“We’ll see what we can do together”: Time, Collaboration and Kinship in The Children of Green Knowe & Tom’s Midnight Garden

This article examines two time-slip narratives of the 1950s – Tom’s Midnight Garden, and The Children of Green Knowe – arguing that their representations of relationships between young boys and older women offer distinct models for meaningful connection between adults and children which are rooted in imagination and textual co-production. Drawing on Marah Gubar’s discussion of collaboration in children’s fiction (2009), and her distinctions between difference, deficit and kinship models of childhood (2013), the article argues that while both texts scope the possibilities for intergenerational relationships, Tom’s Midnight Garden remains invested in a fundamentally nostalgic notion of difference which The Children of Green Knowe is able to circumvent through the development of a palimpsestic kinship.