Recensie: Een zalig klassiek kinderboek

Wat ik nu lees? The Borrowers! Van Mary Norton. Dat is een zalig klassiek kinderboek over kleine mensen, à la Wiplala, die alles waar ze mee leven 'lenen' cq 'stelen' van de grote mensen. Ze hebben een ladenkast van luciferdoosjes, behang van postpapier, schilderijen van postzegels, overleven door klein gegraai uit de keuken voor het eten. Dat levert allerlei avonturen op. Ze wonen nu (waar ik me in het boek bevind) tijdelijk in een oude ketel langs een riviertje want ze zijn ontdekt in het grote huis en moesten dus vluchten. Ik vermaak mij uitstekend!

Zo begint het:

‘It was Mrs May who first told me about them. No, not me. How could it have been me – a wild, untidy, self- willed little girl who stared with angry eyes and was said to crunch her teeth? Kate, she should have been called. Yes, that was it – Kate. Not that the name matters much either way: she barely comes into the story. Mrs May lived in two rooms in Kate’s parents’ house in London; she was, I think, some kind of relation. Her bedroom was on the first floor, and her sitting- room was a room which, as part of the house, was called “the breakfast-room”. Now breakfast- rooms are all right in the morning when the sun streams in on the toast and marmalade, but by afternoon they seem to vanish a little and to fill with a strange silvery light, their own twilight; there is a kind of sadness in them then, but as a child it was a sadness Kate liked. She would creep in to Mrs May just before tea- time and Mrs May would teach her to crochet. Mrs May was old, her joints were stiff, and she was – not strict exactly, but she had that inner certainty which does instead. Kate was never “wild” with Mrs May, nor untidy, nor self-willed; and Mrs May taught her many things besides crochet: how to wind wool into an egg-shaped ball; how to run- and- fell and plan a darn; how to tidy a drawer and to lay, like a blessing, above the contents, a sheet of rustling tissue against the dust.
“Why so quiet, child?” asked Mrs May one day, when Kate was sitting hunched and idle upon the hassock. “What’s the matter with you? Have you lost your tongue?”
“No,” said Kate, pulling at her shoe button, “I’ve lost the crochet hook…” (they were making a bed- quilt – in woollen squares: there were thirty still to do), “I know where I put it,” she went on hastily; “I put it on the bottom shelf of the book- case just beside my bed.”
“On the bottom shelf?” repeated Mrs May, her own needle flicking steadily in the firelight. “Near the floor?”
“Yes,” said Kate, “but I looked on the floor. Under the rug. Everywhere. The wool was still there though. Just where I’d left it.”
“Oh dear,” exclaimed Mrs May lightly, “don’t say they’re in this house too!”
“That what are?” asked Kate.
“The Borrowers,” said Mrs May, and in the half- light she seemed to smile.
Kate stared a little fearfully. “Are there such things?” she asked after a moment.
“As what?”
Kate blinked her eyelids. “As people, other people, living in a house who… borrow things?”
Mrs May laid down her work. “What do you think?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Kate, looking away and pulling hard at her shoe button. “There can’t be. And yet” – she raised her head – “and yet sometimes I think there must be.”’’