'Oh, don't say they're in this house too!' ... Rereading The Borrowers and Mary Poppins

Nearly at the end of term now: can you believe it? This year life has begun tearing past, like these winter winds in London just now. There’s never time to do everything you’d like, it seems, so you have to decide what you want done, you really have to put your shoulder to the gale. I don’t feel I’ve gained much ground on my big studies at the moment, but I have overcome some crises of confidence left over from my MA.

I met a friend recently who underwent the same MA at the same place, around the same time as me, and as we sipped our beers in that strange theatre pub, autographed picture of Peggy Mount on wall, we were united in regret. Both of us had gone into the experience bouncing with enthusiasm; both left humbled, stumbling failures.

But last week I gave a little class presentation on The Borrowers, and it went well and I was pleased. I saw people scribbling notes and I felt we had a good discussion after. I picked Mary Norton’s novel, knowing I’d have the most to say about it – but there’s too much almost. It’s a suggestive novel, full of narrative elisions and rich, inventive detail. It almost made the rest of the course feel reductive: you see the children’s novel develop from Nesbit to Garnet via Streatfeild, and suddenly there’s this (apparently) unprecedented leap forward in sophistication. Of course, earlier highlights can recede among the bolder hues and big names of more famous works.

That said, we’re now (in 1952) at an amazing time for children’s fiction, of respect and alarm at the child: a child born out of world war, austerity, depression and heavy industrialism. The urge is to equip the child, to challenge them, to rescue them out of the terrifying present (as ever) but nowadays not by carrying them away to the Past That Never Was but send them forwards, into new, more complex ways of living. And the Borrowers is about resourcefulness, in that wonderful house built of cigar boxes and old letters, warm and dark beneath the floor.

But it’s also about the oppression of life down there, below stairs, below carpet. This is the experience of Arrietty, a teenage girl living in isolation, self-educated beyond her parents, sexuality a-burgeoning, yearning for freedom. Her experience mirrors oddly the nameless Boy’s life in the house, at full-size: an Anglo-Indian immigrant, a product of Empire, deracinated and lonely. And their loneliness, their friendship, mirrors again (oddly again) the friendship of old Mrs May and our narrator, telling stories about little people in the sad evening light of the morning room.

And we can’t ignore that in the life of the Clock family we see mirrored, in a particularly antique mirror of the kind you’d find in an old English house, the reflection going glossy and dark and unreliable, an image of life in Nazi Germany, as well as, painted broadly, an English working class family changing in a time of crisis, as well as, in the soft light of nostalgia, life in the country at the turn of the century, shadowed by the terrible intervening hand of Empire. It’s resistant to strict analogy because the place and characters live on the page, which allow for self-contradiction, which is the stuff of life.

There is so much to say, and perhaps I spent too long talking; look, I’ve done it again here. There’s not enough space left to last Thursday’s other book, Mary Poppins. No room for PL Travers’ sad childhood and her reinvention of herself, and her invention of Mary, the flinty Nanny with a glint in her eye. I loved the movie as a child but only read the book in my teens, a cosy read amidst GCSE exams, explorations of the city and of my own sexuality, burgeoning as it was (yes, a bit).

It’s nothing like the movie. Julie Andrews has too much nunly virtue to emulate this Mary’s vanity and mystery. An enigma in a crisply ironed blouse, Mary is unique, and her odd encounters with star-gods in John Lewis and women with edible fingers are inspired and oddly affecting, like half-remembered dreams. I like how it’s a very London series, full of zoos and parks and shops.

I’ve been wondering, just this week, whether my interest in children’s literature is motivated by a sense of it (not an idea) as a sort lost literature – like the playground culture that the adult can never quite venture upon; that these texts have a kind of mystical aura we allow ourselves to forget. And Mary Poppins is almost the definition of that: her zoo adventure, with the eerie dance of the animals, is suggestive of a deeper magic we long to access again.

And speaking of which, this week’s text is The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe...