hazel ’s Reviews > The Secret Garden > Status Update

Everything was strange and silent, and she seemed to be hundreds of miles away from anyone, but somehow she did not feel lonely at all.

One place she went to oftener than to any other. It was the long walk outside the gardens with the walls round them. There were bare flower-beds on either side of it and against the walls ivy grew thickly. There was one part of the wall where the creeping dark green leaves were more bushy than elsewhere. It seemed as if for a long time that part had been neglected.

'If tha' goes round that way tha'll come to th' gardens,' she said, pointing to a gate in a wall of shrubbery. 'There's lots o' flowers in the summer-time, but there's nothin' bloomin' now.' She seemed to hesitate a second before she added, 'One of th' gardens is locked up. No one has been in it for ten years.'

He won't let no one go inside. It was her garden. He locked th' door an' dug a hole and buried th' key.

Mary drank some tea and ate a little toast and some marmalade.

It was not a child's room, but a grown-up person's room, with gloomy old pictures on the walls and heavy old oak chairs. A table in the centre was set with a good, substantial breakfast. But she had always had a very small appetite, and she looked with something more than indifference at the first plate Martha set before her.

RACISM galore but maybe there's a teaching moment in the future? Probably not but it's possible with the way this is presented. Miss Mary So Contrary becomes irrationally furious when Martha reveals, "When I heard you was comin' from India I thought you was a black too." before meeting her. Martha doesn't share Mary's opinion bc she's heard they're very religious, but she still treats them like a spectacle.

Since she had been living in other peoples houses and had had no Ayah, she had begun to feel lonely and I think we’re thoughts which were new to her. She had begun to wonder why she had never seem to belong to anyone even when her father and mother had been alive. Other children seem to belong to their fathers and mothers, but she never seem to really be anyone’s little girl.