When I first read Rumer Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows, it wasn’t considered a novel for children. It was just a novel. My mom was a librarian at the Oakland Public Library, and I would go with her to work on Saturdays and pluck from the shelf any book that looked interesting to me. The cover of the 1955 Viking edition with its vulnerable but plucky pink roses behind a formidable wrought iron gate must have intrigued me.
What I remembered of An Episode of Sparrows, before rereading the book recently, was a story about a little girl creating a garden in a bombed-out part of postwar London. In that rough, gritty neighborhood, the little girl tries to make something beautiful. That she worked in secret, on her own, particularly appealed to me—the fact that no grownup knew about her garden. I remembered that the girl—I’d forgotten her name—hides her garden in the rubble, clearing a patch of dirt and planting her stolen packets of seeds. I also remembered that a gang of rough boys find the garden and destroy it.
Because I grew up in Berkeley, California, I associated the creation and destruction of a garden with the stories I’d heard of the drama at People’s Park in the late ‘60s. According to my parents, we were so close to the action that I was teargassed on my way to nursery school. I don’t recall that, but I do remember hearing about how students and other volunteers had made a garden on an empty lot, with flowers, grass and a play area, and how, without warning, Governor Reagan ordered the garden razed and fenced off from the people who had planted it.
Gardens are particularly precious in an urban environment, and particularly vulnerable, I learned.
My new copy of An Episode of Sparrows—the title refers to the London street children, the “sparrows,”—was reissued by the New York Review of Books as part of their children’s book series, though I still think of it as just a book. After all, Rumer Godden takes many points of view, hopping into the heads of adults as well as children. The new cover features a girl holding pansies.
Since reading the book as a child, I’ve become a gardener myself, so I when I read it again I identified with Lovejoy (that’s her name) in a new way. To garden is to invite heartache and doubt. Will the seeds grow in the hard, chalky city dirt? Lovejoy first hurts her fingers trying to dig with them, then bends a kitchen fork before buying a garden fork at pawn shop. I understood her frustration with cheap tools, poor soil, lack of rain, and also her happiness when she first sees the fuzz of green sprouting in her garden, surrounded by all that London gray.
What I had forgotten in the decades since I first read the book is that after the boys destroy Lovejoy’s garden in the bombed out building, she makes a new one in an abandoned graveyard behind a church. And one of the street boys helps her do it.
Lovejoy and the boy, Tip, arrange broken bits of gravestones, marking out beds and paths, creating what they call an Italian Garden. Over time, they plant flowers (including pansies), grass and eventually a tiny standard rose. However, not much is growing in that derelict place when they start—hardly any weeds or other plants—though, there is a vase with a green plant curled around it. Lovejoy knows so little about green things that she doesn’t recognize the plant as ivy, but she appreciates that it is a survivor.
When I began to carve out a garden in my backyard decades ago, wild onions and blackberry vines grew there, as well as a few survivors. They’re still out there: a California pepper tree that must predate the house, as well as an old single-petaled pink rose, planted perhaps when the house was new in 1914 and surviving decades of renters, some probably more attentive than others to the big backyard.
I’ve added a lot to my urban plot, dug a pond, planted fruit trees and flowers. Because it’s in a city, the water in the pond attracts skunks and possums. Raccoons come and rip up the water plants sometimes. Deer get in once in a while and eat rosebuds. That irritates me, but I don’t mind sharing the cherries with the mocking birds building a nest on top of the pergola. Dragonflies hover over the pond looking for mosquito larvae, butterflies lay eggs in the fennel.
The first time I read An Episode of Sparrows, I actually threw the book to the floor when I read about the street boys stomping out the bombsite garden. Then, when my fury died down, I picked up the book and read on. Lovejoy, too, is devastated by her loss, but her garden in the bombsite was always at risk. “It was a silly place to make one,” says Tip.
Then, though I’d forgotten this, Tip takes Lovejoy to the yard behind the church. When Lovejoy looks around this new, secret space, “She could see already that this was a much better place for a garden. Protected by the church, it would be safe. Lovejoy had never heard the word ‘sanctuary’ but she knew she had found a safe place.”
As a child reading An Episode of Sparrows, I identified with the little girl searching for her secret place, a place where she can feel hidden, safe, though she—and her garden—may not be safe at all. Reading it again as an adult, I realized with a shock that I’m no longer looking for a safe place. In my backyard I’ve created my own sanctuary, a safe place I share with other creatures.
