Return to the Secret Garden

by Holly Webb

  “You can’t do that!” Emmie screamed. “He gave it to you! Get it out!”

  Jack shook his head. “It isn’t going to work… I can’t have it any more, it makes me think about him too much. It hurts.” He stared blindly at the fire, and stumbled away, leaving Emmie hovering at the edge of the fire.

  “You mustn’t do that,” Emmie wept. The little aeroplane was charred already, its faded paint blackened. A few moments more and it would be gone. Emmie kicked at the fire with her boots, tearing apart the seething, spitting weeds. She grabbed a stick, and hooked the burning toy out – it was half gone already, one wing hardly there at all. Emmie ran to the water butt by the tool shed, and seized a dipper of water. She flung it down on the plane, and it hissed, little cracks opening up along the wood. Sighing, she squatted down to look at it. The plane was ruined – hardly recognizable. But she picked it up anyway, folding it carefully in her handkerchief.

  Even if Jack couldn’t bear to look at it any more, she would keep it. Someone had to remember, and hope.

  “Emmie. Emmie. I don’t like it. It’s shrieking at me. You’ve been so long washing.” Ruby was huddled in a ball in the corner of her bed, but as Emmie came into the bedroom, the little girl sprang up and ran at her. She clung on tight, with her arms around Emmie’s middle.

  “It’s only the wind,” Emmie said, half-laughing. But she could feel Ruby shaking. She remembered being frightened by the crying of the wind in the chimney herself, and realized with surprise that that had only been a year before. “I suppose you want to get in my bed then?”

  Ruby nodded into Emmie’s chest, but she didn’t move, and she wouldn’t let go. Emmie had to walk her over to the bed, and sit down with her.

  “I have to get my nightdress on, Ruby. Get in. Look, I won’t go anywhere, I promise. Hide under the covers. Lucy’ll sit on you.” She reached out round the littler girl to pull the blankets back, and Ruby hurled herself underneath them, burying her head under the pillow so that only the dark ends of her hair trailed out. Lucy pawed at it curiously, and then tried clawing Ruby’s arm. Ruby didn’t come out from the pillow, she just scooped Lucy in and pulled the blankets up over both of them.

  Emmie tried not to laugh. Ruby was big enough now to hate it when she thought people were laughing at her. She changed into her nightie, and nudged Ruby over, wondering if once Ruby was asleep she could go and sleep in Ruby’s bed. Two girls and a cat was going to be a squash.

  “Is it really only the wind?” Ruby whispered into Emmie’s neck.

  “It’s just the way the wind blows round the chimney, Ruby, honestly. I was scared of it too, when we first came here. I’ve heard it before, and nothing ever happened to me, did it?”

  “I suppose.”

  Emmie leaned back against the pillow, shifting a little to get herself comfortable between Ruby and the cat. The rain lashed across the windows, rattling the glass. Emmie turned her head so she could see the tapestries, smiling at the white horse with the long, foolish nose – her favourite. The wind howled again, but Ruby only twitched a little. She was almost asleep. Emmie sighed. If they’d still been in London, it would be the air-raid sirens wailing like that. Mrs Evans had told them, when she came back from visiting her sister. The wind in the chimney sounded almost friendly, especially when the room was warm, and Lucy had climbed out from under the blankets to purr by the pillow.

  Emmie was almost asleep herself when she heard the door squeaking, a sharp, real noise, very different to the crying of the wind. Her heart thudded, even though she knew it couldn’t be burglars, or anything like that. It was just that it was late, and deep down she couldn’t help it… She sat up on one elbow, gasping in a deep breath and hoping it wasn’t Miss Rose or Miss Dearlove. They were sure to make Ruby move, and then she’d cry, and Emmie almost didn’t mind her being there.

  “Oh, it’s you! Ssshhh, don’t wake her.”

  Jack slid in round the door, his torch, his precious Christmas present, pointed down at the floor. “I couldn’t sleep.” He perched on the end of the bed and looked at Emmie sideways, a bit shifty. “It’s really loud in my room. Much louder than here, the rain really smashes against the window. I couldn’t sleep. And I thought maybe you’d be awake too.”

  “I was only half-asleep.” Emmie yawned. “Ruby had a panic. I don’t know what she thought the wind was – ghosts probably.” She grinned at him. “For half a second I thought you were one, or a murderer. It’s that sort of night.”

  Jack nodded. “It is… Everything feels funny being up so late, doesn’t it? Knowing everyone else is asleep. It changes things.”

  “What things?” Emmie blinked at him tiredly.

  Jack shrugged, and then turned to look at her. “Perhaps it makes it easier to talk. David used to let me talk to him, if I woke up in the night. I think he was asleep a lot of the time though. All he did was grunt, mostly.”

  Emmie giggled. “I could do that…”

  “I really, really miss him. I burned his plane, Emmie. Why did I do something that stupid? He gave it to me.”

