When I was 5, my older sisters were 12 and 15. Sarah, then 12, was reading Mary Norton’s “Borrowers” books, as her older sister probably had before her.
Don’t confuse this English Mary Norton (1903–1992) with the prolific American SF/fantasy writer Alice Mary Norton (1912–2005) who wrote as “Andre Norton.”1 (At one time, I did.)
To quote Wikipedia, the original novel The Borrowers and its sequels “feature a family of tiny people who live secretly in the walls and floors of an English house and ‘borrow’ from the big people in order to survive.” I heard my sisters talk about the books, and later I think I read the first one, at least.
To complicate things, my mother had a miniature wood stove and pots on a shelf in my parents’ room, and I thought it had something to do with the Borrowers, like this was their skillet. As an aside, you see these miniature stoves sold as both toys and as salesmen’s models. Dealers will slap on whichever label makes a sale, since the domestic antiques trade is totally unregulated.
Mary Norton also wrote such novels as The Magic Bed Knob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (1944) and sequels, which inspired the Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). “Becoming a witch” seems to have been A Thing in the 1940s.
Given that, maybe she was “telling true lies.” It seems commonplace now for people with an interest in the paranormal or who sometimes have one foot over the edge to deal with their own “borrowers.” I call them “the critters.” Others might say “the house wights.” All much the same, as far as I can tell. Maybe Mary Norton took her own experiences and turned them into children’s lit — why not?
Barbara Fisher, author, artist, editor, and co-host of the 6 Degrees of John Keel podcast,2 once devoted some time talking about the perennial topic: the more look you into the Other, the more it looks back. And getting extra attention from the “tiny people” appears to be part of that. Maybe they are just delighted to have someone who takes the seriously and will give them Skittles and a wee dram now and then. That’s how I pay my “critter tax,” but I’m not buying them household appliances!
I have a couple more stories to tell in upcoming posts. Stay tuned. Follow and subscribe — you know the drill.
- Andre Norton’s “Time Traders” series may have been the first science fiction — or at least the first series — that I ever read. ↩︎
- Currently on hiatus, but back episodes are available. ↩︎