Gwyneth Rees

The Making of May

‘I put on my trainers and stepped outside. It was a lovely sunny day and straight away I started to pretend that I was Mary in The Secret Garden when she first goes exploring. It’s winter then, not summer, and the grounds are cold and bare.That’s when she first sees the robin that lives in the garden and it starts to become her friend.

I didn’t see any robins as I followed the path that Mrs Daniels had brought us along when she’d first shown us the cottage. After it came out on to the main drive, I walked along it for a bit, then cut across the grass between some trees, heading for the side of the house. I didn’t know which side was south but I guessed it was the opposite side to where I’d gone on the day of Ben’s interview, since the garden there had been open and full of rose beds.

  A narrow stone path led round to the back of the house, so I followed it. I stopped short when I got to where the outbuildings were, but I couldn’t see anyone. I made a run for it, past the old brick sheds and the area where the bins were kept, still following the path, which now turned abruptly away from the house and went through a bit of garden which looked like it hadn’t been worked in for a while. I heard the sound of a lawnmower starting up nearby and guessed that Ben was already being kept busy.
  The path ran alongside a high grey stone wall and after a while I came to the end of it, and found an adjoining wall at a right angle. The path split here – one branch carried on straight ahead but the other turned off and ran along a new wall. I followed the second path, starting to feel excited. This wall was much shorter, and by the time I came to the next wall I knew I had found what I’d been looking for. Inside these walls there must be a secret garden.
  I was almost too excited to breathe properly as I crept along the third stretch of wall. Would there be a door here? Would it be unlocked? I knew this garden wasn’t really secret like the one in the story – but I could pretend that it was, couldn’t I? And if no one knew I was coming here, then the fact was that I was would be some sort of secret at least.
  I soon came to a black wooden door in the wall. I twisted the handle and found that it turned quite easily. I pushed the door inwards, stepped over a cracked paving stone – and found myself inside.
  Straight away I saw that my garden was nothing like the secret garden in my video. That garden was all wild and rambling, with trees and twisting things growing everywhere in a charming, mysterious sort of tangle. This garden had nothing tall in it whatsoever. There were no trees – just grass and flowerbeds and walls that were partly bare and partly covered in ivy. In one corner there was a small wooden shed. The grass in the centre obviously hadn’t been cut in a while and the flowerbeds looked like they had been left to their own devices for a long time too.
  The path was very weedy. It curved round the garden between the overgrown lawn in the middle and the flowerbeds on the edges, and I followed it all the way round until I got back to the entrance again. The garden wasn’t very big really. In the very centre was a stone pillar thing and I went over to look at it. It was a sundial. Its face was brass but in need of a good clean and its stone base had long grass and yellow dandelions growing half way up it. I remembered now that Mrs Daniels had called this the old sun garden.
  ‘Why isn’t anyone looking after you?’ I said out loud to the garden. Of course it was probably just because there was no gardener, but then I thought about Mary Lennox’s secret garden and how it had been locked up and neglected because the wife of the master of the house had fallen out of a tree there and died. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know anything about Mr Rutherford’s wife. Was it possible that some tragedy had befallen her while she was in this garden and that was why it had been left in this state? After all, the rest of the grounds had been kept reasonably tidy, even if they didn’t satisfy Mrs Daniels’ high standards, whereas the garden inside these walls hadn’t been touched all year by the look of it.
  There were roses in the flower beds – all yellow ones – and lots of other plants growing in among them, as well as yellow daisies of different types and sizes, and some other yellow flowers that looked a bit like lilies, growing in big clumps. Everything was growing into everything else.
  A sort of bindweed with floppy white flowers that I recognized from one of Ben’s gardening books was twisting itself around everything. I remembered that the book had given this type of weed a special name that sounded just right for it –convolvulus. ‘You’re a weed a – not a flower,’ I told it sternly, ‘and you shouldn’t be strangling those roses.’ I stepped closer and started to tug at some of the bindweed that was choking the yellow rose bush nearest the path.
  ‘Ouch!’ I drew back my hand as I got pricked by a rose thorn. I didn’t let that stop me though. I went back to the rose, more carefully this time, finding a place where I could break the bindweed easily. I unwound it in both directions from the rose bush, taking care not to touch any of the thorns, and threw it onto the path.
  I started to imagine that Mary Lennox was with me and that we were working together in the real secret garden. ‘Can’t you just hear the poor roses sighing with relief as we free them?’ Mary said in her old-fashioned, slightly imperious voice, and I nodded as I replied ‘Now they’ll be able to breathe properly again.’ Only I said it in a posh voice too – and all of a sudden I felt like I was Mary Lennox.
  It took quite a while to free each prickly stem and it wasn’t until I glanced at my watch that I realised I’d been working in the garden for nearly an hour. My hands and arms were all scratched because it was difficult to avoid the rose thorns completely, but I didn’t care. I was enjoying myself.
  ‘You should wear gardening gloves if you’re going to do that!’ a voice said from behind me.
  And I turned to see – standing grinning at me – the plump boy with the freckled face that I had seen the day in the car with Mr Rutherford.

Making of May © Gwyneth Rees, 2007.  Published by Macmillan.