The Giant returns

At the start of our ice-storm I posted an excerpt from Wilde's Selfish Giant. The first night we lost power, I was visited again by the spectre. . .

"I cannot understand why the Spring is so late in coming," said the Selfish Giant, as he sat at the window and looked out at his cold white garden; "I hope there will be a change in the weather."

But the Spring never came, nor the Summer. . . it was always Winter there, and the North Wind, and the Hail, and the Frost, and the Snow danced about through the trees.

One morning the Giant was lying awake in bed when he heard some lovely music. It sounded so sweet to his ears that he thought it must be the King's musicians passing by. It was really only a little linnet singing outside his window, but it was so long since he had heard a bird sing in his garden that it seemed to him to be the most beautiful music in the world. Then the Hail stopped dancing over his head, and the North Wind ceased roaring, and a delicious perfume came to him through the open casement. "I believe the Spring has come at last," said the Giant; and he jumped out of bed and looked out.

What did he see?

He saw a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in, and they were sitting in the branches of the trees. In every tree that he could see there was a little child. And the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children's heads. The birds were flying about and twittering with delight, and the flowers were looking up through the green grass and laughing. It was a lovely scene . . ."

Sitting brooding in the dark of our powerless situation, the cold growing as the night progressed, I was determined that we should all simply go to sleep as there was nothing to do in the cold and dark.

The children pulled out every other blanket and sheet they could find that night and piled them together in the living room floor. I sat at the kitchen table waiting for them to go to sleep. But the longer I sat, the angrier I got. They were playing, laughing, carrying on.

It was pitch black. One candle. One oil lamp. Cold. The gas stove gently hissing heat to the room, like one soft breath trying to warm a concert hall. Old Scrooge would have said that was too much.

I wanted to go to bed. The children were laughing, playing, frolicking.

The Selfish Giant sat at my kitchen table, in the cold and dark, listening to frost and hail knock the chimney pots down, wondering how long this would go on . . .

. . . while Spring-time blossomed in the living room . . .