The witching hour

We have a lovely children's book called The Shrinking of Treehorn. B had enjoyed it in his youth, and we weren't long into our career as parents before he went out and procured a copy for Monkey. Or "for Monkey". It's written by Florence Parry Heide, of whom I had never heard, and illustrated by Edward Gorey, of whom even I had. (And according to Amazon, it has two sequels. This is wonderful. Must find immediately.) Maybe it's a children's classic, or maybe it's better known in the US, but I had never encountered it until I read it as an adult.

Anyway, it's a slim volume in bile-green paperback and that awkard wider-than-long shape that doesn't fit properly on bookshelves. The liny pen-and-ink drawings are delightfully 70's, from the principal's sideburns to the kitchen floor tiles; and the story of Treehorn, who gets smaller and smaller until he figures out why, is amusing to children - but the humour for the adult reader is all in the beautifully understated writing. It's not so much what she says, as the spaces between the words that convey the story of the jaded adults who so totally fail to notice what's happening to poor Treehorn, and it's deliciously awful.

[Tangent: I've just read the following line and had an epiphany: "He always liked to finish things, even if they were boring." Oh my God, I married Treehorn.]

Anyway, sometimes I feel like Treehorn's mother. Unlike Treehorn's mother, my cakes almost always do rise, but when I read this, I feel a certain sympathy for the poor woman:

His mother was cleaning the refrigerator. "You know how I hate to have you climb up on the chairs, dear," she said. She went into the living room to dust.

She's just so resigned to his going ahead and doing it anyway that her comment is no more than a formal protest lodged to have the paperwork in order in case some day she's audited. As Monkey leaps repeatedly from chair to coffee table to sofa around 5.30 every evening in yet another bid to concuss himself, and I ask him, wearily and pointlessly, to stop, I know exactly how she feels.

Of course, since I rarely dust and never clean the fridge, the similarity ends there.