Fire and Hemlock

He would, Polly thought, if he wasn’t there anyway. All the same, it was a relief to rush up the path to her own front door and burst breathlessly inside.

Ivy met them in the hall, carrying a long, fat envelope. She handed it to Polly. She was still in her mood. “This came for you,” she said in her stony mood-voice. “What have you been up to now?”

“Nothing, Mum!” Polly exclaimed, genuinely surprised. The envelope was addressed in Granny’s writing, to Miss Polly Whittacker. At the back, somewhat torn where Mum had slit the envelope open, Granny had written: Sorry, Polly. I opened this. It wasn’t a mistake. You never know with strange men. Inside was another envelope, fat and crackly, with a typed address to Polly at Granny’s house. It was slit open too. Polly looked at it, mystified, and then up at her mother. “Why did you open it as well?”

Nina took a look at their faces and tiptoed away upstairs to Polly’s room.

Ivy smoothed at her beautifully set hair. “It was from Granny,” she said in a stony voice. “It might – I thought – It could have been something to do with your father.” Two tears oozed from her eyes. She shook them away so angrily that some salty water splashed on Polly’s mouth. “Stop standing staring at me, can’t you!” she said. “Go upstairs and play!”

There seemed nothing Polly could do but climb the stairs to her room. There, Nina was busily setting out a dolls’ tea party. Polly could taste salt still, but she pretended not to notice it and sat on her bed and opened her letter. It was typed, like the envelope, but not in an official way. Polly could see mistakes in it, all the way down the first page, some crossed out with the right word written above in ink, some crossed by typed slanting lines and sorry! typed before the right word.

The paper it was typed on was a mad mixture, all different sizes. The first page was smooth and good and quite small. The next page was large and yellowish. There followed two pages of furry paper with blue lines on, which must have been torn out of a notebook, and the last pages had clumps of narrow lines, like telegraph wires, printed across them. Polly, after blinking a little, recognised these pages as music paper. At this stage, delicately and gently, almost holding her breath, Polly turned to the very last page. The end of the letter was halfway down it, followed by an extra bit labelled P.S. She read, With best wishes to my assistant trainee-hero, Thomas G. Lynn. The name was signed in ink, but quite easy to read.

It really was from Mr Lynn, then. Polly felt her whole face move, as if there was a tight layer under her skin, from solemn to a great, beaming smile. Polly, in those days, was slow at reading. Long before she had finished the letter, Nina had given up even threatening. She played crossly on the floor by herself, and only looked up once or twice when Polly laughed out loud.

Dear Polly,

After I had to run away so abrbubtly – sorry! – suddendly, I had quite a while to sit on the train and think, and it seemed to me that we still had a lot of details to settle conconcerning our secret lives. Most of the things are questionoins-sorry! – I need to aks you. You know more about thseses things than I do. But one thing I could settle was our first avdenture – sorry! – vadntrue – sorry! – job with the giant. I think it happened like this. Of course if you think differntly, please say so, and I shall risk your annoyance by agreeing with you. Here goes.

The first thing you must rememember is that Mr Thomas Piper is very strong. He may look exactly like me – not unlike and ostrich in gold – rimmed glasses – but he has muscles which I, in my false identity as a mere cellist, lack. Every morning he lifts mighty sin-sorry!-sun-blistered wooden shutters, two of them, from the windows of his shop and carries them away indoors. He follows this by carrying outside to the pavement such items as rolls of chicken wire neither you nor I could lift, piles of dustbins, graden rollers neither of us could move, and stacks of hefty white chamberpots that we would have to take one at a time. Every evening he takes it all in again and brings out the shuterts. He could, if he wished, win an Olympic Gold Medal for wieght-lifting, but this has never occurred to him.

In between customers, he idly sharpens axes and stares out into the street, thinking. Like me, he has an active mind, but not having been given the education which was thrust upon me, his mind whirrs about rather. He buys old books from junk shops and reads them all. Most of them are horribly out of date. His sister Edna, who, you tell me, hates him to spend money on useless things like books, tells him he is mad. Mr Piper thinks she may be right. At any rate, on this particular morning his thoughts are whirring about worse than ever, because he has been reading an old book called “Don Quixote,” about a tall thin man who had read books until he went mad and fought some windmills, thinking they were giants.

Mr Piper is staring out between dangling scrubbing brushes as he sharpens his axe, wondering if he is that mad himself, when the light is blocked from the door, once, twice, by something enormous going by. The fire-irons round the door knock together. Mr Piper blinks. For a moment he could have sworn that those were two huge legs, each ending in a foot the size of a Mini Metro, striding past his door. “I am that mad,” he thinks. He has gone back to sharpening his axe when he hears crashing from up the street. Then screams. Then running feet.

