The Little Time Traveler

 

Last fall, my adorable grandson, halfway between two and three years, was finally tall enough to look at the family pictures arranged on a table. He identified his parents immediately. Then we talked about the rest of the people in the photographs.

He kept returning to a picture of a man holding the hand of a little boy, an animated child wearing saddle shoes, shorts, and a polo shirt, waving or pointing into the distance as they stood on an airport tarmac.

“That boy,” my grandson said, “can he come over to my house?”

I explained that the man in the picture was his grandfather, and the little boy was his uncle. A long time ago, I said, when we were all much younger.

“But,” my grandson persisted, “can he come over to play?”

The idea struck me as beautiful and poignant: that the boy in the photograph could have stood still for 36 years while the boy in the present could close his eyes and jump, just like Mary Poppins stepped into a sidewalk chalk painting.

Or the two of them could travel through time, meet somewhere in the middle, and understand each other as only two 2-1/2 year old boys can.

 

“Look at that airplane!”

 

“It’s as high as the sky!”

 

Eventually the little boy who lives in the present wandered off. All I could think of was The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton, my favorite childhood book.

The book was published in 1962 and I found it on a shelf in the children’s room of the Mount Vernon, N.Y., Public Library several years later. I withdrew it so often that my parents finally gave it to me as a birthday present.

The story takes place in Concord, Mass., where a sister and brother, Eleanor and Edward Hall, live in a Victorian house with their aunt and uncle. The children’s parents died many years earlier.

One day, standing in a field across the street from their house, the children notice a small round window in an attic room where they have never been. They race home and up the stairs, find a drop-down ladder in a turret, and scramble up the rungs. Langton writes:

            “Oh—” said Edward. His voice caught.

It wasn’t like Edward to be surprised by anything. He was matter-of-fact and took things as they were. Eleanor felt herself breathing hard. She twitched his trouser leg. “What, what?” she said.

As Edward makes room for his sister, their heads rise into the hidden chamber. Looking around the dim room, their eyes slowly adjust to the light. They see a dresser, a table, the window, a mirror . . .

 

And what was that on either side of the window? Eleanor’s heart bounded into her throat.

It was two narrow beds, and the covers were turned neatly down.

 

***

Demanding answers, the children sit with their Aunt Lily and page through an old photograph album. Her voice trembles as she tells the story of the “lost children,” her youngest siblings, a girl and boy named Nora and Ned.

 

Illustration by Erik Blegvad
The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton

In the old photographs, Ned and Nora bear a striking resemblance to Edward and Eleanor. How did they disappear?

It turns out that an Indian prince, Krishna, once traveled to Concord to study with their uncle, Fred, a world-renowned scholar of Transcendentalism.

Krishna and Lily fell in love. Meanwhile, Krishna invented dream games in the form of a treasure hunt to entertain Nora and Ned, who slept in the attic room. But he had no idea that, over time, the dreams became quite dangerous with the interference of his evil uncle.  

One day, Ned and Nora disappeared. A worldwide search ensued. But the children never turned up, and then Krishna disappeared, too. The evil uncle had captured them.  

 

***

A few days after they learn the story, Eleanor and Edward vow to find the lost children. They move into the tower room and embark on the same magical--and dangerous--adventures as Nora and Ned. In an exciting climactic dream, they finally rescue the lost children and Prince Krishna. Exhausted and back in their beds, Eleanor and Edward fall fast asleep.

They awaken to insistent knocking at the front door. Peering through the glass, Aunt Lily opens it in shock. She calls Edward and Eleanor to come downstairs  and meet Prince Krishna and their “Aunt Nora” and “Uncle Ned.” Langton writes:

           

Why weren’t Ned and Nora children like themselves? But of course, they had been children when they were lost, and that was long ago. Of course they would have grown up, in all this time.

Even in magic and dreams, human beings grow up, although they may keep the heart and spirit of a child. I’m grateful to my grandson for returning me to the book I loved long ago, and for trying to open a little door in the mysterious universe.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2024/05/the-little-time-traveler.html

Jane Langton in Time & Place

The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton
Original cover; drawing by Erik Blegvad
(1962)

My mother told me that it wasn’t fair to other children to withdraw the same two library books again and again.  Since I couldn’t kick the habit, they were finally given to me as a birthday present. 

The Diamond in the Window was published in 1962 and The Swing in the Summerhouse in 1967.  I discovered them in 1970.  Across five decades, I can easily recall entire paragraphs; descriptions, dialogue, and detailed drawings. 

