The Witch’s rampage in London is the first public display of Jadis’s power in Digory’s world, and it turns her from a formidable visitor into an immediate danger to the city. The episode tests the limits of her magic: a spell that destroyed Charn fails in London, but her physical strength remains, and her response to ridicule and resistance is to seize control by force. Digory’s effort to stop her does not end the danger so much as carry it out of London, with several unexpected companions in tow.

Causes and Background

Before the London episode, Jadis explains the destruction of Charn to Digory and Polly. She claims that she and her sister had been at war, that she had tried other means of defeating her, and that she used the Deplorable Word only when the last battle had turned against her. According to Jadis, the word destroyed every living thing except the speaker, leaving her the sole survivor beneath the sun. Polly’s question about the ordinary people, women, children, and animals exposes the cost that Jadis’s account minimizes: she treats the people of Charn as subjects whose purpose was to obey her will.

That history establishes both the scale of Jadis’s power and her habit of describing mass destruction as a matter of rule and necessity. In London, however, the rules change. Digory and Polly bring her back from Charn by plunging into the home pool with their green Rings, and Digory is sorry for her when he thinks she may still be weak. Polly suspects that Jadis is only pretending to be helpless. As they sink toward their own world, Jadis catches Digory by the ear, showing that she has recovered enough strength to follow them through.

The Spell Fails, but Strength Remains

Jadis arrives at the Ketterley house in full view of Aunt Letty, who sees an enormous, splendidly dressed woman in the doorway. When Jadis raises herself up and speaks the words that had turned Charn’s palace gates to dust, nothing happens. Aunt Letty mistakes the words for drunken, unclear English; the narration makes clear that Jadis has recognized the failure of her power, but does not stop to dwell on it. She immediately lunges forward, lifts Aunt Letty, and throws her across the room.

The interruption of this assault is almost absurdly ordinary: the housemaid arrives to announce that the hansom is there. Jadis orders Uncle Andrew to lead the way, and a glance from her silences his protest. She drives him out of the house. Digory sees them go and understands that Jadis is loose in London, accompanied by a man who is too frightened to oppose her.

The horse-drawn hansom soon returns at speed, with no driver in its seat. Jadis stands on its roof as it rounds a corner, then the vehicle crashes into a lamp-post. She jumps clear and lands on the horse, which she has been whipping and continues to urge into a frenzy. A pursuing crowd gathers: policemen, people in other hansoms, cyclists, and pedestrians. The spectacle draws onlookers to windows and doorways, but their amusement does not make the encounter safe.

Crowd, Resistance, and Escalation

The crowd’s mockery briefly produces a different response from Jadis: she bows when people cheer her as an empress, then realizes that they are making fun of her. She changes the knife to her left hand and wrenches a cross-bar from the lamp-post. The failed spell has not left her weak; she can bend the iron bar as if it were a light stick, and she turns it into a weapon. When Digory tries to reach her, she strikes the chief policeman with it.

Jadis frames the crowd’s resistance as an insult she will avenge after conquering their world. She threatens to leave no stone of their city standing, naming Charn and other places as examples of destruction. Digory makes repeated attempts to seize her ankle. She kicks free of his first grasp, and he loses hold; he tries again, is shaken off, and then catches her heel a third time. Meanwhile, the iron bar knocks down more men, and Uncle Andrew pleads with Jadis to compose herself. The scene makes the contrast with Charn plain: London’s people are not Jadis’s subjects, and her threat to repeat Charn’s fate turns her earlier account of that catastrophe into a warning about what she intends to do again.

Escape into Another World

Holding Jadis’s heel, Digory shouts to Polly to go. The angry faces and voices disappear as the children are carried through the pool, but Uncle Andrew’s fearful complaints follow them into the darkness. Digory realizes that they did not mean to bring him along. When the children emerge into the warm, green sunshine of the wood, Polly discovers that the old horse and Uncle Andrew have come with them, as has the Cabby.

Jadis has also been carried away from London. In the wood she turns pale and bends over the horse’s mane, visibly ill; Uncle Andrew is shaking. Strawberry, by contrast, becomes quiet, with his ears returning to their proper position and the fire going out of his eyes. He walks toward a pool to drink, but Polly tells the others to use their green Rings. Since Digory is still holding Jadis, Polly is holding Digory’s hand, the Cabby is holding Strawberry, and Uncle Andrew has taken the Cabby’s other hand, the whole party sinks into darkness instead of letting Strawberry drink.

The rampage therefore ends not with Jadis captured or London restored to calm, but with Digory’s attempt to stop her redirecting the danger into a new world. The chain of linked hands and Digory’s grip on the Witch turn a London confrontation into an accidental group journey, bringing the horse, the Cabby, and Uncle Andrew along with the children and Jadis. The event’s central reversal is that the Witch loses the magical advantage that made her ruler of Charn, yet remains physically formidable enough to threaten London—and that stopping her in one world carries her threat elsewhere.