Edna calles from the back room. “What’s going on, Tom?”

A girl Mr Piper recofnises as Maisie Millet from the supermarket checkout goes running past, looking terrified. “Something at the supermarket, dear,” he calls back.

“Go and see!” Edna screams at him. She is unbearably curious. She likes to know everything that goes on in Stow Whatyoumacallit. But she cannot go out herslef because she always wears a dressing gown to save money and never takes her hair out of curlers.

Mr Piper, still holding his axe, goes out of his shop and stares up the srteet. Sure enough, there is broken glass over the pavement in front of the supermarket, and people are running away from it in all directions, shouting for help. A robbery, thinks Mr Piper, and runs towards it, axe in hand. He pases the phone booth on the way. The manager of the supermarket is in it, white-faced, dialing 999. The plate glass window of the supermarket has a huge hole in it, with notices about this week’s prices flapping in shreds around it. As Mr Piper races up, a white deep-freeze sails out through the hole and crashes into a parked car. Dozens of pale pink frozen chickens drop like bricks and skid across the road. People scream and scatter.

One person does not run. This is a small boy with rather long, fair hair. As Mr Piper stops and stares at the slithering chickens, this boy girl person comes hopping through the mess towards him.

“Thank goodness you’ve come, Tan Coul!” this person calls. “Do hurry! There’s a giant in the supermarket.”

This child suffers from too much imagination, Mr Piper thinks, looking down at her-sorry!-him. She-sorry!-he is madder than I am. “There are no such things as giants,” he syas. “What is really going on?”

Like an answer, there is a terrible roar from inside the broken window. Mr Piper wonders if his glasses need cleaning. A young man in white overalls from the butchery departmnent leaps through the hole in the window and runs as if for his life. Something seems to grab at him as he leaps. Whatever it is is snatched back immediately, and there is an even louder roar. It sounds like swearing.

Mr Piper is trying to convince himself that he did not, really and truly, see a huge hand trying to grab the younf man, when the boy says, “See that, Tan Coul? That was the giant’s hand. He cut his thumb on the window. That’s why he’s swearing. Let’s go in quickly, while he’s sucking it. There may be some more people stuck inside.”

Mr Piper looks down the street, where the supermarket manager is still frantically talking into the teolephone. There is no sign of police or fire brigade yet. It is clear something has to be done. Consoling himself with the thought that there must be a lunatic inside the supermarket even more insane than he is, he says, “Very well. Stay there,” and crunches through the broken glass to the window.

There is an awful mess inside. Shelves of things have been pushed this way and that. The floor is covered with mounds of salt and washing powder, broken jam jars and pools of cooking oil. There are holes in the walls where freezers have been ripped out. Toilet paper has been unreeled across everything. But the thing which causes Mr Piper to stop short by the checkout desks is the huge bulk he can see down at the far end. Something large and round shines balefully at him from there, surrounded by what seems to be barbed wire.

Could that thing really be a giant’s eye, peering at him from a giant’s hair, behind a giant’s doubled-up knees?

“I don’t think it’s a windmill,” he murmurs doubtfully to himself.

“Of course it isn’t,” says a voise at his elbow. He sees that the boy has followed him inside. “The giant’s sitting down against the end wall, with his knees up. He’s too big to stand up in here. That should make things easy. You can just chop his head off with your axe.” Mr Piper does not like veeven killing flies. He is quite convinced that the huge thing down at the end is an optical illusion of some kind. He tucks his axe under his arm and takes his glasses off to clean. The giant – or whatever – dissolves into a blur, which makes him feel much happier. “I told you to stay outsude,” he says to the boy.

“I wouldn’t be much use as an assistant if I did that,” the boy retorts. “I’ve come miles from Middleton to be your trainee, Tan Coul, and I’m not going away now.”

“My name is Piper really,” Mr Piper says.

“I keep a hardware shope. Is that why you keep calling me Can Tool?”

“Not Can Tool, Tan Coul, stupid!” says the boy. “The great hero-”

But at this moment the giant moves. The blur Mr Piper can see produces a yard-long bent strip of white, unpleasantly like a glaoting grin. Something huge softly advances on them. Mr Piper claps his glasses on his nose and sees an immense hand with a cut on its thumb reaching out to grab them. Illusion or not, he and the boy dive out of its way. The hand, with terrible speed, snatches after them. The boy dodges behind a zig-zag of loose shelves. Mr Piper is left out in the open and only a pool of washing-up liquid saves him. He slides in it, falls flat on his back, and loses his glasses. Somehow the boy pulls him behind the shelves too. They crouch there, panting, while the giant, as far as Mr Piper can tell, lumbers about the shop on his hands and knees. The giant is too big to see all in one piece, even if he had not lost his glasses. There are crashes, rendings and sliding sounds.

