The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  Norton’s reference to future ‘Mrs Drivers’ who might summon killers like Rich Williams to exterminate undesirable and parasitic creatures had acquired a special poignancy by 1952. Aware of past atrocities, Western nations were resolved to shun the legacy of the Führer, a German word that means ‘Leader’ as well as ‘Driver’. The sadistic housekeeper whom Norton describes as having a moustache was even drawn with a bristly over-lip by Beth and Joe Krutch, the illustrators of the American edition. But the discovery of Stalin’s own massacres, sudden fears about subversives, the Korean conflict and, above all, the threat of an atomic war provided a new framework for Mrs Driver’s paranoid compulsion to eradicate the last of the Borrowers with poison gas. In her 1966 letter, Norton recalled how, as a child, she had pondered what it would be like to live among the unsafe Borrowers: ‘What would one live on? Where make one’s home? Which would be one’s enemies and which one’s friends?’ (xvi).

  The oppressiveness of the Borrowers’ underground quarters is stressed far more in the sombre, chiaroscuro drawings by the English illustrator Diana Stanley than in the airily kinetic American illustrations of Beth and Joe Krutch. Indeed, Stanley’s depiction of the Clock family’s final escape from their hiding place hardly seems liberating. Weighted down by their possessions and hindered by barriers they must traverse, the trio staggers towards an uncertain safety. Stanley’s artwork apparently influenced the 1993 BBC television series, with its emphasis on the claustrophobia triggered by cramped spaces and jarring sounds. Cast as a debilitated and worried paterfamilias, the actor Ian Holm bears little resemblance to his buoyant, younger counterpart, Eddie Albert, in the rambunctious 1977 American film. Whether as illustrations or in films, the British representations thus seem far more reality-oriented, history-conscious and ‘adult’ than their light-hearted, escapist and ‘child-friendly’ American counterparts.

  This split harks back to the verbal text’s intricate criss-crossing of opposing perspectives. Norton immediately erects barriers that delay our access to the book’s fantasy core. Not until the second chapter are we introduced to the points of view of Arrietty Clock and her Borrower parents. The resisting thicket that meets us at the outset resembles the obstacles Perrault had strewn in ‘Sleeping Beauty’, where a young prince as well as the reader had to sift competing narratives about what a bramble-covered palace might conceal. Norton employs an aged narrator, Mrs May, to adapt the story of the tiny Clock family to a child listener’s comprehension. She is a throwback to the storytellers of the traditional contes de veilles or ‘old wives’ tales’. Yet in telling her story to little Kate, this relic from an Edwardian or Victorian past also invokes a child teller as her prime source. It was her ‘little brother’, Mrs May asserts, who was privileged to see the ‘frightened’ creatures whom credulous ‘ancestors’ had still identified as fairies or ‘the “little people”’.5

  But Mrs May also calls into question the trustworthiness of her younger brother’s account. He was a ‘tease’, she explains, who often told his older sisters ‘impossible things’:

  ‘He was jealous, I think, because we were older – and because we could read better. He wanted to impress us; he wanted, perhaps, to shock us. And yet’– she looked into the fire – ‘there was something about him – perhaps because we were brought up in India among mystery and magic and legend – something that made us think that he saw things that other people could not see; sometimes we’d know he was teasing, but at other times – well, we were not so sure . . .’ (6–7)

  The multigenerational narrative Norton introduces here thus depends on the uncertain testimony of a sickly and lonely Anglo-Indian boy sent to England to recover from ‘rheumatic fever’ at the country-house of still another ancient transplant from an earlier era, his bed-ridden and slightly addled ‘great-aunt’ Sophy. The nameless boy, whose untrustworthiness Mrs May will again stress at the very end of her narrative, is a crucial witness. Unlike Mrs Driver, the housekeeper who reports having seen hundreds of squeaking ‘little people like . . . mice dressed up’ (142), he has held extended conversations with Arrietty before meeting her parents, Pod and Homily Clock. But the boy cannot be recalled in a maturer incarnation to testify about the veracity of his encounters. ‘He was killed’, Mrs May informs Kate, ‘many years ago now, on the North-West Frontier . . . He died what they call “a hero’s death”’ (6).

