I was a little obsessed with this as a child, both the book and a Schools TV adaptation.  I remember having to miss a day of school when the TV would have been wheeled out mid-way through watching the series and feeling bereft that I wouldn’t know what was happening to Tom and I think that’s when I discovered you could watch Schools TV even if you weren’t at school, in fact, in those days, it was one of the few things on in the daytime.

Anyway, I digress, but I’ve always had a soft spot for this time-slip tale.  It would have been in the 1970s when I first encountered it on screen and in print by which time it was already a generation old.  It could be relied on to work well when I was teaching primary school children in the 80s and 90s but has time (which is a central theme of the plot) been kind to it?  I was interested to discover what it reads like 66 years on from publication when its target audience is so different.

I did initially find it much slower-paced than I was expecting, It did begin to weave its hypnotic charm over me but as I am no longer 10 that caused me to fall asleep- something which happened more than once! I don’t feel we really get to know Tom that well, he’s rather a passive character and that aspect of slightly sketchy characterisation may switch off a modern audience.

Plot-wise, I’m sure you will recall some of this.  A boy quarantined because his brother has measles goes to stay with his aunt and uncle in a flat in an old, converted house.  A grandfather clock strikes 13 at night and this opens a gateway into another time when the yard and bin store was a garden and Tom encounters a young girl from this time.

To be honest, not a great deal happens within the garden which could make it a slog for today’s younger audience geared up for continual action but the premise is so fascinating.  Why is this happening?  Is it a dream?  Is it marking in some way the passing of childhood?  Is Tom going down with measles and hallucinating?  It’s a ghost story but you’re not sure who are the ghosts and that make for a very evocative tale.

Philip Pullman claims it is a perfect book and highlights the ending as “the best in all children’s fiction” and it is extremely well handled which almost makes you want to start from the beginning again when finished.

It is a children’s book of its time – the pace is gentle, the adult characters are mostly underdeveloped and Tom needs considerably more oomph to be considered a modern day junior fiction hero but there is not denying that Philippa Pearce was onto something which would imprint itself forever for generations of children but will it continue to do so? This book, like the out-of-time characters at certain points here may become fainter but is probably never going to completely fade away.

Tom’s Midnight Garden was first published in 1958.  I read the 2015 Oxford University Press paperback edition.