The author, Jane Langton, had studied astronomy at Wellesley and the University of Michigan, and held a master’s degree in art history.  She lived in Lincoln, Mass., with her husband and three sons, according to the dust jacket. 

Her books evoked the way that kids can’t wait to grow up, their impatience with unreasonable adults, the pain of unrequited crushes, and the desire to be popular.  But she stayed away from the trite formulas of adolescent fiction.

Instead, Langton wrote beautiful sentences that captured time and place and the feelings that went with them:  Eleanor suddenly felt overcome by the melancholy of the late summer day and the dusty untidy woods.  

Ingeniously, she wove those feelings together with grand ideas about love, truth, good and evil.  The books contained these and many similar quotations:

·       Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!  (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.)

·       Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime . . . (R.W. Emerson)

·       Behold a universe in which man is but a grain of sand . . . (Henry David Thoreau)

Eleanor and Edward Hall in the
front hall of their house in Concord, Mass.
(drawing by Erik Blegvad)

As The Diamond in the Window opens, young Edward and Eleanor Hall are living in a dilapidated Victorian house in Concord, Mass., with their Aunt Lily and Uncle Freddy.  The children’s parents died years earlier in a car accident.  Aunt Lily is scrambling to make money to pay off the mortgage.  Uncle Freddy, once a world renowned scholar of Emerson and Thoreau, is now daft and unhelpful. 

One day, standing at the edge of a brook in a field across from their house, Eleanor and Edward spot a keyhole window that they’ve never noticed before.  When they finally locate it, in a secret room at the very top of the house, they are shocked to find twin beds, children’s toys, and a poem that has been etched into the window with a large piece of glass which now forms its centerpiece.     

The children demand answers, so Aunt Lily sits down with them on a faded velvet sofa and opens an old photograph album.  She sighs and tells them about their “Aunt Nora” and “Uncle Ned,” Lily’s youngest siblings; lost children who once slept in the attic room.

Then she tells them about Prince Krishna, a royal but humble man, who came from India to Concord to study with then-brilliant Uncle Freddy.  From the way Aunt Lily tells the story, it is clear that she and Krishna were in love.

Krishna loved Ned and Nora, too, and he created a series of dream adventures for them on which they embarked each night.  The dreams took shape as a hunt for treasures that ranged from diamonds and pearls to a beloved, if neglected, rag doll.  The poem etched on the window, cryptic and full of philosophical references, contained clues. 

Life went along happily until suddenly, one night, the children disappeared.  A nationwide hunt ensued, but they could not be found.  Eventually Prince Krishna disappeared, too.  Still, as the money dwindled and Uncle Freddy deteriorated, Aunt Lily held out hope that Krishna and the children would someday reappear.

 In one dream adventure, Eleanor and Edward find themselves
trapped inside a Chambered Nautilus shell. 
(Illustration by Erik Blegvad)

The Diamond in the Window and The Swing in the Summerhouse belong to a literary genre called “magical realism,” which blends realistic narrative elements with magic and fantasy.  As Eleanor and Edward set forth after Ned and Nora, and Aunt Lily schemes to save the house while Uncle Freddy blithely decides to move into a hollow tree in the front yard, the ordinary meets the extraordinary.  

That is because the books are infused with Transcendentalism, a philosophy embraced by Emerson, Thoreau and other New England intellectuals.  Transcendental is defined as “beyond ordinary experience, thought or belief.”  The Transcendentalists sought to understand themselves through the Oversoul, a force that connects all living things.

Connectivity between humans and nature echoes through Langton’s writing.

Several years ago I emailed the author, just to tell her how much I loved her books.  She was then about 90 years old, and replied that she was working on a picture book about Charles Darwin and earthworms.  

Evidently the worms fascinated Darwin.  He could not bear to dissect them, but conducted hundreds of experiments testing their intelligence, orderliness, sensitivity to noise, and food preferences. 

“His experiments with worms will be a chance for someone, perhaps me, to draw lots of wriggly pictures,” Langton explained.

I must have told her about living in different parts of the country and having recently made the leap to Atlanta after three years in rural Virginia.

“Good for getting out of Virginia,” she wrote.  “I escaped from Delaware.  I guess we all have to bust out of some sort of cocoon.”

Jane Langton (1922-2018)

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/02/remembering-jane-langton.html