It would seem writers also use this genre (particularly time travel) as a device to articulate an older person’s sense of alienation from the present, using a young person to demonstrate it. New-found independence is then tested when the familiar world is set askew by the supernatural, myth or superstition. Here, the stuff of everyday life can wear gently and comfortably and be respected for it, not constantly replenished, renewed or hidden once age settles in.Īunt Olive has been such a figure to Lucy, having brought her up as an orphan, but with the ways and routines of the turn of the century.Ĭome Back, Lucy belongs to a familiar genre in children’s literature where the lead character is removed to a new environment, separated from family temporarily or permanently, somehow adrift. A ‘grandmother’ in these cases represents a calm space, the one who will listen when parental figures are rattled and who pass on a picture of life in a past that is fascinating in its noticeable, physical difference.

These characters have a familiar function that fits a standard trope: gentleness, order, routine. She saw the mouth on the other side of the window frame the words, ‘Come with me!’” First published in the UK 1973, and in the US as Mirror of Danger Adapted for ITV television in 1978 by Gail Renard and Colin Shindler, directed by Paul Harrison Emma Barkhle as Lucy and Bernadette Windsor as Alice in ITV’s adaptation (1978)īoth Come Back, Lucy and Tom’s Midnight Garden use houses to represent modernisation or obliteration of the past, and both feature a grandmotherly figure. The lights in the room swung, the lights in the reflection swung, wild half-formed ideas swung in Lucy’s head. Lucy, with a thrill of fear, shook her head.

But even as she reasoned, the owner of the face raised a pale hand that beckoned. “She swished the curtain as she spoke in order to see better, and for the peering Lucy the light was suddenly changed so that instead of the dark garden she saw only a reflection of the room behind her and her own face. Victorian visions take a sinister turn in a study of childhood grief set in the progressive 1970s

Mirror of Danger by Pamela Sykes