A Heart Beating Way Too Fast

An Introduction to The Borrowers

What is it about the books that we read as children? Why do they linger in our imagination for the rest of our lives, like strings of coloured beads or brilliant bunting flapping in the breeze?

Is it the feeling they invoke that anything is possible, that magic, wonder and mystery are all around us, that a cornucopia of delight lies just a book away, ready for us to discover? And if that next book is about a race of small people who live beneath the floor and in the walls…

I should have read The Borrowers when I was eight or nine, but I was thirteen when it was gifted to me. I might not have read it then either, but I found myself in hospital with a troublesome eye infection, and the days were interminably long. I wanted badly to be
somewhere, anywhere, else. Books were my refuge, my comfort and my escape and, operating with only one eye, I had to choose carefully lest the medical staff decided that I had strained my good eye quite enough for one day!

Little did I know that Mary Norton herself was near-sighted as a child and that she imagined the Borrowers during times when she was unwell and confined to her bed. And it seems that we shared more than troublesome eyes. Mary Norton drew inspiration for the house in The Borrowers from her own childhood home, The Cedars, a charming old Victorian house in Leighton Buzzard. I, on the other hand, grew up in a three-hundred-year-old house in Galway, filled with nooks and crannies, sturdy walls, and creaky wooden floors.

I was an imaginative child and found it easy to believe that the walls and floors could be teaming with life especially given that so many things disappeared forever under our roof: thumb-tacks, needles, pencils, paperclips, safety pins, keys. I was also the most heedless child of the family, forever losing things. To think! It might not be my fault at all! The Borrowers was published in 1952 and has been entertaining children ever since. In the rapidly changing world in which children live, what is it about this classic story that still
resonates with young readers? Maybe Norton’s book speaks to children because the reader identifies with the small people behind the wainscotting. The Clock family: Pod, Harriet and Arrietty live undercover in a shadowy world, forever afraid of being ‘seen’ by the humans who live upstairs, borrowing the things that they need in order to survive. Children are also voiceless, powerless in a world dominated by adult humans, living alongside their adults, but not really part of that world. In The Borrowers true strength isn’t about physical size; it’s about the determination of those who refuse to be underestimated!

As an adult rereading the book, I was very conscious that the book was written in a post-war world. Mary Norton returned to the idea of The Borrowers after the war with a new perspective, realising that there were men, women and children who had been forced to live the kind of hidden lives that she, as a child, had once envisaged for a race of mythical creatures. As a young teenager, that never occurred to me but other themes definitely resonated.

Arrietty, the young protagonist of the story, is safe in her cosy home. Her parents have worked hard to make it comfortable with a stack of matchboxes as a chest of drawers, postage stamps hanging on the walls as portraits, and red blotting paper making a cosy rug, but she longs for freedom. She wants to see the world, to go on adventures, to take chances and to prove herself as a young woman.

I, like many children reading the book, was on the cusp of young adulthood when I first read it, eager to stretch my wings and hunt down great adventure, but like Arrietty that new life invited danger as well as excitement and the need for resilience and courage.

Reading The Borrowers was a practice run. Arrietty and I set off into the world, armed only with a stout borrowing bag and a heart that was beating way too fast. Our worst fears were realised when we collided with a human ‘bean’ – a Boy! Yet somehow, with skill and courage, we survived and came back better and stronger people. That was only our first adventure of many and the memories of those thrilling days live on, even now.

But perhaps the lasting legacy of The Borrowers is that it is an ode to creativity, a love letter to those who see the world in a different way – where an acorn can be a tea cup, a hankie a sheet and a cotton reel a stool.

It showed me, as a would-be-writer all those years ago, that even the tiniest things can leave an indelible mark on the heart of a young reader and that a good story can ignite the imagination way beyond the wonder days of childhood. Long may it continue to do so.

Patricia Forde
Laureate na nÓg, 2023–2026

This programme note is an excerpt from the programme for THE BORROWERS, available exclusively from the Gate Theatre café, bar and box office.