Never Enuff Tom's Midnight Garden!

The Mayor of Roanoke, Virginia wants to set up internment camps for Syrian refugees. El Manzanar!

Plus there’s a Twitter campaign - #JeSuisDiesel – that invites canines from all over the world to join in anti-terrorist solidarity.

You could not make these things up.

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Yesterday was a very productive day. In the evening I watched From Time to Time, written and directed by Downton Abbey puppet master Julian Fellowes and using many of the actors who star in Downton Abbey, plus one who starred in Upstairs, Downstairs, from which Downton Abbey clearly draws its inspiration.

From Time to Time is not a particularly good movie, but I’m a sucker for Big House movies. (Of the English manor estate variety, not Sing Sing.)

Plus, you know, magic.

I don’t know the YA novels the film is based on. They’re written by someone called Lucy M. Boston whose Wikipedia bio makes her sound insufferable.

But the movie clearly owes a debt to one of my absolute favorite books of all time: Tom’s Midnight Garden. An unacknowledged debt, I might add. Shame, shame.

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Tom’s Midnight Garden takes place in England in the 1950s. A boy – Tom Long – is forced to spend a summer with his bor-r-ring aunt and uncle after his brother is quarantined with measles. The aunt and uncle live in town in a Victorian mansion that’s been partitioned off into flats. There is an ancient grandfather’s clock right next to the front door, but in all other ways the foyer, the house, the apartment Tom’s aunt and uncle live in, are nondescript.

Tom is semi-quarantined, so he can’t leave the flat. Also, the old crone who owns the house lives on its top floor and is rumored not to like children. Tom develops insomnia.

One night as Tom is tossing and turning, the grandfather’s clock strikes 13.

Tom creeps downstairs to investigate. And it’s daytime, and the front door is open on to the most amazing garden…

In this other world, no one can see Tom except for a girl named Hatty, who is a kind of ward of the family that owns the house, and one of the gardeners, a religious zealot named Abel.

Both lonely children, Hatty and Tom develop a friendship. Time is also curiously elastic in this alternate universe: Early in his explorations of it, Tom witnesses lightening hitting and toppling one of the tallest trees. The next night, however, the tree is still standing.

Tom and Hatty have many adventures together, but Hatty is changing all the time although Tom is slow to notice.

“You’re a ghost!” Hatty tells Tom.

“No, you’re the ghost,” Tom tells Hatty. Which makes her cry.

Toward the end of the novel, when Tom escapes into the garden universe, it’s winter. Hatty is excited because the river has frozen over, and she is going to skate it – all the way up to the cathedral at Ely.

“Come with me,” Hatty suggests.

“But I have no skates,” Tom says. Then he has an idea. In their respective time periods, Tom and Hatty both live in the same room, the Victorian mansion’s old nursery with bars on its windows. There are loose board in that room over a kind of hiding space.

“When you leave the house, put your skates in the hiding place,” Tom suggests.

And the next day, when Tom is back in his own time/space continuum, he looks in the hiding place, and sure enough: He finds a pair of rusted, antique ice skates. With a note in faded copperplate script: I place these in fulfillment of a promise I once made to a little boy…

Next night, Tom grabs the skates and sets out into the garden. Hatty and Tom put on their respective pairs of skates – PARADOX ALERT – and begin skating.

When they finally get to Ely, Tom somehow runs into his be-measled brother, Peter, to whom he’s been writing about his midnight adventures, all summer long.

Peter is shocked. “You told me Hatty was a little girl,” he says. “But she’s a grownup.”

Next night when the grandfather clock strikes 13, Tom runs downstairs – and there’s nothing. The front door opens on to an alley with garbage cans and the usual municipal clutter.

“Hatty!” Tom screams in despair.

Pandemonium ensues. Everybody in the house wakes up, including the elderly ogress who owns the house.

The next day, Tom’s aunt and uncle tell him that the landlady has insisted upon meeting him. Doubtless, there will be recriminations, but he must man up.

Except that when they meet, the old woman says, “Oh, Tom. Don’t you recognize me?”

Because, of course, it’s Hatty. Who’s been dreaming of her youth. Though that last night, she had been dreaming of her marriage.

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In the very last scene of the book – narrated through the POV of the prosaic aunt character – the tiny old osteoporotic woman in black with her dowager’s hump and Tom embrace.

“It was almost like watching two children,” says the aunt.

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Most elegant time travel device ever!!!!! For years and years and years, I’ve wanted to plagiarize it somehow. Make it my own. The chronology would be difficult: Someone in her 80s now would have been a girl in 1945. Not a time when a lot of Big Houses were being built, I’m afraid.

The time travel device in the main novel I’m working on these days, Where You Were When, is not quite a Tom’s Midnight Garden plagiary but certainly an homage.

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Tom’s Midnight Garden inspired the bicycle trip I took to the Ely Cathedral in – 1974? Must have been.

I saw a ghost there, too.

But that’s another story.