June 6, 2011 It was the wheelchair scene that got me. I had been identifying more than I realized with the adventures of sad little Mary, who lost her parents to a cholera outbreak in India and who finds herself reluctantly lodged at a relative’s country estate in chilly England. Her only companions are the privileged brat Colin, who turns out not to be crippled, and homespun Dickon, who almost speaks the language of his wild-animal pets. In retrospect I find it easy to see that each child spoke to a different aspect of my own childhood experience and yearnings. But I didn’t think of that at the time. When Colin rose from the wheelchair, healed by the other children’s innocent affection and his own determination—in short, cured by the secret walled garden where it was safe to be a child—I was astonished to find myself crying.
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Garden Secrets
On the sesquicentennial of The Secret Garden, Michael Sims considers the surprising connections between his own Crossville boyhood and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s masterpiece
