Since publication in 1952, when it won the Carnegie Medal for outstanding children’s book by a British author, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers has been constantly in print.

Its popularity has spawned several screen adaptations, including the successful 1992 BBC TV version starring Ian Holm and Penelope Wilton as Pod and Homily Clock, and a number of stage shows, two of which are being produced this Christmas – one at Hull Truck adapted by Charles Way and one at The Dukes in Lancaster, adapted by Bea Roberts.

The Guardian said of the Hull production that ‘Mary Norton’s novel…tells a timeless story, mythic in scope, domestic in detail’. This is drivel. It’s a much more important story than that.

People of a certain age will be familiar with Norton’s story of the Clock family, Pod, Homily and their daughter Arrietty, the little people who live under the floorboards in the big house and who make their living ‘borrowing’ from the ‘human beans’. Borrowing is a precarious business involving great risk, moving secretly around the home, climbing curtains and furniture to get what they need and all the time avoiding being seen. They live in fear of the human beans getting a cat. There used to be several Borrower families in the house but one by one they have left, gone out into the garden never to be seen again. The Clocks remain, largely because Homily refuses to leave and Pod is a coper.

Events come to a head when a Boy arrives at the house, which is owned by his bedridden Great Aunt Sophy. He has been sent to recover from an illness and is in the care of the housekeeper, Mrs Driver. One day the Boy comes across Arrietty out borrowing. Against all the rules, Arrietty, who is on the cusp of adolescence, befriends him and soon the Boy is ‘borrowing’ at her request. But Mrs Driver is suspicious and, thinking that the Boy is stealing, finds what she thinks is his hiding place and lifts the floorboards, only to discover the Clocks. Screaming in fear, she runs to the telephone and calls the ratcatchers. They come and apply poisonous smoke to the floor, and the book ends with a future visit by the Boy’s sister. She discovers a tiny diary written by Arrietty which suggests that the Clock family managed to escape.

Most adaptations include the story from the second book, The Borrowers Afield, which begins immediately after the Clocks have left the house, aided by the Boy who opens a grating in the wall, and are now out in the garden. They have decided to try to find the other Borrower families, but soon discover that life in the wild is just as dangerous as life in the house, although the threats are things like weather, birds and other animals. Then Arrietty meets Spiller, another Borrower, a boy slightly older than Arrietty, living on his own and an expert at survival. From this point, it becomes a coming-of-age story. Spiller helps Pod and Homily to find their relatives, the Hendrearys, who are alive and well and living in a rabbit hole, then he and Arrietty go off together, into the wild.

The Borrowers and The Borrowers Afield

I should declare an interest. I produced and directed several productions of Charlie Way’s wonderful adaptation of the book, and toured it successfully around the country several times. It remains one of my favourite plays, and the moment when Arrietty bids farewell to Pod and Homily and walks off with Spiller always made me cry. But I had an advantage over every other director making this piece.

In a previous incarnation, I was a BBC Radio Drama producer. In 2001, when I was about to direct The Borrowers on stage, I was working in a radio studio with the well-known actress Barbara Flynn. Again, readers of a certain age will remember her in The Beiderbecke Affair, an ITV thriller written by Alan Plater from 1985 in which she starred with James Bolam. I happened to mention to Barbara that I was about to direct The Borrowers and she said (I paraphrase): “I used to know Mary Norton. I played with her daughter. One day I asked her ‘What’s this story you have written about little people who live under the floorboards?’ and Mary replied ‘It’s not about little people who live under the floorboards, it’s about Czechoslovakia.’ ”

It’s not often that you receive information which transforms your understanding of the world. Discovering my stepfather had three other families was one such for me, and Barbara’s reported conversation with Mary Norton was another. Once you know, it seems extraordinary that you missed it in the first place. That The Borrowers is an allegory of life under communism, much as Animal Farm is an allegory of the rise of fascism, seems obvious once you are told.

In 1945, at the end of World War Two, Czechoslovakia became a democratic republic, but was taken over by Soviet Russia in a coup in 1948. The coup, and the subsequent resistance and its cruel suppression, will have been in the news at a time when Norton had just published her second book, Bonfires and Broomsticks, and was thinking about her next.

Anyone who has seen The Lives of Others, or read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other accounts of life in Soviet Russia and its satellites, will know the problems of constant surveillance, the fear of the knock on the door, the difficulty of achieving anything other than a basic existence. I went to Moscow in 1990 for a conference and even then, in the middle of perestroika, Gorky Street (the equivalent of London’s Oxford Street) was empty except for occasional long queues outside shops where a sudden delivery of lemons, for example, had been received. My translator had to work hard to organise a chicken for the dinner she wanted to cook for me, and the dinner included requests for various goods from the west, including Beatles LPs.

Whether by accident or design, The Borrowers Afield is similarly allegorical, being a good account of the dangers and fears of life in the free market, where keeping your wits about you is essential if you don’t want to be conned out of your last penny, whether by crooks or the water and power companies. Freedom has its price, too.

The world of family theatre

Did this information affect the way I directed the play? Absolutely it did. It informed the whole production, helping the actors to understand the level of jeopardy the characters were in, and bringing the show firmly into reality rather than a ‘little story for children’.

Audiences, including the adults, loved the show. I’ve always believed that if you expect adults to bring children to the theatre, then the grown-ups should be entertained too, but not with special gags only they understand. But that’s an argument for another time. Our production of The Borrowers premiered in 2000 as a co-production between my company, Watershed Productions, and The Library Theatre in Manchester where it was directed by Roger Haines. You may even have seen it. I then took it over and produced and directed a couple of tours and some Christmas versions.

The story of The Borrowers is also the story of the changing world of family theatre. Back in the early noughties, it was possible to take a family show into a theatre during term time, getting in on a Tuesday, doing two school shows on Wednesday and Thursday, one on Friday morning, play to families Friday night and Saturday, and then move on. That doesn’t happen anymore, unless you’ve got a huge title like Matilda or a big TV tie-in.

There are several reasons. One is a move away from reading whole books in class. Another is the concentration on National Curriculum grammar requirements, such as being able to recognise a ‘fronted adverbial’, whatever that may be. Then there’s the increased requirement for adults for safety cover on school trips, as well as the need to justify the visit within the bounds of the National Curriculum. Not to mention the cost of the coach and, of course, the price of the tickets.

In the old days, we could expect to walk away with 53 per cent of the box office take, based on the usual 70/30 deal where the theatre would receive 30 per cent of the box office and we would get 70 per cent. Recently we took The Singing Mermaid, our show for tinies, to a theatre where the ticket price was £17, £4 of which went straight to the theatre in box office and other charges, before calculation of the split, leaving us just 42 per cent of the headline ticket price.

So, if you have noticed an increase in the amount of theatre for families with nursery and year 1 and 2 children, that’s because it’s a lot easier to get them out of school, and the shows are smaller in production technicalities and smaller in cast size, so generally much less expensive to tour and therefore less financially risky. You may also have noticed that they’re almost entirely based on well-known titles, often by Julia Donaldson who can do no wrong. Title recognition is the major marketing strategy. It costs far too much to create a brand from scratch.

Christmas remains the bastion of the high-quality children’s book adaptation. The Dukes and Hull Truck have terrific track records in this area, and there are lots of other good adaptations to see this year. Check out your local theatre.

By Chris Wallis, Theatre Editor

Main image: Spiller (William Gregory) and Arrietty (Denise Hoey). Photo by Simon Warner. Usage rights owned by Chris Wallis. 

 

To read Chris Wallis’s review of The Borrowers at The Dukes in Lancaster, click here.