After eating Poppet, Ann lay awake in bed, thinking about what he had said. Before she had gone to sleep, she knew that she wanted to reconnect with the land she’d left behind eight years earlier, to walk amongst the people who held her former size, enjoying the secret memory of having eaten two of them. She thought of ways to make those memories live more in her mind, and then had an idea.

For the next two years, as she finished school, Ann spent some of the holiday times at home reading the diaries of all the women in her family who had lived in that house throughout the centuries. The most significant woman to write about was Mrs Grimble, the one who had started the practice of giant women eating little boys.

In 1956, when Ann finished school, she walked to the Beanstalk one day, reduced herself to her original size, climbed down the beanstalk with enough gold to set herself up in the village, and then wrote a children’s play, which adapted Jack’s encounter with Mrs Grimble. She called it ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.

She changed the ending that she’d remembered from the diary a little, so that Mrs Grimble caught Jack, just before he reached the beanstalk at the end of his first visit, and took him inside and ate him. She set up a stall in the village on market day, and began to sell copies of the book, which she had gotten published soon after writing it.

As everyone who’d been to the giant world had either fallen in love and stayed there, or been eaten by a giantess and never returned, there was nobody at the markets who didn’t find the story very original and imaginative. The book sold out quickly, and Ann had more copies printed. Word of its success spread like wildfire throughout the country, and many people bought copies. A highly successful movie was made in 1960, starring Gobbly Withers as Mrs Grimble, Joanna Lovely as Serena, and Slimathlete Dalton as Jack. Ann payed a brief visit back to her home in Brobdingnag, to tell her family of the success of the play, and learned that her parents had gone to live in a retirement village. Woozly had started boarding school, and would go and live with her parents in the holidays. When she was old enough, it was decided in advance, she would eventually be able to stay with her two big sisters.

In 1965, for a special presentation, Ann hired two local people from a casting agency to play Serena and Jack in a pantomime on the stage at the markets, and cast herself in the role of Serena.

Hundreds of years earlier, Mrs Grimble had detailed her first encounter with Jack very accurately, recalling all the dialogue that had taken place between them. When she had written her play in 1956, Ann had put all of Mrs Grimble’s and Jack’s speeches into the story, and channelled her own happy memories of eating Stephen and Poppet into her portrayal of Mrs Grimble.

Watching in the audience was a young boy named Humphrey. He was seven years old. A few months earlier, Humphrey had dreamt that he had met a giantess who had wanted him to pay her a coin. She had opened her mouth and asked him to put the coin onto her tongue. He had reached into her mouth and looked at her sparkling tongue and enjoyed making the payment and watching her swallow the coin. The dream had never made any sense to him, when he’d retro-analysed it while awake. Yet now he seemed to be particularly enjoying the way the pretty 27 year old Ann delivered some of Mrs Grimble’s lines.

Some of the original memoirs had been altered in the play, to make it more suitable for children, but now Humphrey watched and heard the scene where Jack said he loved Mrs Grimble. Humphrey was aroused beyond words, at the tender young age of seven, when he beheld the sight of the adorable Ann mouthing the words:

“In a way I love you too, Jack, but it won’t be long now before I really love eating you. I’ll just go and let Serena know I’ve caught another little boy and ask her to leave us in privacy. I’ll see you soon, you delicious little darling.”

Humphrey could not remove that combination of words and visual recollection from his mind. He remembered the dream he’d had about paying the giantess with a coin. Now he wished and wished that Ann could really be a giantess, and be saying these things to him, and then eat him. He’d read stories about people being able to fly, and entertained some thoughts of flying himself. Yet never until now had he so fervently wished for the impossible to be possible.