Doodle's Day

The trouble with the path was that nobody could see all of it at once.

You could stand at the gate and see the gate end. You could stand at the orchard and see the orchard. Nobody — not even Zippy, who had run the entire thing before breakfast — could hold the shape of it in one go. So fluffs kept doing the same stretch twice and missing the one in between, and the yard kept having the same argument in slightly different words.

"Let's make something," I said, and went and got the big roll of paper.

I drew it on the barn floor, on my knees, with everybody tripping over me.

The gate. The three steps. The lane. The bridge, with a proper drawing of the bridge, because a bridge drawn as a line is no use to anybody. The orchard as a row of small green blobs. The long bend. Winky's house at the end, with a lantern over the door already drawn in, because Snoozy had been extremely clear about that at breakfast.

Then every hook, as a dot.

That took ages. There are a great many dots. There is a stretch past the orchard where I stopped believing anybody had counted properly and did it again from the road.

Muddle came in at about half past eleven with wet knees and an armful of lanterns out of a ditch and stopped dead in the doorway.

"Oh," said Muddle. "Oh. It's all in one piece."

I have thought about that more than anything else anybody said to me today. It is all in one piece. It was always in one piece. It just was not anywhere a fluff could look at it.

And then Humdy, who had been bored since about nine o'clock, wanted to colour in a dot every time a hook got filled.

Now — and I want to be honest, because this is the part I am pleased about and it did not feel good at the time — my first thought was no. It is my map. I have just spent two hours on the dots. Somebody else's pen all over it.

I said, "That's what they're for."

And then it was not my map any more. Within about twenty minutes it was Humdy's job, and fluffs were coming in from the lane to look at how green the gate end was going, and by half past one Humdy had noticed the thing I never would have: the gate end was going green fast and the middle was not going green at all.

Everybody had started at the ends, because the ends are where you arrive. Tidy moved four fluffs into the middle. The whole thing went one colour by about five.

I did not do that. I drew the dots. Somebody else read them.

Dreamy did the best drawing of the day and did it in about ninety seconds on the back of Beamy's envelope, standing at a gate in the dark.

I am not being modest. Mine took two hours and was extremely useful. Dreamy's took ninety seconds and was the thing everybody wanted afterwards: the lane, the bend, the long bright thread of it, and a small round cloud at the far end, because from the top of the hill the lit path looked exactly like one strand of floss pulled off the Wheel.

That drawing is in Winky's kitchen. It is still there. It is badly drawn and it is perfect and I would not change one line of it.

I spent most of the party with pens out, because a party with fifty-five fluffs in it and nothing to do with your hands is my idea of a long evening, and by about eleven there were four of us doing lanterns on the backs of things.

Beamy read the envelope out and the map was on it, and I put my hand up and said "and Humdy ran it", which got a cheer, and which was the honest version.