  Like Kate, all readers of Norton’s novel thus must depend on Mrs May’s guarded translation of a story told long ago by a pre-literate boy whose early fantasy-life had been shaped, much like that of a near-sighted Rudyard Kipling, by the magical tales of his native India. Yet Kate and the child-reader are extricated from adult scepticism as soon as the story adopts the Clock family’s point of view. Although the adult reader cannot wholly displace a guardedness now associated with the over-protectiveness of Arrietty’s cautious parents, the child reader can embrace the girl’s fearless defiance of grown-up constrictions. Only in the last chapter, when Mrs May reappears as narrator, will Kate and the child reader once again have to contend with the book’s opening questions about the veracity of its contents.

  The layers which structure Norton’s novel thus replicate those which she isolated for the recipient of her 1966 letter. The finished novel both retains and complicates her childish belief in the Borrowers. In a significant reversal, the little girl with two older brothers who later went off to war has been transformed into a little boy with two older sisters, one of whom now so cautiously transmits his child-fantasy to a receptive Kate. Yet just as Mrs May distances herself from the boy teller who was a ‘tease’, so did Norton originally try to distance her readers from that eager believer. Instead of opening the book with a sentence about Mrs May, as all American editions of The Borrowers have done until recently, the British edition focused on Mrs May’s prime listener: ‘It was Mrs. May who first told me about them. No, not me. How could it have been me – a wild, untidy, self-willed little girl who stared with angry eyes and was said to crunch her teeth? Kate, she should have been called. Yes, that was it – Kate. Not that the name matters much either way: she barely comes into the story.’6

  Why does this authorial ‘I’ question the identity of Mrs May’s interlocutor? Is this a further distancing device? Or is the act of naming a character whose name supposedly matters so little ‘either way’ meant to be read ironically? The story relayed by a woman called ‘Mrs. May’ may or may not be founded on fact. But its focus on a feisty teenager called Arrietty should appeal to any ‘self-willed little girl’ who opposes the adults who try to will her future. As a teenager who is older than the giant boy who becomes her accomplice, Arrietty refuses to be shielded from truths she likes to process on her own. She is what I earlier called a ‘third entity’, an intermediary who can help the author negotiate between contrary perspectives. It is hardly a coincidence that Arriety’s first words in this text should come in the form of a question: ‘“What,” Arrietty would ask, “what did happen to Egglentina?” But no one would say’ (13).

  Arrietty’s parents want to prevent her from knowing the grisly fate of a young cousin who was killed in the house, just as presumably was her Aunt Lupy Hendreary, the emigrant who foolishly tried to return to the vacated living quarters. But by failing to answer an inquisitive child’s question, Pod and Homily become her inferiors. It is Arrietty, and not these timid, infantile elders, who brings about the family’s emigration. After she confesses to having met the boy she has enlisted to communicate with the surviving Hendrearys, Arrietty begins to take charge. She urges her reluctant parents to join her uncle and her boy cousins in their outdoor habitat, ‘a badger’s set, two fields away’:

  ‘Do understand,’ pleaded Arrietty, ‘please understand! I’m trying to save the race!’

  ‘The expressions she uses!’ said Homily to Pod under her breath, not without pride.

  But Pod was not listening. ‘Save the race!’ he repeated grimly. ‘It’s people like you, my girl, who do things suddenly with
no respect for tradition, who’ll finish us Borrowers once and for all. Don’t you see what you’ve done?

  Arrietty met his accusing eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said falteringly. ‘I’ve – I’ve got in touch with the only other ones still alive. So that,’ she went on bravely, ‘from now on we can all stick together. . .’ (116)

  By ‘bravely’ contesting her father’s authority, Arrietty here resembles little Fern in the opening pages of Charlotte’s Web, that other 1952 adult/child classic. The child-reader who sutures with such feisty agents can easily set aside any of the qualifications that an ironic narrator may inject. Indeed, unlike Fern, Arrietty has already earned the child-reader’s respect by the fearlessness she displayed in her earlier encounter with the boy.

