FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT, THE SECRET GARDEN,
WALKER BOOKS 8+
ASTRID LINDGREN, PIPPI LONGSTOCKING, OUP 8+

When an adult encounters a difficult hero or heroine in fiction, their immediate impulse is to reject the book. Children, on the contrary, are intrigued by them. The Secret Garden has heroine who is “the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen;” her behaviour is as bad, and generations of children have adored her because of this. Orphaned in India and sent back to England to live in her uncle’s bleak Yorkshire manor-house, Mary discovers a boy her own age hidden in its depths. Colin has been bed-ridden, spoilt and tormented by the belief that he will grow a hunch-back, and die. He is saved by two things: Mary’s appalling temper, and her discovery of the Secret Garden.

When it first appeared in 1911, The Secret Garden was only moderately successful, but its two neurotic, unhappy, bored children discovering health and joy through exercise (especially gardening) has a peculiar relevance to our times. The abandoned garden, shut up since Colin’s mother’s untimely death, is symbolic of their own loveless lives, but also thrillingly real, for Mary’s coldness, and her cousin’s hysterical hypochondria are cured by physical labour and by contact with the bounteous earth. Although it teeters on the brink of being soppy at the end, it is precisely the kind of children’s novel I wish were written more often, and its reissue with lavish illustrations by Inga Moore is a cause for celebration.

Inga Moore’s dreamy, soft-hued style make her at first glance rather an odd choice to illustrate Hodgson Burnett’s masterpiece, whose knowledge of true poverty (from her own wretched childhood) shows through like rocks in a Yorkshire moor.  The cover, showing Mary in a white frock gazing adoringly at a robin red-breast, will put off the strong-minded. Children relish the horridness of other children, and love Mary and Colin precisely because they embody their own worst (ie most interesting) aspects. Mary is never plain enough, and Colin looks like a male model.

When the winter garden bursts into a swooning mass of flower and foliage, Moore’s gentle eye is most rewarding. Her rabbits, foxes, badgers and mice are adorable, and one of her most successful techniques is a filmic succession of pictures which show the natural life of the countryside around Misslethwaite Manor. One just hopes they won’t be too sickeningly good once Colin is cured.

Lauren Child is the best-selling author of the Charlie and Lola books, and her version of Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking is sublime. Pippi, too, is an ugly, abandoned child who, far from being frightened or cross about living alone in an old house with a neglected garden, enjoys unlimited freedom and immense strength (useful for catching burglars). Her friendship with two very tidy children next door is garnished with wild lies, haphazard cooking and hysterically funny send up of convention. Child’s inventiveness ranges from typographical jokes, montages and collages (which children brought up on Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar and John Burningham’s Cloudland immediately love) to swashbuckling, scarlet-saturated pictures of Pippi riding bareback at the circus. Pefectly in keeping with a girl who subverts a school art class by only drawing its front legs on her “tiny scrap of paper” and pointing out that “when I get to the tail I’ll probably have to go out in the corridor”, it instantly makes it look and feel modern and cutting-edge, and conveys Pippi’s crazy, cross-eyed charm to the last drop.

It’s no surprise to learn that Lauren Child was herself inspired by Pippi Longstocking as a child. As a book, I still prefer The Secret Garden, and believe it should be on the National Curriculum for 8-year olds instead of the tripe currently recommended; it should certainly be on every child’s bookshelf. Truly difficult children will, I suspect, clamour for Pippi.

The Times, September 22, 2007