A Tale for Tom Long
‘It was in the year 1895,’ said Hatty Bartholomew, ‘that you and I, Tom, skated all the way to Ely: the year of the famous great frost. That day, on the way home from Ely, we met Barty, and he gave us a lift.’
She smiled. ‘I’d never really talked to Barty before then, for I was shy in company—I still am, Tom. But that day was different: Barty and I were alone together, and we talked, and we began to know each other. Barty used to say afterwards that, before he had turned the gig into the drive here, he’d as good as made up his mind that he wanted me for his wife.
‘So, some time later, he made me a proposal, and I accepted him; and Aunt Melbourne was only too glad to get me off her hands.
‘I was married on Midsummer Day, a year or so after the great frost; Midsummer Eve was the eve of my wedding day. Doing the last of my packing that night, I remembered my skates, and that made me remember you, Tom. I’d kept the skates where I’d promised you that I would, and I knew that I had to leave them there, although it was so long since I’d seen you. I wrote a note of explanation and left it with the skates.’
‘I found it,’ said Tom. ‘Signed and dated.’
‘Dated Midsummer Eve, in one of the last years of the old century. That Midsummer Eve was very hot, sultry and thundery. I couldn’t sleep. I thought of my wedding the next day, and, for the first time, I thought of all I would be leaving behind me: my childhood and all the times I had spent in the garden—in the garden with you, Tom.
‘There was a thunderstorm coming nearer, and there was lightning. I got out of bed and looked out of my window: I could see the meadow and the elm-tree and even the river-bank—I could see it all by the flashes of lightning.
‘Then I thought I would look at the garden, by the same light; I had a great longing to see it. I went into an empty bedroom at the back of the house, overlooking the garden, a spare bedroom.’
‘I think I know the one you mean,’ said Tom. ‘I stuck my head through the door, once.’
‘Well, I stood at the window and looked over the garden. The storm was very close; the lightning flashes made everything very clear. I could see the yew-trees and the fir-tree and the greenhouse, as if by daylight. Then I saw you.’
‘Me?’ cried Tom. ‘But I don’t understand. When? I didn’t see you.’
‘You never looked up. I think you had been walking round the garden, for you appeared from one of those little corner paths and walked across the lawn to the house porch. You looked as thin through as a piece of moonshine. You were wearing your pyjamas—they were pyjamas, weren’t they, Tom? In those days, most boys wore nightshirts, and I didn’t know of pyjamas. Your pyjama jacket was flapping open, I remember.
‘You reached the porch, and I suppose you went indoors, for that was the last I saw of you. I stayed on at the window. I said to myself: “He’s gone; but the garden is here. The garden will always be here. It will never change.”
‘Do you remember the tall fir-tree, Tom—with ivy all the way up? I’ve stood under it many a time, as a child, when there was a high wind, and felt the earth heaving under my feet, as if the roots were pulling like muscles. That Midsummer Eve, when the storm was at its worst, and I was watching it, a great wind caught the fir and—oh, Tom, it was terrible to see!—the lightning struck it, and it fell.’
There was a deep silence, and Tom remembered the silence he had heard after the falling of that tree, and the cry from the upper window that he had heard in it.
‘And then I knew, Tom, that the garden was changing all the time, because nothing stands still, except in our memory.’
‘And what happened next?’ asked Tom.
‘Oh, the next day, Abel complained of the fir-tree and that it had ruined one of his asparagus beds in its fall; but I forgot the fir-tree, and the garden, and you, too, Tom, because this was my wedding day. Barty and I were married and went to live on one of his father’s farms in the Fens; and we were very happy.’
‘And then?’
‘Things went well for us—much better than they did for the cousins here. All three of them were in the family business to begin with. Then Hubert and Edgar went off, and James carried on alone. He married and raised a family; but his wife died, and the business went from bad to worse, and in the end he decided to emigrate. Before he went he sold everything—house, furniture and what land was left.
‘Barty and I came over for the auction. The house already looked very different by then. James had been short of money, and so he’d sold first the two meadows, and then the orchard, and then even the garden. The garden had quite gone, and they were building houses at what had been the bottom of it, with their garden strips where the yew-trees and the lawn had been. None of the trees was left standing, except Tricksy. You can still see Tricksy standing in one of those gardens.’
