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By Root 2123 0

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