WISHING FOR TOMORROW by Hilary McKay
This is a darling book. I hesitate to slather it with the warm and furry adjectives it deserves for fear you’ll think it’s soppy or sloppy, which it is not: McKay has a sharp eye, a classy style, and a good sense of humour.*
I don’t read much ‘middle age’ fiction** because to my evil-cow eye it’s a diabolically difficult authorial voice to get right. The one regular exception is Jacqueline Wilson who is brilliant and I adore her, but I have read McKay’s EXILES series which are also witty and charming without being soft or schmaltzy, and I was intrigued, albeit nervously, by the premise of WISHING FOR TOMORROW. As all Frances Hodgson Burnett-ophiles have already figured out from the first footnote, this is a sequel to A LITTLE PRINCESS.
The Burnett book most often cited as readers’ number-one favourite is A SECRET GARDEN. But there’s a strong vocal minority of us who lost our hearts to A LITTLE PRINCESS. And there’s an argument that as a child I went from a passionate obsession with A LITTLE PRINCESS straight to a passionate obsession with THE LORD OF THE RINGS, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Okay, there was a hiatus for Marguerite Henry, Walter Farley and Elyne Mitchell’s Silver Brumby books. But I still went pretty straight. A LITTLE PRINCESS is a serious totem in my life.
So, for any illiterate peasants out there who haven’t read it***, A LITTLE PRINCESS begins with a little girl in early-20th-century London being taken to her new boarding school by her father. She has grown up in India, the only child of her widowed but doting father; but she has always known that she will have to come to England and go to school, while her father goes back to India and discovers more diamond-mines. He is very rich, and she has always been treated like a little princess.
And then the diamond-mines go bust, and Sara’s father dies raving in brain-fever; and the news comes back from India to Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary for Young Ladies that the little princess is a pauper. Miss Minchin, who has always resented her star boarder, does not take it well. She makes Sara into a drudge.
But the point is that Sara has a nobility of spirit that had nothing to do with all the trappings of her wealth. Cue the violins. We’ve seen her behaving well when it isn’t costing her anything; but she is determined to go on behaving well, even when it’s costing her everything. The scene when she turns on her beloved doll—the only thing she was able to bring with her out of the wreck of her old life—breaks my heart every time.†
Of course it has a happy ending. It’s that sort of book. But as she is carried off in triumph by her father’s best friend, who has been trying to find her since he recovered from his brain-fever and discovered the diamond-mines hadn’t gone bust after all, those of us who have gone through it all with her can’t help but wonder what happens to everyone she leaves behind. As McKay says in her author’s note: ‘That could not have been the whole of it! Surely Lottie and Lavinia, Ermengarde and all the rest . . . did not just fade into the shadows. . . . What happened next? . . . And so I have written the answer. . . . This is the story of what happened next, after Sara went away.’
WISHING FOR TOMORROW is chiefly Ermengarde’s book, which is excellent. A lot of us who love A LITTLE PRINCESS idolise Sara Crewe, and pretend to identify with her, when secretly identifying like mad with Ermengarde, the fat slow timid girl who mysteriously becomes Sara’s best friend.†† You always knew—well, you always hoped, since you knew you were an Ermengarde yourself, not a Sara—that there were hidden depths to Ermengarde—and that she might even earn her own happy ending, in which, for example, she gained an ally against her gruff, terrifying, hideously learned and bookish father. And what about a richly deserved comeuppance for the dreadful Lavinia and the dire Miss Minchin? And perhaps the comeuppance for Miss Minchin might include an escape for her nice if ineffectual sister Miss Amelia? Yes to all of these—but not, perhaps, quite in the way you expect.††† I like what happens to Lavinia particularly—and Alice, the scullery maid who replaces Becky, who went off with Sara to be her personal maid at the end of A LITTLE PRINCESS, is one of the best things in this new book. Alice is from Epping, and spends a good deal of time threatening to go back there if conditions are not to her liking, and dispensing the best of Epping wisdom: “ ‘ . . . mind you don’t go swallowing prune stones because they grow inside and sprout out through the ears. (There was someone who died of it in Epping) . . .’”
Alice is an example of just how capable and appealing this book is. She’s a lively and engaging character who does both much good and some catastrophic ill for Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary, merely by being herself. She’s also part of the vivid background of turn-of-the-last-century London; Lottie’s fascination with the life of a scullery-maid lets you in on the secrets of whitening doorsteps with a donkeystone and splitting coal with a hammer. I love best the books that give you a feel for the reality, the texture, of the places they happen in, be it Middle Earth or London a hundred years ago, and McKay does that beautifully here.
And, speaking of Jacqueline Wilson, there’s a big fat plug from her: ‘A wonderful treat for anyone who loves the classic A LITTLE PRINCESS . . . and it’s got such a clever ending!’ Yes, it does. I admire Hilary McKay’s nerve in even trying it on, and I admire her even more for bringing it off. I’m not an easy audience at the best of times, and this is A LITTLE PRINCESS she’s messing with. Successfully messing with. I recommend it.
* * *
* “ ‘There was a princess,’ related Sara, ‘who kissed a frog, and he turned straight away into a handsome prince and he fell in love with her.’
“ ‘He must have been an odd sort of prince,’ said Ermengarde. ‘To fall in love with someone who kisses frogs.’”
** Despite being middle aged. Ha ha. One of these categories needs a new name. Yes, I would object to ‘kiddie middle age’ and ‘decrepit antique middle age’.
*** Who are so enamoured of this blog they’re getting one of their lettered friends to read it to them
† Yes I still reread it. Of course. It’s one of my heart books. It’s like LOTR: I can see what people are talking about when they fault it, but I don’t care, and in fact I feel sorry for them that they can’t enjoy, revel, wallow in it the way I can. And you know: A LITTLE PRINCESS has a strong heroine. Which, sadly, cannot be said of Tolkien. Sara does have to be rescued—she’s a penniless orphan child—but there’s no doubt that she has held her line through appalling circumstances.
†† The DUFF, in fact, before DUFFs were invented. The concept has been around since there have been kids and schools and hierarchies. No, before that. Since there have been people.
††† And if your remaining burning question is, does Lottie ever grow up? The answer is, no, at least not by the end of this book.
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