Jennifer Jane meets the giant Part 1

Jennifer Jane woke up with a start in the middle of the night. She lay quietly for a moment wondering what had happened to wake her, she usually slept very soundly, especially now that her family had recently moved to the countryside. She turned the light on and looked at her alarm clock, it was only four o’clock in the morning, it was pitch dark out side and there wasn’t a sound to be heard.

Her father had just bought a new house in the country. All the houses had large gardens, bounded by the road passing the houses at the front and an area of dense trees at the back. It was all very different from the town where she had been born.

Then she again heard the unusual noise coming from somewhere in the woods at the end of the garden. It was a long way away, but it sounded just as if a grown-up was crying. In the quiet of the night it sounded much louder than it would have done during the daytime. It must have been hearing that, which had woken her. Maybe somebody lived out there, or perhaps they were lost, or hurt. In any case it sounded as if they might need some help. So she decided that tomorrow, she’d go into the woods and search for the person who was crying, then she snuggled down in her bed and went back to sleep.

The next morning at breakfast time, she asked dad if he’d heard any noises during the night.

“Not very likely,” he laughed, “there isn’t much round here to make any noise. If you heard something, it must have been the wind blowing through the trees at the end of the garden, possibly an owl hooting, or maybe even a fox, but nothing unusual for the countryside.”

After breakfast, her mother said she could explore in the woods by herself providing she took good care and she soon was walking along the garden towards the trees. It didn’t take long to find a gap in the hedge and she began exploring the paths. Now that she was amongst the trees she could just hear the same sobbing noise that she’d heard the previous night. Every time she came to a turning on the path she headed towards the noise and it slowly became louder and louder.

Then just as the sobbing became so loud that she expected to find someone any minute, she turned a corner and found herself looking at a large pond in a clearing surrounded by tall trees. As she looked, two tremendous splashes of water fell out of the sky into the pond, making small waves as they fell in, while the sobbing could be heard coming from somewhere high up above her. Jennifer Jane looked up to see where the sobbing came from. First she saw a large pair of green trousers, then further up an even larger green jerkin and right at the top nearly as high as the treetops, a very miserable face, which was crying the tears into the pool.

"Who are you?" shouted Jennifer Jane, the face was very high up in the air, so she felt she had to shout to make herself heard.

"That's a silly question, I'm a giant!" replied the miserable face "and it's my job to cry salt tears into this pool, which overflows into a stream and then runs down to the sea."

Jennifer Jane had often wondered how the salt got into seawater.

"It's not really a bad job," the giant went on “and it's very important, but it makes me so miserable crying all the time."

‘Oh crumbs, ‘thought Jennifer Jane, ‘I'll try and cheer him up’, so she told the giant the funniest joke she knew. He brightened up considerably and said he felt much happier. In fact, he felt so happy that he stopped crying.

"There, that's better," she said.

Just as soon as she said that, the giant burst out crying again louder than ever and the tears simply poured down his face like salt rain. When he had calmed down again to a steady sobbing, Jennifer Jane asked him what had made him become miserable again.

"Well, when I feel happy, I'm not doing my job," said the giant "and that makes me feel so miserable, that I start crying and then I'm back where I started. I don't think I’ll ever feel happy again." The tears fell into the pool making such big splashes, that Jennifer Jane had to go home before she got soaking wet.