Toys in MIniature: Frances Armstrong
More about Mary Norton's Borrowers books
including scenes that should inspire any miniaturist
Mary Norton (1903-92) based her five Borrowers books on imaginative games she played as a child, but she writes with a detail and clarity that would appeal to anyone who is intrigued by miniature worlds. Borrowers are about six inches high, so they can use standard dollhouse furniture when they can find it, but usually they adapt human-scale objects that they've "borrowed" from the houses they live in. Pod and Homily and their daughter Arrietty belong to the Clock family, because they live under the grandfather clock in an old house, and they are quite clear that "borrowing" from humans is quite different from stealing, because humans clearly exist to supply Borrowers with the necessities of life, just as coal exists to keep one warm.
Most miniaturists who are inspired by these stories and who make scenes from the books do so in "real" scale, with the borrowers about six inches high. I prefer to make miniature borrowers about half an inch high. Whatever the size, there are many scenes that would be fun to create in miniature. I'll be adding to these pages more scenes as I make them. Some are available as kits or ready-made
In the notes below, page numbers refer to the Harcourt Brace paperback editions of the novels.
The first book, The Borrrowers, was published in 1952, and won the Carnegie Medal for children's books. It introduces the Clock family who live beneath the grandfather clock in an almost-empty house. There are promising scenes described of the rooms they've put together, and of the surrounding environment under the floorboards. I have made a miniature version of some of the rooms, which you can see on the right. Encounters between borrowers and humans would be fun to portray; there's the housemaid who was startled when she dusted a china figurine and it sneezed (pages 37-39, and the time Arrietty escaped into the garden and met a human boy (72-73). Or bedridden Great-Aunt Sophy who often sees Pod, but thinks he comes out of her decanter of Maderia; or the moment when the little boy pulls up a floorboard and uncovers the Clock home. The family are last seen running for their lives.
The sequel to this book is The Borrowers Afield (1955), which picks up the story as the Clock family leave the home they have lived in for so long. After they've got safely away they stop to have a look at what each has brought on the journey. They have all chosen useful things like a bottle of water, a piece of candle, and some tea, but each also has a special treasure: Arrietty has her diary, Pod his shoemaking equipment, and Homily her hair curlers. The scene (pages 45 to 47) would be easy to replicate in miniature.
The family first takes shelter inside an old boot, and then decide to move it down near a stream. Soon they have settled nicely into a little cave (pages 90 to 95, with illustration). They have encounters with various insects and plants, and even a snake, and soon meet the wild boy Spiller--there are several possibilities for scenes here. For instance, Arrietty is paddling in a stream and doesn't hear a dog and its gypsy owners approaching. Spiller is passing in his boat (made from an aluminum soapbox), and quickly jumps out and puts Arrietty into the boat, to float downstream till she finds the old kettle in which he lives (147-49).
There are vivid accounts of meetings with insects--Arrietty strokes a bumble bee, and thinks grasshoppers look like prehistoric birds. She dresses up like a flower fairy, but has trouble finding a bell-like flower that actually fits her head as a hat (162-65).
Many miniaturists love making gypsy caravans, and you could put yours to use (if you don't mind a rather unpleasant scene) showing the borrowers trapped by gypsies; or, more cheeringly, depict their rescue by the young Tom Goodenough, crammed into his pocket.
Tom takes them to the cottage of his grandfather, a gamekeeper, and reveals that their long lost cousins Hendreary and Lupy and their three boys, are living in a space between the walls .
For more on these scenes, including kits to make them, click here.
The Borrowers Afloat (1959) begins with a repetition of the reunion scene in the gamekeeper's cottage wall. Here's a wonderful opportunity to find a home for out-of-scale miniatures in your collection, because this family has been able to "borrow" real dolls' house furniture for their own use, in a wide variety of scales. More unusually, they've made a fireplace out of an old metal door lock, the kind that is fitted to the outside of a back door or shed. Spiller, it turns out, knows them and supplies them with food, and Lupy makes his clothes for him.
The Clock family are allotted a small ledge in the wall structure, but it becomes obvious, when the gamekeeper and his grandson have to leave the cottage, that even one family will find it difficult to get enough food. So the Clocks have to leave, and they do this through the laundry drain. Miniaturists might not be attracted by this section, even though the drain carries only bath and laundry water, but the mechanics of getting down the drain, and of making a trip in a soap box to the outlet in a stream, are described in intriguing detail.
They move into an abandoned kettle, one of Spiller's homes, but are carried downstream by a flood, and nearly hooked (deliberately) by the unfriendly gypsy. Spiller, travelling in a barge that had been a knife box, rescues them and helps them get to safety in a model village.
The Borrowers Aloft, first published in 1961, begins with a detailed description of two model villages. At first there's no reference to Borrowers, but miniaturists will enjoy the details of how Mr Pott, a retired railwayman, carefully makes his village as a labour of love, assisted by Miss Menzies, a true miniaturist. Mr and Mrs Platter, on the other hand, copy Mr. Pott's ideas shamelessly, and will settle for the cheap and nasty if it will bring them a profit.
It's in Mr Pott's village that the Clock family settle down, and for a while they live there quietly, hiding by day when the visitors are around (although Arrietty and Spiller like to join the artificial figures and take rides on the train). Miss Menzies and Mr Pott get to see them, and treat them well (which means leaving them alone most of the time).
But the Platters see them too, and quickly kidnap Pod, Homily, and Arrietty. They lock them up in their attic over the winter, while Mr Platter prepares a house for them that will have glass sides and leave no place for them to remain unseen.
Horrified by this thought, the family plans to escape, and using what they find in the attic, make themselves a gas-filled balloon. (The details are very convincing.) You can click here
to see a roombox I made to represent the point at which Pod is trying to open the window catch. It would be fun to show them actually flying in their balloon, too.
They land safely back in Mr Pott's model village, but as this book ends they decide that this kind of life is not for them. Arrietty has to be persuaded that even nice humans cannot be trusted.
.Click on the picture for a larger version.
At this point Mary Norton took a break from these stories (very little is known about her life), and then came back in 1982 with The Borrowers Avenged. The borrowers leave the model village by night, in Spiller's knife-box barge, and travel by river to an old rectory Spiller has discovered. In fact, he has already brought Hendreary and Lupy and young Timmus to live in the church next door.
The rectory is a wonderful old building, partly renovated, and inhabited only by a caretaking couple, and the Clock family settle down for the night in an old stove. Early in the morning Arrietty goes exploring and finds another borrower living there, a young man with a limp. Peregrine (known as Peagreen) belonged to the Overmantel family, but fell off the mantel during renovations, as his family tried to escape. Other borrowers looked after him and his broken leg, but now he lives alone.
He invites them to take over the home he is just about to leave, a spacious one underneath a windowseat in the library. He himself is moving into a set of bird houses on the outside wall. The wall is covered with ivy which is easy to climb, and he has found a way to get into the larder, where the caretaking couple keep their food.
The story continues on several levels: we hear all about how Pod and Homily set up their new home, Arrietty gets to know Peagreen and has a happy reunion with little Timmus, with whom she harvests Brussels sprouts from the garden and climbs the roodscreen in the church. Meanwhile on the human level the kind Miss Menzies and her friends go about their business, and the Platters continue to plot a recapture. A scene that would probably be too big for even the smallest scale miniaturization is the one with the church fully decorated for a floral festival, and Timmus being chased through it by the Platters and a dog.
If you look carefully you can see Arrietty in one of Peregrine's birdhouses, watching with alarm as Timmus hangs upside down on the ivy.
Timmus practising climbing on a little piece of carving.
