Just looking back at the start of the thread, Julie, you mentioned you were disappointed that the book turned out not to be about ghosts but about dreams instead:
Julie2owlsdene wrote:*SPOILER WARNING FOR TOM'S MIDNIGHT GARDEN*
I've just finished reading this book, and when I first started it, I was enjoying it. Then I got halfway through and worked out exactly who Hatty was - the elderly lady living upstairs. So then I realized it wasn't a book about a 'ghost'! It then started to lose it's appeal, as I thought - What's it all about then?
Sorry to give away the plot if anyone hasn't read this, but for me it was just a book about complex dreams, and it was just sheer imagination which I found slightly disappointing.
(FURTHER SPOILERS FOLLOWING!
)
I remember when I first read the last couple of chapters of
Tom's Midnight Garden years ago, I did at first wonder, while I was reading, whether this meant that Tom, perhaps while asleep himself without knowing it, had simply been entering into the old lady's dreams as she dreamt them and their adventures had only happened in his or her imagination all along — a slightly more sophisticated version of the "and then I woke up and it was all a dream" cliché that some improbable stories end with.
I would have found that a big let-down too.
But when you read those final chapters carefully (I've just confirmed this on re-reading them!), it does gradually become clear that although Mrs Bartholomew's dreams
were somehow the means by which the garden from her childhood appeared every night, Tom wasn't only entering into these dreams she was having as an old lady — he was genuinely stepping back in time into her real life as a young girl, becoming the mysterious playmate that only she (and the gardener) could see, and who came and went at different times throughout her childhood but started to fade away as she grew up and was less in need of a secret friend. So when they finally meet at the end of the book, she's not recognising Tom merely as a figure who appeared in the dreams she's recently been having — she's recognising him from her actual childhood, as the same boy who became her friend in the garden all those years ago. That for me was what made the story so moving — the idea that because both of them (Tom in the 1950s and young Hatty in the late Victorian era) were lonely and longing so deeply for a friend, somehow that longing brought them together in a friendship that transcended time.