding work for herself. I wonder how much money her parents left her? If Colin had been killed, Archibald Craven might have made her his heir, if the property wasn't entailed, in which case the doctor would have got it after all.
I don't think she married Colin, though, even though he survived. For some reason, I feel really resistant to that idea, and not just because they were first cousins.
What do you think happened?