  That encounter, however, is also marked by complications that wary older readers cannot quite as easily dismiss. In chapter 9, when Arrietty meets the boy in the garden, she first perceives a huge eye, a ‘glaring eye’ much ‘like her own but enormous’. The voice that addresses her, ‘like the eye, . . . enormous’, is threatening. She is ordered not to come any closer, nor to try scrabbling ‘at me with your nasty little hands’. ‘Or’, the voice twice warns, ‘I’ll hit you with my ash stick’. But Arrietty quickly senses that the owner of this disembodied voice is as frightened as she is. The boy admits that he has previously been scared by tiny ‘things’ like her: ‘I’ve seen them. In India.’ Arrietty quickly capitalises on this opportunity. Remembering her Tom Thumb’s Gazetteer of the World, a miniature geography book her father ‘borrowed’ for her, this girl reader calmly points out: ‘You’re not in India now’ (71–4).

  As the ensuing exchange makes clear, Arrietty’s literacy enables her to rise above the boy who towers over her:

  So this was ‘the boy’! Breathless, she felt, and light with fear. ‘I guessed you were about nine,’ she gasped after a moment.

  He flushed. ‘Well, you’re wrong. I’m ten.’ He looked down at her, breathing deeply. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Fourteen,’ said Arrietty. ‘Next June,’ she added, watching him.

  There was a silence while Arrietty waited, trembling a little. ‘Can you read?’ the boy said at last.

  ‘Of course,’ said Arrietty. ‘Can’t you?’

  ‘No,’ he stammered. ‘I mean – yes. I mean I’ve just come from India.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ asked Arrietty.

  ‘Well, if you’re born in India, you’re bilingual. And if you are bilingual, you can’t read. Not so well.’

  Arrietty stared at him: what a monster, she thought, dark against the sky.

  ‘Do you grow out of it?’ she asked.

  He moved a bit and she felt the cold flick of his shadow.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘it wears off. My sisters were bilingual; now they aren’t a bit. They could read any of those books upstairs in the schoolroom.’

  ‘So could I,’ said Arrietty quickly, ‘if someone could hold them, and turn the pages. I’m not a bit bilingual. I can read anything.’ (74–5)

  There are some delicious ironies embedded in this exchange. The boy has defensively exaggerated his age. As Mrs May later informs Kate, ‘He was not . . . a very strong little boy and he was only nine (not ten as he had boasted to Arrietty)’ (171). The boy’s exposure to Hindi in an oral culture has apparently delayed his development as a reader of English texts even more than it slowed down the seven-year-old Kipling. The undefined scary ‘things’ he claims to have seen may well be ‘scrabbling’ insects or even small mammals as deadly as Kipling’s cobra-killer, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. But they may also have been sprites that an imaginative boy exposed to Indian folklore might conjure in his reveries or dreams. The nameless boy tries to justify himself to the girl whose own name has been deformed by her semi-literate parents. He insists that one ‘can’t read’ when one is ‘bilingual’. But what he really seems to mean is that, though nine, he does not yet want to read. He has resisted the print culture his sisters have accepted. He therefore feels inferior to these older sisters, whose bilingualism has worn off, as well as to the older Arrietty, whose bookishness so greatly impresses her illiterate mother.

  Both Arrietty and this defensive boy seem to regard ‘bilingualism’ as a decided handicap. But what about Mary Norton and the sly Mrs May, her fellow practitioner of indirection? Might they be implying that the boy’s retardation could be regarded as an asset? Arrietty has, after all, reached the age of puberty at which Mary Norton shelved her childhood imaginings. Rather than his fourteen-year-old interlocutor, it is the boy who thus acts as the double of the myopic child creator of a pigmy race. Could he, then, actually be Arrietty Clock’s creator? In the novel’s conclusion, Mrs May hints that Arrietty’s memoranda book, which she found outdoors, may well have been a forgery, the handiwork of a boyish ‘tease’. Yet this elderly ironist also encourages an alternative speculation. Given her unlettered brother’s limited skills and her authorial circumspections, she may simply be masking the invention of an ‘old wives’ tale’ of her very own.

