In Karen Inglis’s The Secret Lake, the past appears as a living dimension bound tightly to the present. The book shows how current life rests on layers of hidden history and how Tom and Stella must uncover those layers to understand their surroundings. Their time tunnel in the communal garden links people, objects, and the landscape to an earlier era, and these links show how personal and communal identities grow out of lasting relationships that echo across generations.

The garden gives the clearest evidence of this bond. The grassy mound where the children play hides the boat from the lost lake, a remnant of an erased geography. The time tunnel inside the old tree opens a direct route between eras and reveals that the past sits just beneath the surface. When Tom and Stella crawl through it, they do more than travel to another time. They strip away part of their own reality and uncover an older one beneath it, which shows that their present is a part of a much longer story.

Objects deepen this sense of connection. Early in the summer, Tom digs up a “tatty old purse” that he thinks belongs to a doll (2). Once he reaches the past, he understands that it’s Mrs. Gladstone’s stolen coin purse, a piece of evidence in a crime that shaped Jack’s life. This purse ties Tom’s literal digging in the present to the children’s figurative digging into Jack’s persecution in the past and turns a casual discovery into a bridge between eras. Stella’s friendship bracelet works in a similar way. When Mrs. Moon later reveals that she’s Emma, she shows Stella the same bracelet, now “worn and faded” (101). Its threads mark a bond that has lasted almost a century.

People anchor these connections most strongly. When the children learn that Mrs. Moon is Emma Gladstone, the distance between their adventure and their daily routines collapses. Emma becomes a neighbor who links the community’s past with its present. Charlie Green, the terse gardener, also embodies the connection between past and present through his relationship to his father, Jack, the boy Tom and Stella helped. His guarded attachment to the garden grows from this family legacy. By uncovering these ties, Tom and Stella learn that their home, their community, and their own lives stand on the stories of those who lived on the same ground a century earlier. 

Significantly, it is the discovery of these connections that changes Stella’s attitude toward her new home in England. While she finds the place “deathly dull” at the beginning of the story, after she comes to fully understand the neighborhood’s present through its connection to the past, she understands the richness of the place. After she and Tom return from the past, Stella is depicted smiling and happy several times, and she decides that she will write to Hannah to let her know that “[t]hings here are definitely improving!” (76). Stella’s comfort in her new surroundings stems directly from her discovery of a communal identity tying the present intimately to the past.