The Child Garden by Catriona McPherson

 
published 2015




 

 
I chose high, wedge-heeled boots in plum-coloured suede and black trousers that skimmed the top of them. They were made of some kind of very sturdy elasticated fabric I had never come across before. I pulled it in every direction, wondering what it must be like to sew seams into, then I put the trousers over my arm and went looking for tops too. Standing in the changing room, I looked at myself in the leopard-print chiffon blouse and the black fake-leather jacket; in the sturdy trousers, balanced on the not-quite-sturdy-enough wedge heels. I clipped on the earrings I had chosen and then set to unwinding my hair. It was longer than I thought. I don’t look in mirrors much and the small one in the bathroom that I use to make sure my parting is straight only shows me from my scalp to my chin. I had no idea that my hair would cover me to the elbows.


commentary: Catriona McPherson has featured a lot on the blog, but mostly via the wonderful Dandy Gilver, her 1920s series sleuth. But her contemporary books are really excellent too (The Day She Died is here). This one I found nearly unputdownable – it’s beautifully structured so you need to know what is going to happen next. Many of the tropes are familiar, but she does something really different and clever with them. The heroine, Gloria, lives near an old house which is now a carehome (where her son lives) and was once a school. She meets up with a childhood friend who was part of a group of children who had a very bad experience at the school – a night’s camping trip that went wrong. It seems that those now-grown-up children are being picked off one by one. She tries to trace them all. Meanwhile she visits her profoundly-disabled son, and reads to him from the Robert Louis Stevenson book A Child’s Garden of Verse. She has another friend in the carehome, and a lot to worry about. She is a wonderful heroine - not perfect, has her issues, unusual looks. A nice woman to spend some time with.

McPherson always has wonderful observations about life along the way: I liked her sharp comments on a passing character who is talking about suicide:

“There’s copers and there’s quitters. If he had thought on his poor mother before he did it, she’d be a happier woman today. But then, she brought him up and made him what he was.” Even to me, a stranger, this sounded like the most cold-hearted, smug-faced drivel anyone could think up if they were paid to try.

She’s brilliant on clothes, and I like her portrayal of Gloria, who dresses like ‘a Texas polygamist’, but still knows what she is doing. The passage above is her changing her look, because she needs not to be recognized. But she has plenty to say about others, a woman wearing:

The sort of trousers you’d have to go looking for these days, when it’s harder to dress badly than it is to go to Primark and dress like everyone.

Probably my favourite thing in the whole book comes when Gloria describes a game she plays with her assistant – her job as a registrar involves seeing new parents:

Lynne and [I played] The Hand Of Woman, where we tried to tell whether a toddler had been dressed by its dad when the mum was still on her back from the birth. “She laid that outfit by,” Lynne had said one day, full of scorn, when a young man brought in a child, chittering and blue-lipped in a matching sundress and sandals during a sudden cold snap. “That’s the hand of woman.”

One of those truthful, real things that most women would recognize – but have never seen written down. And it has its relevance…

McPherson is such a good writer: she creates a wonderful atmosphere in the book, using a variety of features, and is funny and entertaining and scarey all at the same time.

She makes excellent use of the Stevenson A Child’s Garden of Verse. The poetry book is a strange read with its simplicity and clarity that still leave your mind full of questions. There’s a reason why it has entertained endless generations of children. The picture above is of my own ancient, very battered copy.

 


….And this is just a sample of the hundreds of editions it has run to over the years, with wildly varying covers and illustrations.

RLS has also featured on the blog with his marvellous book Kidnapped.

Click on the labels below for more from Catriona and Dandy 

Thanks to EW for reminding me to read this.