48 pages • 1 hour read
The Borrowers
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Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
When Arrietty returns to the living room, Homily tells her that Pod has gone borrowing to Great Aunt Sophy’s room, which means that he will not return for a long time. He amuses himself by talking to the bedridden woman, knowing she will always think that he is only a delusion. Pod’s excursion gives Arrietty an idea, for she remembers that her father always leaves the gates open until he returns. Arrietty tells her mother that she is going to the storeroom and hastily makes her way down the passageway, knowing she has at least an hour to find the boy and ask whether he found her letter to her aunt and uncle. She stops by the storeroom first to find a hatpin that she can use as a tool to help her climb the human stairs.
Arrietty quickly makes her way upstairs and can hear her father inside Great Aunt Sophy’s room. She stealthily makes her way through the patch of light that streams from the bedroom doorway as she listens to Sophy talk about horse racing while her father halfheartedly listens. Finally, she makes her way to the night nursery where she knows the boy will be sleeping. She startles him when she appears by his bedside, but he soon realizes who she is. He hands her the letter, telling her that Hendreary has written something on the back. She slowly sounds out the words “Tell your Aunt Lupy to come home” (111). Just as Arrietty is beginning to process what this means, she sees her father in the doorway.
Chapter 14 Summary
Pod and Arrietty walk home in silence. He tells Homily what Arrietty has been doing, and with horror, she realizes that rather than being angry, her parents are terrified. She tries to calm their nerves by telling them everything about her first encounter with the boy and the letter to Hendreary, but they are convinced that her actions mean they will have to flee the house and emigrate. Since she has told the boy so much, not only can he reason out where they might live, but he also knows where Hendreary’s family is as well, and thus Arrietty’s actions have put them all at risk.
Arrietty argues that she could not help but talk to the boy, for he saw her first that day in the yard. Arrietty thinks her parents are wrong about humans and that because the boy has been nice to her, they have nothing to worry about. Pod and Homily counter that human beings cannot be trusted and begin to consider what they should do next. A human has never found out where a Borrower lives, and they worry that cats, terriers, ferrets, and humans will soon be arriving to eradicate them. Eventually, they ask what Hendreary said in his letter. When Arrietty tells them about the letter’s contents, it only confirms their deepest fears; Lupy must have tried to visit and disappeared somewhere between the badger den and the house.
Chapter 15 Summary
The family eventually calms down enough to go to bed, although Homily and Pod sit up talking for hours while Arrietty eavesdrops on them through her cigar-box walls. After frantically putting her hair in curlers in case she is seen the next day, Homily, like Arrietty, lies awake staring at all the familiar things in her room and wondering how much longer they will be able to stay there. She eventually falls asleep but awakens some time later to a strange breeze entering the room and the taste of dust in her mouth. Horrified, she realizes that a large metal object has penetrated the floorboards and that slowly, their roof is being pried away. Pod wakes up and sees that the intruding object is a screwdriver.
Eventually, the ceiling gives way, and the boy’s face appears in the gaping hole above them. Homily yells for the boy to put the board back in place, but he tells them he has brought a present: a china cabinet complete with real plates from a dollhouse in the nursery and a tiny velvet chair. Although Pod and Homily remain concerned about the intrusion, they admire the gifts and begin to realize that the boy does not mean them harm. They ask him to replace the roof but agree that he should not wedge it in too tightly, as there is plenty more dollhouse furniture that he can bring to them.
Chapter 16 Summary
For many nights, the boy brings more exciting surprises from the dollhouse. They begin to have more fine furniture than they know what to do with, and Homily begins asking Pod to build a drawing room to house it all. In exchange for the items, Arrietty reads to the boy by the cherry tree where they first met. Exposed to many more books than she previously had, she begins to learn even more about the world and realizes just how much exists beyond the confined space of the house and the garden. For a while, the Clocks and the boy coexist happily; the Borrower family has more than they ever dreamed possible, and the boy and Arrietty have each other as friends.
Everything changes, however, when they decide to take some things from the drawing room. The dollhouse was long forgotten, but when a tiny silver violin and harp and other valuable items begin to go missing from a drawing room cabinet, Mrs. Driver begins to get suspicious of everyone in the house. Eventually, she starts to think that Sophy, who has been getting out of bed more regularly lately, must be intentionally taking her own things so she can accuse the housekeeper of stealing and drive her out of the house.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
Arrietty becomes increasingly bold as the story progresses, but up to this point, her parents have been unaware of her contact with the human boy. Life has largely returned to normal by the time that Pod catches her in the boy’s bedroom, a pivotal moment that changes the trajectory of the story entirely and dramatically raises the stakes, for Arrietty’s actions have gone far beyond the willful explorations of a curious teenager and have exposed both her immediate family and potentially her extended family to a much larger, existential threat. Her transgression is not a small one; by willingly maintaining contact with the boy, she has broken the most sacred aspects of the Borrowers’ code and very way of life. Even the information she has managed to glean about Hendreary’s wife, Lupy, only implies further danger and hardship, for Hendreary’s letter clearly indicates that Lupy has gone missing, further underscoring the dangers of venturing forth into the wider world and deepening the Clock family mythology of risk and loss. However, despite their distress, Pod and Homily quickly set about planning their next course of action, a response that emphasizes the Clock family’s penchant for Survival and Adaptation.
This theme continues to develop in the family’s next encounter with the boy, for despite their initial fear, Pod and Homily soon adapt to a way of life in which luxuries and conveniences are delivered to their doorstep, rather than coming only as the result of risky and arduous borrowing. Even in the initial meeting with the boy, the Clock family’s ability to adapt to new realities is fully demonstrated, as Homily becomes less concerned about the human peering into her house and more worried about what he might think of her messy home and unkempt appearance. Norton thus creates a sense of absurdity in this deliberate contradiction, as well as building a subtext that comments upon people’s tendency to be more concerned about appearances than for safety, even in the most trying of times.
The boy and the Clocks begin a symbiotic relationship for an undisclosed amount of time, and this high point of the Clocks’ life in the old country house thus allows the family to once again enjoy a caliber of luxury that Pod and Homily remember from years ago, when the abundance of supplies enabled the residence of many more Borrowers than just themselves. Indulging in the varied benefits that their association with the boy makes possible, the Clocks drastically change their way of life and thus begin to undergo fundamental changes in attitude, forgoing much of the natural caution that has kept them safe for so many years. In some ways, their vanity begins to get the better of them, and their natural secrecy begins to slip. For example, Homily becomes obsessed with having nicer things for the house and demands that Pod build extra rooms to accommodate all the new possessions. Pod, meanwhile, begins leaving the house not to borrow, but to amuse himself by talking to Sophy, and this careless behavior is encouraged by the boy, who becomes increasingly bold in his own borrowing. He even comes to see himself as a human-sized Borrower, but because of his childish nature and human status, he does not possess the natural sense of fear and caution that comes with being tiny, so he starts to become somewhat reckless in his acquisitions, thus precipitating the baleful attentions of the cook and accelerating the conflict of the story to its inevitable conclusion. The real Borrowers, meanwhile, are lulled into a false sense of security by the boy’s friendly treatment and are unable to see the risks involved in his efforts on their behalf. This dynamic comes to full fruition with the boy’s attempt to borrow from the drawing room, a high-risk area that Pod has always avoided. While things in other parts of the house will never be missed, Pod knows that the drawing room is full of precious items that are carefully tracked and guarded from harm, and this final abandonment of every shred of caution and good sense results in the cascade of events that ultimately necessitates the Clock family’s departure from their ancestral home.
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