The Children's Book (52 page)

HERE WAS ONCE A LITTLE GIRL
who was very kind to little creatures. She used to make nests and put them out hoping that birds would find them. She went fishing in the park for tadpoles and kept them in a big jam jar, and cried bitterly, when they all died. She made homes in matchboxes for caterpillars and ladybirds. And she had a beautiful doll’s house, in which there lived a family of dolls with tiny china faces and stuffed bodies
.

She made lovely little meals for the dolls in the doll’s house. She made jellies with individual bits of blackberry in them, and currant buns with one currant, and tiny tarts which slightly overlapped the pretty china plates in the doll’s house. She put out tiny glasses of ice cream with red-currant jelly on top, and little biscuits with icing flowers on them. The awful bit was when the food went limp and had to be disposed of—in case it attracted mice, or other nasty creatures, like beetles and silverfish, her mother said. Her mother was keen on hygiene
.

Her name was Rosy. Her mother liked roses. The doll’s house was decorated in a variety of rosy pinks. Rosy sewed quilts and blankets and rugs for the dolls. She had tried clothes, but her sewing was not fine enough and the dolls looked ridiculous in the hats and jackets she made. So she made more and more sheets and blankets. Some of the dolls had ten or twelve each
.

She pretended that the dolls made their own beds and cooked their own meals, and went to school, and slept, but she wasn’t very good at pretending, and knew very well that they depended on her sharp fingers for every movement
.

One day, going to the park in the city centre to look for creatures, she thought she saw a beetle running under a tree root. She laughed aloud because it looked like a little old lady in a stiff coat. Then she saw it
was
a little old lady in a stiff coat, waving some sort of stick in front of her, which Rosy had mistaken for the beetle’s horns. So she sat down, very quietly, not too close—she was good at watching creatures—and after a time she saw two more little people run across the grass—sheltering in the shadows of
leaves and pebbles—dressed in the same kind of stiff, tubelike brownish clothes. Their heads were encased in round black shiny hats. It was as though they were trying to disguise themselves as beetles
.

She came often to watch them, after that. She saw that they had paths, as ants do, along which they always scurried. She brought a magnifying glass her uncle had given her, and studied the roots of the trees, when the little folk had gone into the ground. She found cupboards and larders, with rough, hardly visible shelves containing parcels and packages wrapped in dried leaves, and fine, fine little hooks from which dangled fine nets full of seeds—beech mast, thistledown, sunflower seeds. Under another root she found a barely visible covered market, with baskets made from nutshells set out on trestle tables made from twigs—all cleverly disguised to look randomly stacked, to the human eye, or the questing eye of a puppy. There were minute clay jugs and pannikins full of a fluid a little thicker than water, that might have been juice, or diluted honey. There were chestnut shell platters of what looked like new chopped meat, but she could not tell what kind of meat
.

She watched their comings and goings, and learned the rhythm of their gatherings. They danced on a Tuesday, under the highest arch—their music sounded to her like nothing but a whisper and a scratch and a squeak—she could see their fiddle-like instruments, and their straw pipes, but not the string of the bow or the holes for the fingers. They did not go to market every day. They went twice a week, all jostling and—cheeping, like chickens, almost inaudibly. She put a few tiny glass beads around the roots, to see what they would do with them. They avoided them
.

She thought how amazed they would be, to move out of their drab, furtive world into the rosy, silky comfort of her doll’s house. She persuaded her mother to buy her a fine butterfly net—with a small diameter for close work—and took it down to the park, with a couple of jam jars, with strings and lids. Then she waited until their dancing was at its liveliest, put the mouth of the net over the arch of the root, and stirred vigorously amongst the dancers with a stick, so that they leapt into the air and dispersed every which way. As she had hoped, a few of them made the mistake of fleeing into the mouth of her net. She scooped them up—she had caught about eight—and carefully decanted them into the jars. She held
the jars up to her eye, and peered in. She had three old ladies, two children, a young woman and two men of indeterminate age. They were all flat on their faces, under their cloaks, trying to look like dead insects or fallen leaves. But she knew better
.

When she got them home, she opened the mouth of the net to the doll’s house door, and shook the net, so that they would run in. They did not. So she had to prod them with a knitting needle, which looked a bit cruel, but was for their own good. Then they crawled and scrambled into the house and collapsed on the sitting-room floor. Rosy, considerately, drew the little pink silk curtain across the window, so they could recover in shade and privacy. Then she latched the front of the house securely and went away. They would recover, she thought, and settle in, and play with her. When she went back, they had drawn back the curtains, and their beady little faces were pressed against the windows, peering out. When they saw Rosy, they retreated, creeping under the dolls’ beds, and behind the pretty sofas. Rosy put her presents in through the door—tartlets and sponge cakes, icing sugar flowers and hundreds and thousands, a pile of little party dresses and velvet jackets from the dolls’ wardrobes. She noticed, of a sudden, that the little creatures had dragged and heaped the resident dolls into a kind of rubbish heap in one corner of the kitchen. She gave them some dolls’ teapots full of lemonade in case they were thirsty
.

They would not play. They were worse than the dolls, for they made sick little screaming sounds if she tried to pick them up and dress them, and one of them bit, or stabbed, her little finger, which developed a nasty sore. They didn’t touch the pretty food, and they tore up the pretty dresses and made a kind of nest of them, on the beds and the sofas. She knew what she should have done, but she was stubborn, and lonely, and meant well, so she sat and whispered into the keyhole, and down the chimney, that she only wanted them to play, to enjoy the nice things in the house, she would give them all sorts of things they hadn’t got, wheelbarrows, chests of drawers, even a little omnibus, if they would play with her. They pretended to be dead. She thought they might be starving, and hit on the idea of giving them dolls’ pans full of porridge oats, which were more like the food they sold in their market
.

She began to feel, without realising it, that she was gross and monstrous
.

Her chubby hands seemed to her like legs of ham, and her fingers were like rolling-pins
.

She said
, “Please,
play with me, it is such a lovely house.”

Now, it is necessary to know that Rosy’s house was on the edge of a meadow, by a cold stream that had come leaping and rushing down the side of a mountain, and spread out into still pools across the flat grassland, under willows and white poplars. In the old days this side of the river had been known as the Debatable Land, and no one had built there, because over and beyond the mountain 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.”