Giant’s Bread · Book I · II · Chapter 1 2 1

I

Winnie the nursemaid was going away. It all happened very suddenly. The other servants whispered together. Winnie cried. She cried and cried. Nurse gave her what she called a Talking To and after that Winnie cried more than ever. There was something terrible about Nurse; she seemed larger than usual and she crackled more. Winnie, Vernon knew, was going away because of Father. He accepted that fact without any particular interest or curiosity. Nursemaids did sometimes go away because of Father.

His mother was shut in her room. She too was crying. Vernon could hear her through the door. She did not send for him and it did not occur to him to go to her. Indeed he was vaguely relieved. He hated the noise of crying, the gulping sound, the long-drawn sniffs, and it always happened so close to your ears. People who were crying always hugged you. Vernon hated those kind of noises close to his ears. There was nothing in the world he hated more than the wrong sort of noise. It made you feel all curled up like a leaf in your middle. That was the jolly part about Mr. Green. He never made the wrong kind of noise.

Winnie was packing her boxes. Nurse was in with her⁠—a less awful Nurse now⁠—almost a human Nurse.

“Now you let this be a warning to you, my girl,” said Nurse. “No carryings on in your next place.”

Winnie sniffed something about no real harm.

“And no more there wouldn’t be, I should hope, with Me in charge,” said Nurse. “A lot comes, I dare say, of having red hair. Red-haired girls are always flighty, so my dear mother used to say. I’m not saying you’re a bad girl. But what you’ve done is Unbecoming. Unbecoming⁠—I can’t say more than that.”

And, as Vernon had often noticed after using this particular phrase, she proceeded to say a good deal more. But he did not listen, for he was pondering on the word “unbecoming.” Becoming, he knew, was a thing you said about a hat. Where did a hat come in?

“What’s unbecoming, Nurse?” he asked later in the day.

Nurse, with her mouth full of pins, for she was cutting out a linen suit for Vernon, replied.

“Unsuitable.”

“What’s unsuitable?”

“Little boys going on asking foolish questions,” said Nurse, with the deftness of a long professional career behind her.