A very long time, I went a wedding as a child, in a country pub kind of establishment. The bride, dressed in a floaty splotchy kind of blue and pink dress gifted me two thick books when we were leaving: The Children of the New Forest, and The Secret Garden. They were both hardcover bound in dark crimson red leather (or leather-like stuff, idk), with gilt printing on the cover, one or two full-page coloured illustrations on glossy paper, and a few black and white line drawings- none of which were very good or memorable. The pages were sewn into place with thread. These were the only books like that that I possessed.
(The groom, iirc, was the brother of the then-wife of my mother's uncle. I have never heard of him since and no idea what happened to bride and groom)
Anyway, I devoured both books. I did not like The Children of the New Forest, the casual cruelty of the children's almost-murder appalled me "after you kill the rats, you don't leave the little ratlings alive, do you? HAHAHA"), and it was too realistic and close to actual history for comfort. I didn't particularly appreciate the depictions of survival life in the New Forest, the hunting and baking and those bloody dogs, unlike the Little House books or even Swiss Family Robinson which later on, I simply lapped up.
But The Secret Garden? Oh yes. Something about Mary's life – her origin story as a spoiled brat from India, abandoned to uncaring and secretive relatives on to the moors of Yorkshire, oh yes. It was like Jane Eyre for children, and I, a comfortable city child who had no actual idea what a walled garden looked like (never mind a fucking forest) or how could you even "lock up" a garden? Oh I was obsessed. And even without knowing about sex, or smut, or the dessicated aristocracy, or Victorians, I had a sense of what Mary's real "Secret Garden" was. Oh Dickens, you child of nature. Oh dear, let's read, again and again about this hidden garden blooming and healing and glowing and bouncing, this glorious nature. I wanted my own garden, I wanted it to be secret, and I wanted two boys to play in the garden with: a ruddy-cheeked curly-haired strong country lad with an accent thick as butter, and a pale hollow-cheeked vulnerable sad cousin. And I wanted ivory elephants to play with, and I wanted to live in a mansion on a moor. Oh Mary, you lucky, lucky minx, you.
by 1000andonenites