With apologies to Monty Don, there’s another unstoppable stalwart gardening icon for 2020. Her name is Mary Lennox. Yes, she comes from an Edwardian children’s novel and is much stroppier than stoical Monty, but the heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 classic The Secret Garden is a modern woman with messages for today’s generation (including, after this year, her bewilderment at having to dress herself).
As someone who grew up on the 1993 film version (Maggie Smith as Mrs Medlock saying ‘I’ll come and BOX yer ears’ in a Yorkshire accent remains exhilarating), a new film adaptation of this classic tale of spoilt orphan sent to live in her surly Yorkshire uncle’s giant manor house sounded to me like sacrilege. Released this week after months of Covid-inflicted delays, scripted by master-adaptor and playwright Jack Thorne and starring Colin Firth, Julie Walters and newcomer Dixie Egerickx as Mary, it’s actually the kind of technicolour big-screen burst of wonder to wash away the grey of this year. But crucially, it cuts through, over a century on, with things to say that feel relevant to a generation of frazzled millennial Londoners.
“Might I have a bit of earth?” the orphaned Mary asks her uncle, Archibald Craven, after being packed off to Misselthwaite Manor. Before lockdown, it felt like a poignant question for those of us grappling with the sadness that we might never own any green space of our own. But after months of confinement, it’s even simpler and more urgent. The Secret Garden is also a story about illness and the damage caused by isolation. In the novel, Burnett writes that Mary’s “disagreeable thoughts” are replaced, “when her mind gradually filled itself with robins, and moorland cottages crowded with children, with queer, crabbed old gardeners and common little Yorkshire housemaids, with springtime and with secret gardens coming alive day by day”. Green therapy is real, she tells us — get outside, it’s good for you.
As a child, Thorne wanted to be Dickon when he grew up — the muddy-knuckled nature whisperer, who is brother to Misselthwaite servant Martha — but for him the story is about Mary’s journey. “She’s one of the great children’s heroes — the bravery of writing a child who is dislikable for so much of the story. You fall in love with Harry Potter within 10 pages, yet with Mary Lennox you don’t fall in love with her for 80,” he says. “She redeems herself. And kids do fall into traps, certain behaviour. How brilliant to see that, write it, celebrate it and redeem it.” One change he made for the film was for her to befriend a stray dog, so the audience could spend time on their own with her as she discovers the Manor’s sprawling fields.
Mary’s cousin Colin Craven, meanwhile, is essentially her mirror. Like her, he has lost his mother, but rather than being encouraged to explore the world, he becomes a bedbound, anxious, self-hating child, shut away by his ashamed father (it’s no coincidence that the garden once so loved by his mother has been locked away by his father, too). In Thorne’s hands, Colin’s condition and the attitudes around it suggest how grief can impact mental health. “I’ve worked a lot in the disability world, and the one thing I was very anxious not to tip into was the idea of Colin being a disabled boy made better. He’s not. He’s a traumatised, scared kid who’s been convinced of a hysterical illness that he doesn’t have.” It’s likely that Colin has what we might now describe as Munchausen Syndrome.
Also significant is the decision to move the start of the story to Partition-era India in 1947. The novel was originally published in 1911, three years before the start of the First World War, when the world was innocent of the destruction that was to come. The change allowed Thorne to look at how Misselthwaite Manor itself would have suffered after the war, having been used as a military hospital. “It wasn’t like Downton — that they came in, used it as a hospital and then it was restored to its former glory. A lot of those houses never quite recovered from that, because there was very little money in them — that’s why they were all sold to the National Trust. I wanted Misselthwaite to be a real character in the story,” he says. “The idea of these lives that were once there, and the whole place reeking of pain, felt very interesting to me.” The moments that follow Mary’s evacuation alongside other British children allow some of her best moments of dialogue: “I need better food than this. My parents are dead.”
In an uncertain world, it makes sense that The Secret Garden will be available on demand as well as in cinemas. Thorne – who says his family discovered a wood during lockdown, “where we could build dens, balance along trees and have made-up adventures” - is glad there’s still a chance to see the film communally. He loves to go to films and plays alone, but enjoys being part of an audience. “I love being transported as one into something. I remember watching The Inheritance last year and just feeling this incredible focus and grief from all around me. That feeling of being surrounded by stories that you don’t know and that are having a relationship with the story on stage or on screen. It’s quite extraordinary. I don’t know whether it works for everyone, but for me, it lifts me up and takes me somewhere new.”
That nature can offer a place of rebirth and discovery, not just among the bulbs and the soil but within oneself, is a huge consolation in a year like this. But of course, another of the story’s more contemporary messages is that nature must be urgently saved. If the latest David Attenborough doc seems a bit too real, watch The Secret Garden and feel that very modern mixture of wonder and peril. Perhaps Burnett, in her wisdom, always knew we have to live with both. When Colin asks Mary if the spring is coming – and what it’s like – she replies, “It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine.”
The Secret Garden is released in cinemas and on demand from Sky Cinema on October 23