Tom said, ‘So that’s Tricksy.’
‘At the auction, Barty bought some of the furniture that I fancied—the barometer you saw, and the grandfather clock, that I’d always loved to hear striking. When I was a little girl, Tom, I used wilfully to misunderstand its hour sometimes, in the morning, and get out of bed and go downstairs before the maids—before sunrise, even—to play in my garden.’
‘But you couldn’t take the grandfather clock away with you into the Fens,’ said Tom. ‘It couldn’t be moved.’
‘It never needed to be moved,’ said Mrs Bartholomew, ‘for Barty bought the house—he would always buy anything I fancied, if he could; but he said it wasn’t a gentleman’s house any more, with no garden to it. He made flats out of it, and let them.’
‘And then you came to live here?’
‘Not then. Barty and I were very happy in the Fens. We had two children—boys. They were both killed in the Great War—the First World War they call it now.’ Mrs Bartholomew did not cry, because she had done all her crying for that so long ago.
‘Then, many years later, Barty died, and I was left quite alone. That was when I came here; and I’ve lived here ever since.’
Mrs Bartholomew stopped, as if that were the end of her story, but Tom prompted her. ‘And since you’ve come to live here, you’ve often gone back in Time, haven’t you?’
‘Gone back in Time?’
‘Gone back into the Past.’
‘When you’re my age, Tom, you live in the Past a great deal. You remember it; you dream of it.’
Tom nodded. He understood so much now: why the weather in the garden had always been perfect; why Time in the garden had sometimes jumped far ahead, and sometimes gone backwards. It had all depended upon what old Mrs Bartholomew had chosen to remember in her dreams.
Yet perhaps Mrs Bartholomew was not solely responsible for the garden’s being there, night after night, these last weeks. For she remarked to Tom now that never before this summer had she dreamed of the garden so often, and never before this summer had she been able to remember so vividly what it had felt like to be the little Hatty—to be longing for someone to play with and for somewhere to play.
‘But those were the things I wanted here, this summer,’ said Tom, suddenly recognizing himself exactly in Mrs Bartholomew’s description. He had longed for someone to play with and for somewhere to play; and that great longing, beating about unhappily in the big house, must have made its entry into Mrs Bartholomew’s dreaming mind and had brought back to her the little Hatty of long ago. Mrs Bartholomew had gone back in Time to when she was a girl, wanting to play in the garden; and Tom had been able to go back with her, to that same garden.
‘But these last few nights, before last night,’ said Tom, ‘you’ve hardly dreamt of the garden at all; you’ve been dreaming of winter and skating.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Bartholomew. ‘Of skating to Ely—the farthest I’d ever been from home; of growing up, and of Barty; I dreamed less and less of the garden and of you, Tom.’
‘I suppose you couldn’t help that,’ said Tom, ‘if you were growing up. I noticed, the night before last, in the gig,
you talked to Barty all the time; never to me.’
‘You were getting thinner—thinner through—every winter that I saw you,’ said Mrs Bartholomew; ‘and, by the end of that drive home with Barty, you seemed to have vanished away altogether.’
Tom said, without bitterness, ‘And so, last night—’
‘Last night I dreamt of my wedding day and of going away from here altogether, to live in the Fens.’
‘And last night,’ said Tom, ‘when I went down and opened the garden door, the garden wasn’t there any more. That was when I screamed out. I called to you, but I never really thought you could hear me.’
‘You woke me,’ said Mrs Bartholomew. ‘I knew it was Tom calling to me for help, although I didn’t understand, then. I couldn’t believe you were real, until I saw you this morning.’
Tom said: ‘We’re both real; Then and Now. It’s as the angel said: Time No Longer.’
From far downstairs in the hall came the sound of the grandfather clock striking. It struck two, and Mrs Bartholomew—who seemed to understand its language—said the hour must be eleven. Tom’s aunt must be wondering where he was. Tom went downstairs to ask whether he might take a mid-morning cup of tea with Mrs Bartholomew. Aunt Gwen was too much surprised to object or even to question him.
