14:00

Market Row

The wick run. Four of them go down Market Row for more wicks, string and matches. Handy says yes to four extra errands on the way and Nopsy says no to two of them, kindly, out loud, which is the first time Handy has watched somebody do that. Snuggs buys eleven blankets on the grounds that it will be cold on the path tonight, and is teased about it, and is right. Gladly counts what the shops had rather than what they did not. Back by twenty past three.

2 fluffs tell this minute. None of them saw the same one.

Gladly

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Four of us went down Market Row in the afternoon for wicks and string and matches, and Market Row was nearly out of everything, because fifty-five fluffs had had the same idea since breakfast.

I heard myself starting on it. No matches. Hardly any wick. The good string gone.

And then I stopped, on purpose, in the middle of the road, and did it the other way round: what have they still got?

Enough wick for the tunnel, which is the stretch that needs it most. Two boxes of the long matches. String that is not the good string and will do perfectly well for one night.

Snuggs

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Four of us went down Market Row in the afternoon for wicks and string and matches.

And I bought eleven blankets.

I want to explain the eleven, because everybody found it extremely funny and nobody asked.

I had been thinking about six o'clock. Not about the lighting — about the standing about. Fifty-five fluffs, out on a path, in the open, in the dark, at the cold end of a day, waiting for a chief who might be late. And the fluffs on the far stretches would be furthest from a door and would either stand there going blue or give up and come back and miss the whole thing.