the Lennox bungalow
The Lennox bungalow in India was the home of Mary Lennox during the first nine years of her life, a place defined not by warmth or family but by neglect, illness, and the rigid customs of colonial rule. It was here that Mary grew into a sickly, tyrannical child, handed over to an Ayah who was instructed to keep her out of sight, and where she never learned to dress herself or to feel affection for anyone. The bungalow's atmosphere of isolation and the Mem Sahib's absorption in social life created a hollow domestic space that mirrored Mary's own emotional emptiness.
The Cholera Outbreak and Abandonment
The bungalow became the epicenter of a devastating cholera outbreak that killed Mary's parents and most of the servants. On the morning of the crisis, Mary awoke to find her Ayah replaced by a frightened stranger; the household was in chaos, with native servants missing or hurrying about with ashy faces. She wandered into the garden, playing alone under a tree, sticking scarlet hibiscus blossoms into heaps of earth while muttering insults. The wailing from the servants' quarters announced the Ayah's death, and within two days, three more servants had died and others had fled in terror. During the confusion, Mary hid herself in the nursery and was forgotten by everyone. She ate fruit and biscuits, drank a glass of sweet wine that made her intensely drowsy, and slept heavily through the hours when her parents' bodies were carried away. When she awakened, the house was perfectly still; she heard only a little snake rustling on the matting. She was not frightened, but she was angry that no one remembered her. It was only when a large officer named Barney opened the nursery door and exclaimed, "There is a child here! A child alone!" that Mary learned the truth: "There is nobody left to come." She had neither father nor mother left; they had died and been carried away in the night, and the few native servants who had not died had left the house as quickly as they could, none of them remembering that there was a Missie Sahib.
The Bungalow as a Space of Neglect and Custom
The bungalow was the setting where Mary's most ingrained habits of helplessness and imperiousness were formed. She had always been waited on by native servants who obeyed her every command, and she had never put on her own shoes or stockings. When she later arrived at Misselthwaite Manor, she would explain her inability to dress herself by saying, "It was the custom," a phrase she had learned from the native servants who used it to resist any change. The bungalow's physical layout—the veranda where her mother entertained, the nursery where she was hidden, the dining-room where she found a half-finished meal—all reinforced her sense of being a peripheral figure in her own life. The only person she had liked to look at from a distance was her mother, a tall, slim, pretty person who wore lovely clothes "full of lace," but who had not wanted a little girl at all and had handed her over to the Ayah's care.
The Bungalow's Narrative Significance
The Lennox bungalow functions as the origin point of Mary's emotional and physical deprivation, the place where she learned to be "contrary" because no one cared whether she was happy or not. Its abandonment during the cholera outbreak—the servants running away, the house left silent except for a snake—foreshadows the locked rooms and hidden grief of Misselthwaite Manor. The bungalow's emptiness, however, is not mysterious; it is the result of panic and death, not of deliberate secrecy. Mary's experience of being utterly forgotten there prepares her for the loneliness of the moor, but also for the discovery that she can survive and even thrive when she is forced to rely on herself. The bungalow is the negative space against which the secret garden's life-giving power is measured: in India, Mary was always hot, languid, and weak; at Misselthwaite, the fresh air and the garden begin to stir her blood and awaken her imagination.
