The Secret Garden

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A level 3 Oxford Bookworms Library graded reader. Retold for Learners of English by Clare West.

Little Mary Lennox is a bad-tempered, disagreeable child. When her parents die in India, she is sent back to England to live with her uncle in a big, lonely, old house.

There is nothing to do all day except walk in the gardens – and watch the robin flying over the high walls of the secret garden… which has been locked for ten years. And no one has the key.

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Фрэнсис Бёрнетт

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THE SECRET GARDEN

‘We’re alike, you and me,’ old Ben Weatherstaff said to Mary. ‘We’re not pretty to look at and we’re both very disagreeable.’

Poor Mary! Nobody wants her, nobody likes her. Her parents have died, and she is sent home from India to live in her uncle’s house in Yorkshire. It is a big old house, with nearly a hundred rooms, but most of them are shut and locked. Mary is cross and bored, and lonely. There is nothing to do all day, and no one to talk to, except old Ben Weatherstaff, the gardener.

But then Mary learns about the secret garden. The door is locked and hidden, and the key is lost. No one has been inside the secret garden for ten years – except the robin, who flies over the wall. Mary watches the robin, and wonders where the key is …

And then there is that strange crying in the night, somewhere in the house. It sounds like a child crying …

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First published in Oxford Bookworms 1993

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ISBN 978 0 19 479129 8

A complete recording of this Bookworms edition of The Secret Garden is available on audio CD ISBN 978 0 19 4791014

Typeset by Wyvern Typesetting Ltd, Bristol

Word count (main text): 10,715 words

For more information on the Oxford Bookworms Library, visit www.oup.com/bookwormswww.oup.com/bookworms

e-Book ISBN 978 0 19 478663 8

e-Book first published 2012

Little Miss Mary

Nobody seemed to care about Mary. She was born in India, where her father was a British official. He was busy with his work, and her mother, who was very beautiful, spent all her time going to parties. So an Indian woman, Kamala, was paid to take care of the little girl. Mary was not a pretty child. She had a thin angry face and thin yellow hair. She was always giving orders to Kamala, who had to obey. Mary never thought of other people, but only of herself. In fact, she was a very selfish, disagreeable, bad-tempered little girl.

One very hot morning, when she was about nine years old, she woke up and saw that instead of Kamala there was a different Indian servant by her bed.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked crossly. ‘Go away! And send Kamala to me at once!’

The woman looked afraid. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Mary, she – she – she can’t come!’

Something strange was happening that day. Some of the house servants were missing and everybody looked frightened. But nobody told Mary anything, and Kamala still did not come. So at last Mary went out into the garden, and played by herself under a tree. She pretended she was making her own flower garden, and picked large red flowers to push into the ground. All the time she was saying crossly to herself,

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