Beamy's Day

I started the list at about nine o'clock on the back of an envelope and it was not a job. Nobody asked. I cannot watch a fluff do something good and let it go past unmentioned, and on a day like today they were coming at about one a minute.

Huffy — rope. Muddle — the box. Wondy — oil. Yetty — the knot (1 hr!!). Mendy — 9 patched. Sharey — the oil sums. Lonny — orchard hooks, asked for it himself.

By four o'clock the envelope was full on both sides and I had started on a second one.

The thing about keeping a list like that is that you have to stand still to do it.

I did not hang a single lantern. I want that written down at the start, because it is what I spent most of the evening being talked out of minding about.

What I did instead was go round the yard all day saying the entries out loud to whoever was nearest. That is the part that is not obvious. A list in a pocket is a list in a pocket. It only does anything when it comes out.

"Has anybody actually thanked Blushy?"

I said that in the middle of the yard at five o'clock, loudly, and the yard turned round, and Blushy went the colour of a strawberry and wanted to go home. I knew that would happen. I did it anyway, and I have thought about it since, and I would do it again, because six hours on the bottom of a ladder is six hours and nobody had said one word.

Blushy stayed. Held the ladder through the whole of it, went red for eleven seconds in front of everybody, and did four more fluffs afterwards.

Some of them I had to get second-hand. I was not round the side of the barn for the knot; Fizzy told me about that at about three, considerably impressed and slightly cross about it. I was not at the wall at half past four when Neaty counted, but I had it inside ten minutes because the yard was full of it.

And at about six, Sparkly found me on the step reading the envelope over.

"That's everyone," said Sparkly, over my shoulder. "That is genuinely everyone. Fifty-four names."

"Fifty-five things happened."

"Fifty-four names," said Sparkly again, "and you're not on it."

It had genuinely not occurred to me to write Beamy on it, and now that it had been said out loud it was faintly embarrassing, like catching yourself in a mirror.

"I didn't do a lantern," I said. "I just watched."

"You watched fifty-four fluffs have the best day of the year, and wrote down every one of them. Tonight they are all going to find out that somebody was keeping count. That is not nothing. That is the only copy."

So I wrote it at the bottom in small letters. Beamy — kept the count.

I read it out at twenty past nine, standing on Winky's bucket, and it took eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes is a very long time to hold a room. I was about four names in when I realised that it was not going to be a nice moment — that it was going to be a big one — because of what I could see happening on the faces.

Lonny found out that Buddy had put him with Peeky on purpose, before the counting got as far as the end of the line. Lonny went and stood in the kitchen for a minute.

Mello found out that an hour and forty minutes of a queue not falling apart counts as an event.

Huffy went completely still at the first name on the list, which was his, for a rope nobody had thanked him for at half past nine that morning.

And Snoozy found out, from Oopsy, going pink, what the cleaned lantern on Winky's table had cost the yard at half past four.

None of those fluffs knew. That is the thing I came away with. They had all been there. They had done the things themselves, with their own paws, and they did not know what the day had been until somebody read it out in order.