Essay Questions

Why does Mrs. Bartholomew decide to tell Tom who she really is? How does she do this without letting anyone else in on the secret?

When Tom is looking for the entrance to the garden, he makes rather a noise. Assuming that he can get into it as usual, he is not really paying attention to the things that are around him in his present-day, "real time" life. He does not notice the stack of garbage cans and runs into them, making a cacophony of noise that wakes up everyone in the house - including Mrs. Bartholomew, who has always been considered to be the type of person one should definitely not waked up by making too much noise in the middle of the night. As Tom searches for the entrance to the garden, he is calling out Hatty's name. Mrs. Bartholomew hears this and realizes that he is the little boy whom she is meeting in her dreams.

Mrs. Bartholomew clearly believes that traveling between past and present is both possible and perfectly normal. She doesn't question how or why Tom comes to be in her dreams, but just accepts that he is, and because of the friendship that they have developed in the garden she feels that she owes him an explanation for disappearing without warning. This is why she decides to tell him who she is. She lets it be known that she wants him to apologize to her for making such a racket the night before, but when he arrives to do so, she reveals that she was once, and in a way still is, Hatty.

Why does Hatty seem to grow up faster than Tom does?

At first, Tom thinks that his present-day world and Hatty's Victorian world are somehow existing at the same time, almost like two parallel universes, and that just as only twenty-four hours exist for him between their nightly meetings in the garden, so they do for her as well. He quickly comes to realize that he is slipping in and out of a window in time at random intervals. Although time in the ghostly world moves forwards - Hatty is never younger than she was on his previous visit - there is no particular rhyme or reason as to how old she will be when he sees her.

Ghost time seems to pass at a different speed or rate than time passes for the living, from Tom's perspective. At the end of the novel, we realize that nothing about the visits is random, but rather is it Mrs. Bartholomew's dreams that are dictating the age that Hatty is when Tom meets up with her. Whatever time or occasion that she is dreaming about is the time and occasion that Tom joins when he gets to the garden. This leads to another question; is he visiting a ghostly garden, or is he somehow visiting someone else's dreams?