  Emmie sighed, and wriggled further away from Ruby so she could reach over to the bedside table. “You owe me a handkerchief,” she murmured. “Miss Dearlove moaned at me for ages.” She pulled the sad little parcel out, and handed it to him. “It’s not all there. A wing’s gone. And the paint’s sort of bubbled off.”

  Jack gaped at the plane, charred and broken in his hands, and then at Emmie. “You pulled it out? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because you’d have gone and put it straight back in, of course! I was waiting till I thought you’d want it. Sorry. Maybe I should have given it back to you before. But you still seemed … not ready for it.”

  Jack hunched up one shoulder at her, half-shrug, half-nod. “Maybe you’re right,” he muttered. He sighed, slow and shaky. “If she’s in your bed, can I sleep in hers? No one’ll mind.”

  Privately Emmie reckoned Miss Dearlove would, but she didn’t care. “Go on then. Don’t blame me if Ruby jumps on you in the middle of the night and has a screaming fit, though.”

  “It is the middle of the night.”

  “Shut up and go to sleep then.” Emmie wriggled back down, curling herself around Ruby, and smiling in the dark. The plane had been haunting her, from inside that drawer. It still belonged to Jack, she’d felt as if it wanted to go back to him. She peered across the room to the shadowy lump under the window. There was a hint of whiteness pressed against his face – her handkerchief, still wrapped around the plane.

  Emmie surfaced slowly from the grey dream again. It came every so often, that terrible sense of longing and despair as she was shut away from the garden. She clenched her hands on the blankets, breathing fast. It wasn’t real. Just a dream. “Only a dream,” she muttered, repeating it to herself like a chant. “Only a dream.”

  Ruby huffed and wriggled and mewed like a kitten, and went back to sleep. Emmie sat up, rubbing at her arms.

  “You’re awake.” Jack was kneeling up on Ruby’s bed, looking out of the window. “It’s getting light.”

  “So it is.” It must be, she could properly see him. She slid out of bed, and went to stand next to him at the window. He’d opened it, she noticed. The smell of rain-wet garden eased around her, and she took a deep breath in, banishing the dream. “Shall we go out?” she asked suddenly.

  Jack looked round at her. “Now?”

  “Why not? You could put Arthur’s boots on – they’re by the side door.” Emmie stood on tiptoe, resting her elbows on the windowsill. “I want to be out in it. I want to see the sun come up.”

  Jack scrambled off the bed, tucking the wrapped plane into the pocket of his too-small dressing gown, and Emmie snatched the blanket off Ruby’s bed. They crept out of the room and along the passage and down the stairs, pale and ghostly in the pre-dawn light.

  The bolts were stiff, and shrieke
d. They stared at each other, round-eyed and frozen by the door, but no one came after them. Jack yanked the door open, and grabbed her hand, and they went running out through the gardens. There was a faint pinkness at the lower edges of the sky, and the fish pond glimmered in the light of Jack’s torch as they raced past.

  The ivy rustled as Emmie reached for the handle, and the door shushed over the grass. The garden was full of birds, calling to each other as the children crept in. Emmie wanted to dance about on the wet grass, but she didn’t – the garden wasn’t theirs so early, they were visitors. They huddled next to each other on the bench, watching the trees and the statue and the sundial grow clearer and sharper as the darkness seeped out of the sky. Jack held the wooden plane in both hands, cradling it like a tiny bird.

  A faint September mist swirled around their feet, and the birdsong faded to a chirrup, here and there. Emmie thought she saw the robin, perched in the rose arch overhead and peering down at them with curious bead eyes. But the light wasn’t good enough to be sure.

  “The sun’s coming up,” Jack whispered. “I’ve never seen it from outside before. It feels like magic. The sky’s turned golden. I can feel everything in the garden; it’s all reaching up for the light.”

  “Someone’s coming,” Emmie whispered, clutching at his hand. “Jack, someone’s coming, I can hear footsteps on the path. The door!”

  It was probably only Dickon – or perhaps Jack’s mother, come to look for him. But in the early morning light, there was a breathless sense of something about to happen. Something strange, or frightening, or wonderful, Emmie couldn’t tell which. Perhaps all of them at once.

  The door shifted a little, and then drew open, and a tall figure stepped through, out of the shadows.

  “Who is it?” Emmie asked, her voice gone high and squeaky. But Jack was already gone, the little wooden plane and the handkerchief had slipped on to the bench. He was laughing and laughing, running across the grass towards his brother.

  Emmie Hatton

  Misselthwaite Manor

  29th October 1940

  Mrs Craven gave me back the diaries. She said that she had loved reading them again, but now she thought I wanted them more than she did. She gave me a pencil too, a pretty one with a striped paper wrapper around it. She showed me the end of the diary, and the empty pages, and even though she didn’t say so, I know she meant for me to write in them myself. But I didn’t know how to begin. I hadn’t anything to write about, except that we have been here for a year. More than a year, now it’s October. I wanted my diary to start with something special. I wanted something to happen, and now it has.

