Jelly's Day

The orchard stretch is forty hooks long and nobody walks past it.

I knew that by eleven o'clock and I minded about it by twelve.

Down at the bridge there was laughing. Fluffs kept stopping on the bridge to say ooh, doesn't that look lovely, and somebody was singing, and you could hear all of it perfectly well from up in the orchard, which is the worst possible arrangement.

Up here there were forty hooks, some wasps, and me.

"Ooh," I said to a wasp, bitterly. "I wish that was mine."

The row was mine as much as Huffy's and I knew it was going wrong about halfway through, which is the worst possible moment to know.

It was the hot part of the day. I came down for water and said the thing about it not being fair that the bridge lot got the good job, and Huffy said "oh, here we go", and up it went like dry grass.

We were both loud. We were both right about something. Neither of us was right about the same thing, and I could not for the life of me have told you what I was actually angry about, because it certainly was not rope.

Dinky got in the middle and fell over a bucket on purpose, and it stopped, the way Dinky always stops it.

And then Dinky did not walk off.

"Jelly. Say the real one. Out loud. Not to me — to Huffy."

"What?"

"I feel..." said Dinky, and waited.

I have thought about that waiting a great deal. It went on for about ten seconds and it was the longest part of my day.

"I feel left out," I said, at the ground. "Because everyone's at the bridge and I'm up an orchard on my own and nobody can see me doing it."

"Oh," said Huffy, in an entirely different voice. "Well. That's not the same as the rope at all."

"No," I said. "It isn't."

Tipsy had watched the whole thing from the wall and never said a word, which I noticed at the time and appreciated more later.

We did the orchard together after lunch, the two of us, arguing amiably about something else entirely.

And at one o'clock Sharey came all the way up that lane with half a sandwich held out in front, which is how Sharey arrives everywhere.

"Half for you, half for me."

We sat under a tree with it, and Sharey made me count three good things the orchard had that the bridge did not. I thought it was a stupid question and said so, and then counted them anyway: shade, apples, and forty hooks in a line, every one of them filled, which from that end looked like a very long sentence somebody had finished.

Sharey left a spoonful of oil with me afterwards. For the orchard. Which was already done and did not need it.

My bit of the evening happened before the party, and it is the part I would keep.

The path lit from the far end back, stretch by stretch, coming down the lane towards the gate. Sparkly was up on the gatepost with Beamy's envelope shouting whose bit each one was as it came on.

"THE ORCHARD," Sparkly shouted, "IS JELLY'S. FORTY OF THEM. ON HIS OWN. ALL AFTERNOON."

And forty hooks came alight all at once, up on the hill, and the whole lane went up.

I cheered louder than anybody. Not for mine. I mean I cheered for mine, obviously, but then Sparkly did the bridge, which was Truly's, done twice because Truly went back and redid them, and I shouted for that too. And the hedge tunnel, which was Cloudy's. And the rope, which was Yetty's, and took an hour, in the sun, on a crate.

I went hoarse. I have never gone hoarse cheering for other fluffs in my life.

At Winky's, Beamy read it all out again off the envelope, and my forty were in there, and it was lovely — and it was honestly not as good as the shouting had been.