'What are the chances?' Woman reunited with childhood book in museum

Zoe Andrews found her copy of The Secret Garden in Reading’s Museum of English Rural Life

A woman has been reunited with a copy of The Secret Garden she owned as a child, serendipitously discovering it for sale on the shelves of the Museum of English Rural Life shop.

The MERL, which made news last year for sending an 18th-century schoolboy’s doodles of a chicken in trousers viral, acquired the Ladybird Children’s Classics edition from a charity shop in Wallingford for its collection of second-hand books. On Friday, it was picked up by its former owner, Zoe Andrews, who looked inside and saw it had her sister’s name in the front cover, written in characters that she’d dreamed up as a child.

Related: Eighteenth-century doodles of a chicken in trousers go viral

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