  The Home has been bombed. Miss Dearlove told us this morning. It just isn’t there any more, nothing is left at all. It wasn’t just the Home, the bombs destroyed most of the street – but no one was killed, everyone had gone to the shelters. She was shaking when she said it, and I suppose I ought to be shocked too. But London seems so far away. I almost can’t remember the me that lived there.

  We can never, ever go back. Mrs Craven explained it to all of us, that the Home will be at Misselthwaite for always, not just while the war is on. She promised.

  That means that we belong here now.

  What made you want to write a sequel to The Secret Garden?

  It’s one of my favourite-ever books. I wish I still had the copy I had as a child – it was dark blue leather, with a portrait of Mary set into the cover, looking very pale and sickly! I loved the characters, but particularly Misselthwaite Manor itself. The idea of continuing on the story of the house and the garden was so tempting.

  Have you ever written a sequel before? What was the biggest challenge?

  No, I haven’t, though I have read sequels to some of my favourite books. That was one of the things that worried me, actually – I’d been so cross about some parts of those sequels that to me seemed so obviously “wrong”! What if someone else felt the same way about my book? I could just imagine all the furious letters – especially about some parts of the plot, and what happens to certain people…

  Did you feel any sort of responsibility towards Frances Hodgson Burnett’s characters?

  Yes. If you’ve read the book and you aren’t just skipping to the end (tch!) you’ll know that even though Emmie and her contemporaries aren’t from the original book, several of the other characters are. I loved those characters, and it felt a huge privilege to be allowed to imagine what happened to them next. I’m still a bit worried about what I’ve done to them though…

  Did you find it easy to imagine the children from the original as grown-ups?

  Yes and no. As I reread The Secret Garden as an older child (I reread my favourite books a lot) and thought about when it was written, it became obvious to me that the children, Mary, Colin and Dickon, were growing up just before the First World War. Colin and Dickon would have been expected to fight. Colin grows up in the book and gets well, and might have gone off to boarding school, but Dickon probably wouldn’t ever have left the moor. Imagine going from such a small, well-known world to fighting in France. It would have had an indescribable effect on him. It was quite hard to imagine the transformation of such a loving, happy child.

  Return to the Secret Garden is set during the Second World War. How did you keep the story historically accurate?

  I had several excellent reference books: Wartime: Britain 1939-1945 by Juliet Gardiner was my main reference – it’s full of letters and documents, and is really interesting. I also read The People’s War by Angus Calder, and Doodlebugs, Gasmasks and Gum by Christina Rex – that’s a collection of interviews about people’s wartime experiences as children. I also used a lot of online references – all sorts of things such as the London Transport Museum archives for details about trains and stations, histories of various RAF bases, and the BBC Archive, which was wonderful. I spent one whole afternoon listening to radio broadcasts about evacuees, and crying. One of the interviewers asked all the children on the platform to cheer – they had no idea what was happening, or even where they were going, but they still did. I have a horrible feeling that there are mistakes, though, all of which are down to me.

  What about the garden itself? Are you a keen gardener, or did this require some research too?

  I love gardening, but I’m not hugely good at it… One of my favourite parts of The Secret Garden is Frances Hodgson Burnett’s evident love of the garden she created. She actually based it on a house where she lived a few years before she wrote the book: Great Maytham Hall in Kent, where there was a real walled garden, though I don’t think it was ever as neglected and abandoned as the garden at Misselthwaite. The trickiest bit was trying to map the gardens from the descriptions she gives. I’m terrible at spatial awareness, and I wanted to have a sense of where things really were, but it was so hard to pin down!

  Do you have a favourite character or moment from the original book?

  Definitely Mary. But I have to admit that I prefer her about halfway through the book, before she reforms entirely and becomes a lot less grumpy and stubborn. I adore Colin, but by the end of the story, I can’t help thinking that Mary lets him boss her about far too much! The main characters in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s other two most well-known novels, A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy, are annoyingly saintly (particularly Cecil, Lord Fauntleroy), but Mary Lennox always seemed much more likely to me! I also loved The Painted Garden by Noel Streatfeild, who’s best-known for writing Ballet Shoes. The Painted Garden is about a girl cast as Mary in a film of The Secret Garden. I’d recommend it – Jane is equally deliciously bad-tempered…

  My favourite moment from the original story is when the robin shows Mary the knob of the door, and she first gets into the garden. I had to put a robin in my book too.

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  First published in the UK by Scholastic Ltd, 2015

  This electronic edition published by Scholastic Ltd, 2015

  Text copyright © Holly Webb, 2015

  The right of Holly Webb to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her.

  eISBN 978 1407 16130 3

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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