Love at First Flight

I came across Frances Hodgson Burnett’s My Robin (1912) while doing research for a book I was writing about my grandfather. I had discovered, on reading through my father’s papers, that the family tales of connections to Frances and The Secret Garden were true. (Perhaps I’m still not convinced that Frances presented a pram with her initials emblazoned on it at the birth of my Aunt Gert, and yet it is consistent with her character.) My grandfather was gardener to Frances at Maytham Hall in Kent, and he was the inspiration for the book’s more interestingly named character, Ben Weatherstaff.

Grandad Millum, as we called him, was quite a presence in the family as far as my two older sisters were concerned. He tried to teach Pat, the eldest, the violin but without much success. He didn’t interact much with me and I viewed him as a slightly scary, grumpy old man. As far as I can work out, he gardened at Maytham all the time that Frances was there, from the mid-1890s until 1907 when she left once more for America. We know that Frances used the walled garden at Maytham as a quiet retreat in which to write.

It was a lovesome, mystic place, shut in partly by old red brick walls against which fruit trees were trained and partly by a laurel hedge with a wood behind it. It was my habit to sit and write there under an aged writhen tree, grey with lichen and festooned with roses. The soft silence of it – the remote aloofness – were the most perfect ever dreamed of.

A robin is a key feature in The Secret Garden and I wondered whether it was merely a plot device (with symbolic attachments) or if the bird did actually exist. I doubted it. But then I discovered My Robin, in which Frances described her encounter with the bird when she was at Maytham Hall. It is a wonderful example of nonfiction writing: a sustained 4,500-word ‘essay’ about one particular bird. This bird, she writes, ‘was an English robin and he was a person – not a mere bird’. At first you are inclined to dismiss this as the product of a romantic imagination but as you read on you begin to understand. Over the following weeks and months, she and the robin form an intense relationship. To begin with she is both surprised and delighted.

The surprise was not that he was there but that he stayed there – or rather he continued to hop – with short reflective-looking hops and that while hopping he looked at me – not in a furtive flighty way but rather as a person might tentatively regard a very new acquaintance.

She is enchanted by the bird’s proximity and by the way it seems to be genuinely curious about her. ‘Without stirring a muscle I began to make low, soft, little sounds to him – very low and very caressing indeed – softer than one makes to a baby . . .’. The robin stays for half an hour and then disappears – where to, she never discovers, but that is the way with birds. However, it returns the next time she sits in the rose garden, and she writes now as if it is a case of love at first sight. ‘It was the beginning of an intimacy not to be described unless one filled a small volume. From that moment we never doubted each other for one second. He knew and I knew.’ The robin makes a regular appearance whenever Frances sits in the rose garden. Eventually, it comes to perch on her hat to examine the roses around the crown. ‘From that time each day drew us closer to each other’ until the bird was taking crumbs from her hand. Robin behaviour of this kind is not uncommon but the intensity with which she imbues the relationship is unusual. The bird must have been recently fledged because to begin with it lacks a red breast and only later does it begin to sing. ‘He would tilt on a nearby bough and call me with a flirtatious, provocative outbreaking of song.’ And so the love story goes on. Her robin is outraged when another robin seems to have stolen Frances’s attention and he drives it off in an angry assault. He’s also jealous when she talks to the gardener, interrupting with loud song to attract her attention.

But it was not only his vanity which drew him to me. He loved me. The low song trilled in his little pulsating scarlet throat was mine. He sang it only to me – and he would never sing it when anyone else was there to hear.

To learn how her robin discovered another, avian love and how the affair ended, you will need to read the rest of the account. Suffice to say, Frances’s final words to her robin are, ‘Never since I was born have I loved anything as I have loved you – except my two babies,’ which is a powerful statement from someone who had two husbands and remained close to her siblings. Perhaps she wrote like this for dramatic effect, and yet the sheer force of her love for the bird permeates all these thousands of words. Shortly after leaving Maytham, its rose garden and its robin, Frances began writing The Secret Garden. Early on in the book, the robin makes its appearance in response to the gardener’s ‘low soft whistle’. Then there is a ‘soft little rushing flight through the air’ and the bird alights by the gardener’s foot, just as Frances’s robin used to arrive ‘with a darling little rush of wings’. As in My Robin, the bird in Frances’s novel has a ‘soft bright eye which looked like a black dewdrop . . . he was so pretty and cheerful and seemed so like a person’. My Robin was written after the publication of The Secret Garden (1911), prompted by a letter from a reader asking about the bird. Either Frances had already recorded some of her feelings about those experiences in the rose garden or she was supremely adept at recreating them. Whichever is the case, it shows why she was so successful as a writer and is still admired over a century later.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 82 © Trevor Millum 2024