Pouty's Day

I had a grim sort of morning and I am not going to dress it up.

The route I had been given got changed twice before ten o'clock — once because of the rope and once because four fluffs were moved into the middle — and each time I had it in my head, laid out, how the day was going to go, and each time somebody rubbed it out.

That is my particular weather. Not big disasters. Small rearrangements, one after another, each of them completely reasonable, each of them landing on me like a dropped plate.

At about half past two I was up near the bank when Boingy went over the edge.

Fast. Very fast. Arrived at the bottom in a sitting position with nettles up both arms and no wind left at all.

"Oh no," I said, over the edge, and I meant it.

And then I sat down at the top and kept company from a safe height, which is the only sort of help I had to offer, since I was not going down there.

Boingy lay in those nettles a good long while. I want to write that down properly because everybody in this land knows Boingy as the one who bounces, and what I saw was a fluff lying quite flat at the bottom of a bank listening to the day carry on being lovely somewhere above without him in it.

I know that exact feeling from the inside. It is my entire subject.

"Are you getting up?" I asked, eventually. Not to hurry him. To find out.

"In a bit. It's not a race. It's just a bank."

Then he said I can try again to the nettles and bounced three times and came up the solid way.

I did not say anything useful that whole time. I just did not tell him to get up, which I think is the single most useful thing anybody can do for somebody at the bottom of a bank, and I only know it because I have been down there.

The matches ran out with one lantern to go.

Not a spare one. The gate lantern — the first one anybody would see coming up the lane, the one Sunny had been promised at seven o'clock that morning and had been carrying the long matches for all day.

"But I really wanted to —" I started, and stopped, because everybody turned round and because it was not actually my lantern to want.

But it was absolutely my kind of moment. That flat drop when the thing you had lined up in your head simply does not happen, in front of everybody, at the worst possible time.

So I gave it a minute.

A proper one. Standing there in the dark at the gate feeling genuinely fed up about somebody else's lantern, while fifty-five fluffs waited and some of them shuffled.

And I want to explain what the minute is for, because fluffs think it is sulking and it is not.

If you skip it, you do not actually know what has been lost. You go straight to never mind, we'll do something else, and you end up with a thin little replacement that nobody wanted. The minute is where you find out what the thing was for. And what the gate lantern was for was being the first light Rainbow saw, lit by somebody who had waited all day to light it.

Then: "You don't need a match."

"We do rather. It's a candle."

"You need a flame," I said. "There's forty-nine of them lit up that lane already."

Hopsy went up to the third lantern with a dry twig and came back down two hundred feet at the speed of somebody carrying a small flame in the wind, with the whole lane holding its breath, and the gate lantern went on from the light of one that was already burning.

It was better than a match. Everybody said so. Somebody said we should do it that way every year, as though there had ever been a year.

Sunny lit it with Hopsy in the end, two of them, which was what Sunny had asked for at half past seven in the morning and I did not know that at the time.