was a strange country where no one went, and from which strange things and creatures occasionally came. There were tales of wild wolves, flowing in grey clouds along the hillside, and tales of the fairy folk, in green cloaks, and soft boots, selling strange foods that melted in the mouth and drove young women to death and starvation, for they refused all other food after tasting these pale wafers and sharply sweet berries. There were also tales of giants, who had put huge legs over the ridge, and came down into the plain, filling their pockets with cattle and sheep, pulling up whole trees, and leaving sandy pits, which were their footprints. Rosy had been told these “fairy stories” and liked to hear them. Like all children, her nature was unsatisfied by what she could immediately see and touch. But also, like all children, she enjoyed the comfort of knowing that dragons and witches, giants and wood demons, are real only in a different world, where the mind, but not the body, can travel. “Over the mountain” changed colour, shape and topography constantly, as Rosy made it up, with little thrills of delight and safe fireside terror.
But perhaps we only dream such things because somewhere, some time, they are and were as we imagine them? Rosy told no one about the little people in her doll’s house, who were solid enough, and cross enough, to be independently real. But they were not to be shared, in case, despite being solid, they vanished.
One day Rosy was lying on her stomach, gazing in at the window of the doll’s house. Her mother had crossed the river to shop in the village. She heard a heavy sound, like a hammer on a road, or in a forge. Thud, thump, thud, a regular crashing. The floor of her house trembled, and Rosy trembled on it. The windows of her house darkened. She heard a great wind, sighing and soughing in the chimney. She lifted her head, and tried to look out of the window, and could not at first make out what she saw. It was black velvet dark, ringed with concentric splinters of palest blue, mixed with silvery threads and emerald-green lights. The circle of splinters was surrounded by something whitish, between blancmange and the white of a soft-boiled egg. It was an eye. It was an eye that was as big as the window. There was an enormous gruff grunt, like an oak tree falling. Then her house began to sway from side to side. And then to rise, as though some vast creature was pulling it up by the roots, which was indeed what was happening. Rosy felt very sick and held on to a stool, which didn’t help, as the stool shot across the sloping floor and back. The house was lifted, shaken, and dropped, falling with a muffled sound into soft dark. Then it rose again, and began to move, jerk by jerk—huge jerks—stride by stride. Something, someone, had dropped the whole house into a monstrous sack, and was making off with it. Rosy began to cry. Finally—because the striding went on so long, she fell into something between a faint and a sleep.
Later she peeped cautiously out of the kitchen window of her house. She saw huge carved posts rising out of sight, and realised that they were the legs of a vast table, whose surface was out of sight. She made out a bucket as big as the house she was in, and a lot of overlapping coloured blankets, which she understood to be the edge of a rag rug, the size of a lawn. Then she heard thudding again, and saw a shiny shoe with a thick high white sock in it, a little girl’s shoe, on a huge foot. There was a rustling and thumping, and the eye was to the window again. The front door opened. Rosy cowered against the kitchen wall. The giant child began to murmur and growl what Rosy could see were meant to be soothing sounds. A plump hand, the size of a sofa, squeezed in through the door, twisted, and reached with bolster-like fingers in Rosy’s direction. Thumb and finger closed round Rosy, who was dragged, resisting, out of her own door and swung up in the air. The giant child was sitting on the rug, in a heap of scarlet skirts like the folds in a hilly landscape. She pinched Rosy’s middle, and held her up to her eyes, frowning as she stared. She had a lot of thick shiny yellow hair, standing out round her head like the sun. Her breathing sounded like bellows. An eye that size is a terrible thing—wet colour round a black space that opens into an unknown intelligence. There were more booming, soothing sounds.
Rosy twisted and squirmed and spat, like an angry kitten. She bit the finger that restrained her as hard as she could, which caused the giant child to yowl so loudly that Rosy thought her ears were bursting. She went on struggling and scratching and biting. A huge tear brimmed on the lower lid of the giant eye, flowed over, and fell, a heavy liquid sphere, and splashed on the hand that held Rosy. Another followed. Rosy found herself thrust back inside her door; the fingers extracted her key, fumbled, and turned it in the lock, from the outside. Then the shutters were pushed, from the outside, against the windows, and Rosy’s world went dusty dark.
She did not even think about the little people in her doll’s house. She was reminded of them when the giant child opened the front door and pushed in a platter the size of a tea-tray full of chopped-up fragments of some fruit or vegetable—turnip or pear—with a sickly smell she couldn’t bear. She had food, for the time being—the kitchen and the larder were stocked with biscuits and cheese. But her revulsion at the giant food made her suddenly full of misery about what she had done to her own captives. She knelt down by the doll’s house, with tears running down her cheeks, and opened the hasp that kept the front wall closed, and said in a whisper, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I would let you out, I should never have shut you in, but now we are all prisoners. I don’t suppose you understand a word I say. I want to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
The little people had been crouching in the nest of toy bedclothes. One of the little old ladies stood up. To Rosy’s amazement, she spoke. Her voice was high and scratchy, like a cricket sawing away with its legs. Rosy had to stop breathing to hear her.
“We do understand. That is, we understand your language. We don’t understand why you took us prisoner and we don’t want to. We want to go home.”
“Oh, if only you could. But something—someone—has carried away me and my house and we are locked up in a giant kitchen. Come and look.”
She took the old lady up, very carefully, and placed her on the table, so that she could see out through a crack in the shutters. The old lady commanded Rosy to fetch the others. She asked them, very politely, to step into her sewing-basket, and in this she lifted them all up to the window.
It was clear that they could make no sense of what they saw. Rosy said “That’s a table-leg, and that’s the edge of a rug. This is a dish of food it put in for me to eat, but it’s loathsome and smells quite horrible. You have to believe me. It took the key and locked the door on the outside. It is a monster.”
“You are a monster,” whistled one of the little men, severely. “We know a monster when we see one.”
“Oh I am so sorry,” Rosy said again, beginning to cry. Her tears splashed into her sewing-bag amongst her captives, and one of the little children was hit full in the face by a balloon of salty liquid.
“You see,” said Rosy, “we can’t get out.”
“You can’t get out,” said the little man. “We can. We can squeeze and scramble under your door, which doesn’t fit perfectly. We can escape easily, but to what and to where we don’t know.”
At this point they all fell silent, as they heard the crashing footsteps of the giant child. The cracks in the shutters were full of the red light of her skirts. The monster looked to see if its offering of food had been accepted, and sighed heavily when it saw it had not. It spoke, incomprehensibly, booming like an organ in a church. Rosy stayed mum. The door closed again, and the key turned.
Rosy said
“When it’s dark, you could all get out and run away to somewhere. I should think you’re so little the monster can’t even see you. You can run away like spiders.”