  The hybrid text of The Borrowers refuses to resolve this conundrum. Instead, the narrative invites the young and the old to participate in a reading process that steadily alternates between affiliation and disaffiliation. We are invited to partake of the pairings on which the novel is structured – the oppositions and alliances between old Mrs May and young Kate, between a Mrs May and the boy who was her younger brother, between that sickly boy and the later ‘hero’ who died on some ‘North-West Frontier’, between Arrietty and her parents. All these, and pairings I have not discussed – such as the opposition between Pod and Homily or the alliance Pod forms with great-aunt Sophy, the tipsy matriarch who assumes that he is merely an alcohol-induced figment of her imagination – can seduce us into a suspension of belief that Norton allows her younger readers to maintain but also encourages her older readers to relinquish.

  Child readers, as I have suggested, can identify with Arrietty as the novel’s heroine. Betty, a nine-year-old from Hong Kong, who enthusiastically recommends this book, singles out Arrietty because, though small, ‘she is adventurous and does brave things like being seen by a [huge] boy’. Kelkel, a boy who is also nine and also from Hong Kong, likes the alliance that the boy forms with Arrietty and stresses his helpfulness to the Clocks. Yet he, too, declares Arrietty to be ‘my favourite character. She is cute. She is a kind girl. She loves to have company.’ He vows to recommend this book to current second graders ‘so that next year’ they can form a company of fellow-readers. By way of contrast, the eleven-year-old from New Orleans who hides behind the pseudonym of ‘Monkey’ and protests that ‘i am not small like the borrowers in the book’ is more guarded. She notes that there are different audiences and different versions of the plot: ‘the book is not like the movie that i have seen and is not as exciting’. Still, the possibility of ‘different endings and beginnings’ entices her to consider sequels with ‘a lot more adventures for Arriety’.7

  The instability that ‘Monkey’ senses is something Norton asks her older readers not to forget. She is herself a ‘borrower’ of sorts, not only by reframing her childhood imaginings but also by enlisting the constructs of earlier writers such as Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Kipling. Her self-conscious hindsight alerts us to the precariousness of all pre-existing constructs. Children’s books, Norton suggests, are innately ‘bilingual’ in their quasi-elegiac preservation of a receding and diminishing childhood world. The Borrowers cling to decorations and artefacts that have become outdated: ‘On the walls, repeated in various colours, hung several portraits of Queen Victoria as a girl; these were postage stamps borrowed by Pod some years ago from the stamp box on the desk in the morning room’ (15). Norton insists on the importance of a historical awareness. Yet she also makes it extremely difficult for her readers to affix a precise temporal framework to the story she has Mrs May tell.

  When the boy examines the interior of the Clocks’ main room, he sees a ‘Victorian chair�
� and proposes to replace the effigies of a young Victoria with ‘some better stamps than those’, notably ‘some jubilee stamps with the Taj Mahal’ (126–7). Ostensibly, Norton here refers to either Victoria’s golden or diamond jubilees of 1887 and 1897. Yet none of the jubilee stamps issued in 1887 featured the Taj Mahal. They merely reproduced the Queen’s profile, as does the spurious 2-pence stamp that Norton’s American illustrators, the Krutches, placed on the walls of the Clocks’ living room. The boy’s postage stamp thus must be an Indian, 2½-anna, brown-and-orange stamp of a 1935 set issued for the silver jubilee of George V. But if so, how could this ten-year-old have been killed ‘many years ago’ on the North-West Frontier that Kipling’s Kim protected as far back as 1888? Even if he were to have died in the carnage of the First World War, in ‘the mud and blood across the Channel’ where Norton’s older brothers fought, the young officer could hardly have availed himself of a 1935 stamp.

  Mary Norton here goes beyond the anachronisms she has Mrs May implant. She deliberately undermines the historical veracity of a story that demands that its adult readers be hyper-conscious of mid-twentieth-century events. She wants such readers to understand that her narrative of persecution and survival is meant to evoke both the fall of a Victorian empire and the rise of the darker empires that succeeded it. At the same time, however, she also suggests that the entropy that has winnowed the race of Borrowers is not limited to any one historical period. Their illusory belief in their superiority over human ‘Beans’ will surely be adopted by others; and the mass-migrations and mass-exterminations to which they are subjected will surely recur.