“What’s he doing?” pants Mr Piper.

“Pushing some freezers and the cash desks across the hole in the window,” says the boy.

“Now he’s put another freezer across the door at the back.”

“Oh,” says Mr Piper unhappily.

The giant begind to roar again. His voice is almost too loud to hear, but Mr Piper distinctly catches the words “fresh warm meat on legs!” and possibly something about Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum too. He does his best not to believe that he is trapped in a supermarket with a hungry giant. But the shelf they are hiding behind tips and begins to move. Four enormous fingers with dirty nails seem to be gripping it by one end. The boy and Mr Piper get up and tiptoe hurriedly behind the next lot of shelves, skipping over smashed pickle jars and trying not to crunch in cornflakes. Mr Piper has to do this by smell and instinct, since he can hardly see the floor.

“Kill him!” the boy whispers as they tiptoe. “You’re a hero. You can’t be a coward!”

“Oh, can’t I just!” Mr Piper whispers back. The shelf they are now behind gegins to move too. They tiptoe on, through tins of dogfood and mushy peas. “There are no such things as giants,” Mr Piper explains as they go. “This is some kind of illusion.” The latest shelf moves, and they scuttle behind another.

Now a low rumbling begins, getting gradually louder. If Mr Piper were not doing his best to know better, he would swear it was the giant laughing with triumph, because the giant is moving his prey shelf by shelf into a corner where the upended freezers spill out squashed butter and squinched cartons of yoghurt. They will be trapped in that corner.

The boy sighs. “Do me a favour, Tan Cou – er – Mr Piper. Pretend there is a giant. Pretend we’ll be dead in a minute unless you do something.”

Mr Piper’s foot slips in yoghurt. He goes down with one knee in a pound of butter. The giant’s rumbles becomes a roar. The boy’s advice suddenly seems excellent. Mr Piper swings his axe round in threatening circles as he kneels.

The laughter stops. The blurred shape of the giant, on all fours against the windows, looks at them with its bushy head tipped on one side. Then a vast arm stretches. Mr Piper scrambles round on his knees and chops desperately at the huge hand reaching out at him.

“Throw tins at his face!” he gasps to the boy. “Get him to stand up!”

“Good idea,” says the boy. He picks up a tin and hurls it, and another. His aim is good, but he is not strong enough to worry the giant, who just comes crawling towards them.

Mr Piper throws a tin himself and chops again with his axe at the reaching hand. The giant gives a roar that buzzes the windows. They snatch up tim after tin and bombard the giant’s head. The giant, kneeling hugely opposite, keeps on grabbing at them. Mr Piper chops at his fingers every time he does, keeping him at bay. He feels hopeless now. He can only see the reaching fingers when they are almost too close. He cannot see properly to aim tins. The boy keeps hitting, but this does not worry the giant at all. On the rare occasions when Mr Piper’s tins hit, they make him rear up and bump his head on the ceiling.

“What’s up there?” pants the boy. “Anything that might help?”

As far as Mr Piper knows, there is the supermarket manager’s flat up above. He is hoping that there are iron girders in the ceiling, on which the giant might be induced to brain himself. But they run out of tins just then. Mr Piper scrambles backwards to the nearest shelf and seizes a packet off it at random. Beside him, the boy hurls a large cheese. It misses, because the giant moves his bushy head aside. He moves it into line with the packet Mr Piper has just thrown.

It turns out to be a packet of flour. It succeeds beyond Mr Piper’s wildest hopes. It hits the giant in the eye and bursts all over his face. The giant howls, so loud it hurts their ears. He claps both fists to his face and, most unwisely, rears up on his knees. The great, bushy head goes straight through the ceiling. The giant howls again and falls over backwards, smashing two sets of shelves underneath him. And things begin to rain down on the giant through the hole in the ceiling. First comes a large sofa, then a television, followed by a squad of armchairs. While the giant is gasping from these, there is a pause, full of sliding noises. Then a kitchen table falls on him, followed by a washing machine, a big refrigerator, a dishwasher, and finally a heavy gas oven. The gas oven hits the giant in the stomach and knocks the breath out of him with a WHOOF that blows all the tiolet paper into the air. Mr Piper picks his way among the fluttering streamers of it until he is so close that even he can see he is standing by a steep, bushy hill of head, beside a monstrous ear. He takes careful aim, swings the axe with all his great strength, and hits the giant with the flat of it, just behind that enormous ear.

Everything goes quiet. In the qiet Mr Piper becomes aware of sirnes – sorry! – sirens, and neenawing and whooping. Flashing lights are arriving outside the window.