Despite the last of these being in 1999, they set the bar high for adaptor Edith (Grattery), but the result is glorious. Philippa Pearce’s childrens’ novel was published in 1958, before inoculation, when measles was still all too frequently a disease that killed children, while three TV adaptations, a Jackanory reading and a feature film surely establish Tom’s Midnight Garden as a children’s classic. He can enter a garden outside, but emerges in the past. However, it doesn’t take Tom too long to discover the clock strikes thirteen every night, and when it does something magical happens.
His Uncle and Aunt live in what was once a grand house, now converted into flats, the remnant of former times being a grandfather clock bolted to the wall of the entrance hallway. As seen on the sample page, Tom’s not at all happy to be sent to stay with relatives in order to prevent him catching measles from his brother. Several years on again – looking now towards the end of school, and the wider world – I remember the thrill of reading about Charles Ryder’s early days at Oxford, and his ‘faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that great city’.īut reading to my own children, the door I’ve been happiest to pass through again is the door into Tom’s Midnight Garden – a door one can only imagine because, unlike most of the others, it is never described.
A few years later came the doors into Narnia, the Secret Garden and Wonderland, Bilbo Baggins’s ‘perfectly round’ green door with its shiny yellow brass knob ‘in the exact middle’, the door into the Yellow Dwarf ’s home in the orange tree, and the dark door into Bluebeard’s bloody chamber.
Aged about 4, I suppose, I passed through the small, latched door in the hillside, into Mrs Tiggywinkle’s flagged kitchen, filled with the ‘nice, hot, singey smell’ of ironing, busy and reassuring. When the Clock Struck ThirteenĪ lot of the stories I loved most as a child involved doors. A garden that everyone told him doesn’t exist. Thirteen? When Tom gets up to investigate, he discovers a magical garden. Lying awake at night, Tom hears the old grandfather clock downstairs strike.
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