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When I was growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, most of the children’s books I loved were set in the countryside, in villages or (at most) in small towns like the one where I lived. Yes, there were books set in cities too, but they tended to be the depressing, gritty realist ones, and I wanted adventure - and especially magical adventure. Magic, it seemed, was dispelled by petrol fumes.
There’s a long tradition dictating that the countryside is the natural home of both children and magic, no matter how few children actually live there. Maybe it goes back to Rousseau? Not only that, but in many of the classic books from my childhood there’s a gloomy sense that both magic and countryside are under threat from the creeping spread of urbanization, concreting over our imaginations and surrounding them with chain-linked fences and razor wire.
Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) is a good example. In that book, young Tom Long, staying with his childless uncle and aunt in a pokey flat with no garden, finds that he is able each midnight to travel back in time to a period some 70 years earlier, when the flat was part of a grand house, and what is now a back yard containing nothing more than a car on bricks was part of an idyllic garden backing onto fields and a river. There he is able to pass his days (or rather nights) playing happily with the garden's Victorian inhabitant, a girl called Hatty.
It’s a wonderful book, but like many others of that time it’s built on the assumption that the rural past is interesting, luxuriant, and beautiful, while the urban present is dull, sterile and ugly, and likely to become more so. And that, for a child destined to spend most of her life in the future and probably in a city too, was a depressing conclusion.
Things have changed a bit. Since the 1970s a genre of urban fantasy has appeared, written by people as diverse as Michael de Larrabeiti (whose Borriblesseries were a pre-Punk answer to the Wombles), Diana Wynne Jones, and more recently China Miéville and ABBA’s own Elen Caldecott. It turns out that, like foxes, magic can live quite happily in cities after all. All the same, I want to do something to put the record straight for my younger self. So here, with some small adjustments, is a passage from my rewriting of Tom’s Midnight Garden.
9 Comments on Hatty's Midnight Yard - Cathy Butler, last added: 6/2/2012
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What wonderful sacrilege!
And timely for me, as I am trying to pitch a quite tricky urban-magic story to my editor. Who has recently moved to the countryside...
Ah - I grew up in the country (the Australian "bush") and I have to admit things can happen there. I doubt we would have had the same freedom to roam in the city!
Excellent! I love it when really characters appear in stories. makes you feel so clever for recognizing them! And a very interesting point about the way we view cities and countryside!
Brilliant and so clever. Thanks!
Loved it! But could you do a whole novel about carburettors? Maybe you could...after all, they would want to test drive the car, at some point.
I remember a lot of books I loved with urban settings: Madeleine; The Family From One End Street (shame those books never lead to a genre); The Little Princess; Paddington; Diana Wynne Jones as you say - especially The Ogre Downstairs. One thing I notice is that when there is an urban setting it often seems to be London! Very hard to think of books set in Manchester, Leeds or most other British cities.
I've just written what might be termed an urban fantasy myself: "Wolfie", out in August - at least, it involves magic, and its set in an urban neighbourhood. Didn't know I was part of a trend! I was conscious though of wanting a certain kind of neighbourhood ...the sort of place I know well and which is also familiar to most children.
A novel about carburettors? In Cambridgeshire? Haven't you read Fen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
I shall look out for Wolfie come August, Emma!
Love it! I also adored anything with an urban setting, The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright (New York) was a particular childhood favourite. The sequel (which I've forgotten the name of) where they move to the countryside was nothing like as good.
I've always wanted to write a magical fantasy set in the 'burbs, the most common (yet sadly neglected by literature) geography of cildhood
Fen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Love that Cathy. With some Cambridge academic riding pillion, waffling on about Aristotle and classic vs romantic, while steams through fenland.
Thought of two more urban books I loved: Harriet the Spy and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Both Manhattan - neither of them fantasies, though.
Ah yes, Harriet the Spy is one of my all-time faves too!
Jongleuse, I quite agree about the suburbs - a much neglected territory.