Tom’s Midnight Garden

Dir Christine Secombe, UK 1988 Second Sight, £19.99 (DVD)

The DVD of the BBC’s 1988 sixpart version of Tom’s Midnight Garden is a joy to watch.

Tom (Jeremy Rampling), a boy of nine or 10, is sent off to stay with his Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen near Ely, because his brother Peter has measles. He’s in quarantine, so he can’t go out anywhere, and is prepared to be bored. From the first episode, when Tom complains that a fortnight is years, and his uncle says “Time is purely relative”, there is questioning about the nature of time.

His aunt and uncle live in a flat in a converted old house owned by the elderly Mrs Bartholomew, who lives upstairs. Tom’s disappointed that there isn’t even a garden; the house’s original garden was sold off for modern housing, and there’s only a small yard with dustbins and an old motorbike.

An antique grandfather clock in the hall tells the time but is “totally unreliable when it comes to striking”, and when Tom discovers that at midnight it strikes 13 he creeps downstairs, opens the back door – and discovers a huge, sunlit garden. Back in the house everything is old-fashioned; a maid walks right past him but doesn’t see him; the grandfather clock still stands against the wall.

Over the next two weeks Tom slips into the garden in his pyjamas every night, and meets a girl, Hatty (Caroline Waldron), who is (almost) the only one who can see him. She pretends to be a princess, but is an orphan; her unpleasant aunt calls her “a charity child, a pauper”, and asks why she ever took her in. Hatty’s cousins mostly don’t want to play with her, and she and Tom become good friends. Each thinks the other is a ghost, but Tom gradually comes to realise that Hatty had lived in the house years before, in late-Victorian times. Over the nights of his visits to the garden Hatty becomes older; at one point she complains, “Sometimes it’s months before you come again.”

The earlier scenes in the garden are all in spring and summer; the later ones are in winter, and Hatty is skating. Tom persuades her to leave her skates, when she’s not using them, in her secret hiding place under the floorboards of what is both his bedroom now and hers, decades ago. He finds them there, and takes them with him that night, and they go skating together, Tom noting the paradox that they are wearing the same skates! But Hatty is older now, a young woman – and courting a young man, Barty.

On his final night Tom goes through the back door at midnight, and trips over the bins in the yard. In despair, he calls out Hatty’s name, and the disturbance wakes old Mrs Bartholomew. The following day, Tom and Mrs Bartholomew talk about the adventures they had each time they met, when she was dreaming of the garden of her childhood.

Philippa Pearce’s original 1958 novel is a classic children’s time travel story, with all the tropes of

the genre: a child sent to stay with relatives in an old house; timeslips (with one explanation or another); a lonely child in the present, an unhappy child in the past; an object that links present and past – here the grandfather clock.

One difference with Tom’s Midnight Garden is that Tom’s nightly visits are months apart for Hatty; she grows up from a girl of about his age to a young woman in the fortnight of his visiting the garden. Director Christine Secombe mentions in the 10-minute “Look Back” feature that they’d deliberately chosen an actress who could play Hatty as both a child and a young woman. (It’s reminiscent of Robert Nathan’s novel A Portrait of Jennie (1940), which the BBC adapted as a haunting Boy Meets Girl play in 1969 and sadly seems to have been wiped; a struggling artist encounters a young girl (Anna Calder-Marshall) who is a year or two older each time he sees her over a few months until they finally meet in the present day at the end of the story.)

The BBC rendering of Tom’s Midnight Garden is beautifully produced; the garden is almost a character in its own right, and the often slightly awkward relationship between Tom and Hatty is a delight – though at times the acting of Tom is a little too young and overdone. The adult actors have the stiltedness that often comes from filming a story set in the 1950s some 30 years later; just how should mothers and aunts and uncles speak to a child? But this isn’t their story; it’s the story of the friendship across half a century between two lonely children, and of the mutability of time. David V Barrett