He came back to Mrs Bartholomew, and she had just brewed the tea and brought out seedcake to eat with it. Over this, they settled down to talk of the garden.
They exchanged tales and secrets. Tom asked after Abel, and Mrs Bartholomew said that he had married Susan and they had had a large family and lived happily. Then Tom told her that Abel had been the only other person, besides herself, ever to see him. ‘Fancy!’ said Mrs Bartholomew, much struck. ‘And Aunt Melbourne was always so scornful of Abel: she used to say he was as stupid as a cow in a meadow.’
‘Well,’ said Tom, warmly, ‘the cows in the meadow could see me; and she never could.’
Mrs Bartholomew laughed at that—she could afford to laugh at Aunt Melbourne now; and then she, in her turn, told Tom a secret of the garden. She confessed to a disobedience of long ago. ‘You told me not to carve marks and initials on the tree-trunks, Tom; but, when you’d taught me how to swarm Tricksy, I carved both our marks there: a long thin cat for you, Tom, wearing a hat for me—oh dear, it did look ridiculous! I never told you.’
‘I once planned to climb the yard fence, to look at Tricksy,’ said Tom. ‘I wonder if I should have found the mark there.’
‘It may still show.’
So their talk of the garden rambled on, until the grandfather clock struck for noon, and Tom jumped up, for he must go. Lunch would be ready downstairs; and after lunch he was to be driven home.
‘But you’ll come again!’ cried Mrs Bartholomew. ‘And what about that brother of yours, that I saw in Ely—what was his name?’
‘Peter,’ said Tom, and started guiltily to think how he had forgotten Peter, first of all in the horror of losing the garden, and then in the amazement and joy of finding it again in Mrs Bartholomew’s remembrance.
He sat down again and told her about Peter, and especially of how Peter had loved to hear about the garden and of their adventures there. ‘You must certainly bring him to visit me,’ said Mrs Bartholomew, firmly. ‘Will you be sure to tell Peter that I shall be expecting him?’
Tom promised. He found that, after all, he was looking forward eagerly to going home. There would be the warmth of that homecoming; and, when the welcomes were over, he would draw Peter aside into the little back-garden and whisper: ‘Peter, I’ve the secret of the other garden to tell you, and I’ve an invitation for you from Hatty.’
Meanwhile, Tom must really say good-bye to Mrs Bartholomew now, or he would be late for lunch and for going home. Already Aunt Gwen was anxiously looking out for him, on the floor below. From the front door of Mrs Bartholomew’s flat, Tom saw her on the watch; and Mrs Bartholomew saw her too.
‘Good-bye, Mrs Bartholomew,’ said Tom, shaking hands with stiff politeness; ‘and thank you very much for having me.’
‘I shall look forward to our meeting again,’ said Mrs Bartholomew, equally primly.
Tom went slowly down the attic stairs. Then, at the bottom, he hesitated: he turned impulsively and ran up again—two at a time—to where Hatty Bartholomew still stood …
Afterwards, Aunt Gwen tried to describe to her husband that second parting between them. ‘He ran up to her, and they hugged each other as if they had known each other for years and years, instead of only having met for the first time this morning. There was something else, too, Alan, although I know you’ll say it sounds even more absurd … Of course, Mrs Bartholomew’s such a shrunken little old woman, she’s hardly bigger than Tom, anyway: but, you know, he put his arms right round her and he hugged her good-bye as if she were a little girl.’
Photo by Helen Craig
Philippa Pearce spent her childhood in Cambridgeshire. Her father was a flour miller and corn merchant in the village of Great Shelford, and the family lived in the mill house there. She went to school in Cambridge, and studied English and History at Cambridge University. After college she worked in the BBC as a scriptwriter and producer, and then in publishing as an editor. Her earliest ambition was to be a writer, and she has written many books, winning the Carnegie Medal for Tom’s Midnight Garden. The village where she grew up, and the Cambridgeshire countryside, provide the background setting for both Tom’s Midnight Garden and Minnow on the Say. She died in 2006.
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