Wick - The Secret Garden's message of hope

This piece was originally written for the journal Off Assignment, who were very lovely throughout the process but in the end, it wasn’t quite right for them. I hope you enjoy it.

Where I come from in the north of England, we have words for things that don’t exist elsewhere, and accents that bypass words altogether, making sentences clipped, personal, and efficient all at once. When I was younger, I loved cutting “the” down into “t’”, feeling older and wiser, speaking like a grownup. I was told over and over again to speak properly. This parrying of proper speech versus local dialect in my country has lived with me ever since.

Because—why should local accents be massaged out? Detoxed through homespun speech therapy applied at home, the knots of its history and sense of place smoothed into the beige insincerity of the “proper” English accent. I knew that “gan yam” means “to go home” in the Cumbrian dialect, that dish is another word for face, and that “how’s tha’ diddlin’?” was a much warmer, funnier way to say “how’s things?” The words I came across in my muddled area of the north west were from Cumbria, North Yorkshire, and deepest Lancashire, and I repeated them as much as I could. Knowing there were other ways to speak, besides the given language I was taught in school, felt rebellious and free. It made the country I lived in seem big and wild.

During the 90s it was rare to hear northern accents on the radio or on the telly without them being used as part of a character’s personality and a marker of their socio-economic standing. Coronation Street was a steadfastly working class soap made from a patchwork of northern stereotypes—the heavy drinking odd-jobber, the gossiping old ladies in their press-studded aprons and shampoo and set hairstyles, the thickly-accented butcher, the simple nephew being groomed to take over the family business, the mill owner (okay, he actually ran an underwear and lingerie factory.) We didn’t watch it in our house. The newsreaders on every channel had fascinatingly smart accents from another world. Any comedy show was populated by southern voices. Northern accents were shorthand for poverty, crime, luddites (well, we did invent the movement) and ripe for patronisation.

In Frances Hodgeson Burnett’s book The Secret Garden, dialect and slang are used to separate the lower classes from the higher members of society, but rather than place prominence on the well-spoken characters, Burnett ensures her use of dialect is sympathetic and characteristic—it is never used as a tool with which to mock or belittle. Of course, it’s the servants and outliers of society who speak this way, but I can forgive her. It’s representative of its time. Mr. Archibald Craven, the master of Mistlethwaite Manor, might have a North Yorkshire surname, but he didn’t seem to pick up many colloquialisms on the aristocratic circuit. Nor did the actor who played him in the 1993 film adaptation, which I have watched many hundreds of times. He was not the focus of my attention, though. The resonance of a word I learned from this book has carried through, long into my adult life: the word “wick”. A word from Yorkshire, derived from Old English, its closest definition is “alive”. That one word doesn’t do the trick, though. Wick was taken from its use as a description of a candlewick to be used to share something the word “alive” can’t portray—a potential for life. A living energy. It is a bigger word than any of its closest synonyms. In The Secret Garden, the character Dickon—a child, a gardener, a wanderer—uses it to show life hidden within the most hidden places. The glow of green in a winter-blackened rose stem felt like it was so much more than merely alive. And it was. It was wick.

This book has travelled with me as my favourite story since I first read it as a child. The gothic nature of the stately home enthralled me, and the spookiness of being lonely was captivatingly familiar. I felt close to the main character, Mary Lennox, even though we had very little in common—she was high-born in India to wealthy parents, then orphaned by cholera, then sent to live in a grand mansion in the Yorkshire Dales. I was, during my first few readings of the book, a normal working class schoolgirl in Lancashire, who lived in a semi-detached house with no secrets to speak of.

It was only when Mary left the confines of the great house to explore the cold earth of its gardens that we began to get along. I too spent hours at a time alone in the garden, picking at the mud and lichen on unusual rocks, collecting dead twigs for birds’ nests, and looking closely enough at the grass that I could see the individual spears rising up from the ground, ants and woodlice crawling among it as though it were a bamboo forest. The smell of damp earth was comforting to me, and in the pages of The Secret Garden I could smell it, and I understood what the book meant when Mary became stronger and brighter because of it.

The garden wasn’t Mary’s only saviour, though. Her chambermaid Martha breezed through her sour personality and RP accent like a stiff westerly wind on wash day, feeding her good, nourishing food and treating her with kindness she had never received before, all with the straightforward, no-nonsense attitude and thoughtful vocabulary of a local Yorkshirewoman. There were lessons for Mary, and for me, in these scenes where the two were together—the young woman and the child at odds, a gulf of class between them. Instead of retreating, Martha bridges the gap, teaching Mary words from her dialect that helped her understand her surroundings that little bit more, introducing her to a world less opulent but more alive than she had ever known. To Mary, the only appropriate way to describe the moors is in Martha’s voice, and with the words that Dickon teaches her. There are some things that can’t be translated.

“I told thee tha’d like th’ moor after a bit. Just you wait till you see th’ gold-colored gorse blossoms an’ th’ blossoms o’ th’ broom, an’ th’ heather flowerin’, all purple bells, an’ hundreds o’ butterflies flutterin’ an’ bees hummin’ an’ skylarks soarin’ up an’ singin’. You’ll want to get out on it at sunrise an’ live out on it all day like Dickon does.”

Wick is the lesson that Dickon gave us all. To care even while all looks desolate and dead, knowing that life will spring up again is hope in its most pure form. Teaching such a vibrant, beautiful word to me, a girl who was lonely and insular, was a powerful magic. Within all things there is life that can be nurtured and can once again bloom. Wick is not just a gardening term—it’s not easily translated. Wick holds within it the power of nature. It is a word that means resurrection and joy and summer sunshine, and the smell of gorse and fresh, green leaves. It sounds like the wind rushing through the long grasses of marshy hilltops, and wet footsteps in the mud, and it looks like cold, spring sunshine so bright it can shine through closed eyelids. And to Mary, it means connection too, the use of a local word binding her more closely to a place she’s beginning to call home. The core of the rose stem that glows green is wick, and that core remains one of the most important and enduring images in literature to me. Amongst the abandoned and the dead there is life. Under every pile of rotten leaves there are new shoots. Winter never lasts forever. We can begin again.