the gate

"Hopsy. Take this up the lane and don't let it go out."

It was a twig. There was about an inch of flame on the end of it and it did not look like it would last to the end of the wall, never mind two hundred feet down a lane in the open dark.

The matches had run out with the gate lantern unlit and Pouty had worked out that you do not need a match when there are forty-nine flames already burning up that lane.

So I cupped both paws round it and walked.

The matches ran out with one lantern to go.

Not a spare one. The gate lantern — the first one anybody would see coming up the lane, the one Sunny had been promised at seven o'clock that morning and had been carrying the long matches for all day.

"But I really wanted to —" I started, and stopped, because everybody turned round and because it was not actually my lantern to want.

But it was absolutely my kind of moment. That flat drop when the thing you had lined up in your head simply does not happen, in front of everybody, at the worst possible time.

The matches ran out with one lantern to go. Mine. The gate one, the first one anybody would see coming up the lane, the one I had been promised at seven o'clock that morning and had been carrying the matches for all day.

I did not get to light it.

Pouty worked out that you do not need a match when there are forty-nine flames already burning up that lane, and Hopsy carried a lit twig two hundred feet in both paws, walking at the speed of somebody carrying a small flame in the wind. It nearly went out twice. The whole lane held its breath.

And I stood there and watched somebody else light my lantern, and found that I did not mind even slightly, which surprised me.