A nice story. A book for children, indeed, but I'd never read it before, so I read it now uncaring of my not-being-a-child-anymore. It's a good story of how children should be brought up. It was sometimes difficult to read because of all the Yorkshire-talking, but I got used to it, and it became very slow at points, with all those long descriptions of flowers and nature growing and animals alike. Still, the children story was good. It also has two protagonists, because for the first half it's Mary Lennox, and the second half is all Colin Craven.
Mary was the daughter of an English couple living in India: none of her parents ever took any care of her. She was all the time with the Indian servants who spoiled her badly because she was their master, until one day cholera broke out in the house. Her stupid mother had stayed in India to attend a party instead of running away weeks before, and they both died along with many servants. Those that lived ran away, and she was forgotten and left alone. When she was found, she was sent to England to her uncle Mr Craven. When she arrived she was an ugly, yellow looking, disagreeable child of ten years old who could not even dress herself and ate almost nothing and was rude to everybody because she disliked everybody, and they disliked her. At the house, though, she met a poor, low servant: cheerful Martha, who talked a lot, as if they were equals, and loved the moor and her family and often talked about her mother and her twelve years old brother Dickon with a special way with animals. To pass the time she started going out in the gardens and met Ben Weatherstaff the gardener and a special robin who would come near him and now near her. Slowly she started to see there was beauty in the world, and the fresh air agreed to her and she started to eat more and gain weight and a better color and interest in things. She even started to like some people: Martha, Dickon, Ben...
Mr Craven's wife had been dead ten years, and since then he had ordered that her personal garden would be locked up, and the key buried and nobody was to go into it ever but Mary was a lonely child with nothing to do, so she set her mind to find it. She succeeded one day that she was out playing with a skipping-rope Martha's mother had bought for her, and she had never before seen one and had to be shown what it was for :-p
Mary found an old key in the ground and a door on a wall covered with ivy. She found her secret garden, and she shared her secret with Dickon. One night she heard heavy crying in the big house and set out to discover what it was. She found a room she'd never been before and a boy nobody ever talked about: Colin, Mr Craven's son whose mother died when he was born, so he's ten years old like her, and her cousin. At first the relationship is difficult because when the next day he called for her to go visit him she didn't have time because Dickon was waiting for her in the secret garden to work at it together, and Colin was used to be obeyed and got angry at her, and then in the night he broke into hysterics shouting and crying. All his life he had been alone, lying down, always indoor, with everybody saying he was not to live long, so much that he was convinced of it himself, and some nights he would think like everyone else did that he was becoming a hunchback like his father and scream and cry and think he was about to die: I don't know why exactly, how possibly the two things were related, but it was that important to him, his back. The servants and the nurse did not know what to do and called Mary because as Martha's mother says: children needs children. Mary made a scene herself yelling for him to stop, that he had a normal, straight back and he was not going to die, and in some way this did him good, and he started to want her company, and then he wanted to go out in the gardens, and she made him part of the secret and took him to the secret garden and seeing the spring beauty he started feeling like he was going to live and get well, and believing it is half work done, and day by day he changed like Mary had, eating more and standing on his own feet and growing stronger every day. Mary, Colin and Dickon would go into the garden every day and play and laugh (the best medicine of all, said again Martha's mother) and excercise to make them stronger and better, and they also attended at the flowers in the garden. When finally Mr Craven got home again, after such a long time, he found them in the secret garden, laughing out loud and running about, and was astonished to see his sick child as a healthy, lively boy, straight and tall, stronger and very much alive, who did not need either medicines or to be carried around in a chair anymore. The end of the book is all for Colin, walking towards home at his father's side under the incredulous looks of all the servants in the house.
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