A Day in Candyfloss Land · in their own words

Hopsy's Day

Happy

How it went: ordinary → steady → concentrating → cheerful about cake

My morning

I had an ordinary morning and I did ordinary things, and I am putting that first because the rest of this is about four minutes in the dark and I do not want it to look like the whole day.

Hooks. Carrying. A stretch of the lane with two other fluffs. I am not the one anybody comes to in the morning.

The day

I am the one they come to on a grey afternoon, and there was not much grey about this one until the matches ran out.

What I did for most of the day was keep going at a steady rate while other fluffs had their large moments. I am aware that sounds like a complaint and it is not. Somebody has to be at a steady rate.

Boingy went down the bank in the afternoon and lay in the nettles a good while, and I heard about that later and thought: yes. That is the bit fluffs do not talk about. I know all about the lying-there part, because keeping a light on through a long grey week is mostly lying-there with a candle.

The party

"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.

Slowly. Ridiculously slowly. Past the bridge, where everybody had gone quiet. Past the three steps.

There was a moment near the hedge where the flame went almost flat and blue and somebody behind me made a small noise, and I did not hurry — because hurrying makes wind, and wind is the entire problem. That is the only thing I know about carrying a flame and it took me a long time to learn it: the danger is never the distance. It is you, going faster because you are frightened of losing it.

Then I stood at the gate and touched the twig to the wick and it caught, and the cheer went all the way back up the lane, lantern by lantern, to the orchard.

Sunny lit it with me. Two of us, in the end, which I found out afterwards was the thing Sunny had asked for at half past seven that morning and had not got.

"Weren't you scared it'd go out?" Sunny asked.

"It nearly did, twice."

"But you looked so calm."

"I was thinking about tomorrow morning," I said. "There's going to be cake left."

Pouty, who had thought of the whole thing, said that was the least inspiring sentence anybody had said all day.

"It's a seed of hope," I said. "One thing you're looking forward to, that's all it has to be. It doesn't have to be a big one. Mine was cake."

"Cake."

"It got me down the lane."

What Hopsy learned

Fluffs think hope is a feeling I have got and they have not. They say it in a slightly envious voice, as though I were born sunny, like Sunny — who, incidentally, woke up grey this morning and told Mopsy so on a wall, which rather makes the point.

It is not a feeling. On the greyest week of the year I do not feel one scrap of it, and I keep the candle going anyway, and that is the whole of my method.

And the thing that keeps me going is never grand. It is never *the light will return* or *this will pass*. It is a small, specific, faintly ridiculous object about a day away.

Fluffs expect my reason to be a grand one. It was cake. A small enough reason is the only kind that survives two hundred feet of wind.

Who else was there

Hopsy was not the only one in these minutes. Read them from the other side.