Sunny's Day

"Sunny can light the first one! Sunny's the sunny one!"

And everybody agreed, in that warm way a crowd agrees, and somebody pressed the long matches into my paws, and that was that. Decided. Before breakfast, and without anybody asking me.

"Here comes the sunshine!" I said, because that is what I say, and I meant about two thirds of it.

Here is the truth of that morning. I had woken up grey. No reason at all. Grey the way a morning is sometimes grey, with nothing wrong anywhere in it.

And on nine mornings out of ten I would simply have got on with it, brightly, and nobody would ever have known, because the brightness works. That is the entire trouble with the brightness. It works. It works so well that nobody ever checks.

Mopsy was sitting on the wall not doing anything much, which is a thing Mopsy is extremely good at.

"You've gone quiet," Mopsy said.

"I'm fine."

"Mm," said Mopsy, and went on not doing anything much, and left a space.

I sat down in the space. I have thought about that since — how it was not a question. If it had been a question I would have answered it cheerfully and that would have been that. It was a space, and a space is much harder to be bright at.

"They always give me this one," I said. "The first lantern. The good bit. Because I'm the cheerful one. And I am — I do like it, I'm not pretending about that. But it's a cloudy sort of morning, and nobody ever asks a sunny fluff whether it's a cloudy sort of morning."

"Cloudy's allowed," said Mopsy.

"I know." I turned the matches over. "I think I'd like somebody to light it with me, though. That's all."

That was the whole of it. It took about four seconds to say and I had been carrying it since six.

The rest of my day was hooks and carrying and the long hot middle bit, and at ten to two we all found out we had four hours instead of nine, and after that nobody had time to be anything at all.

My bit of the evening happened before the party, at the gate, and I nearly missed being any part of it.

The matches ran out with one lantern to go. Mine. The gate one, the first one anybody would see coming up the lane, the one I had been promised at seven o'clock that morning and had been carrying the matches for all day.

I did not get to light it.

Pouty worked out that you do not need a match when there are forty-nine flames already burning up that lane, and Hopsy carried a lit twig two hundred feet in both paws, walking at the speed of somebody carrying a small flame in the wind. It nearly went out twice. The whole lane held its breath.

And I stood there and watched somebody else light my lantern, and found that I did not mind even slightly, which surprised me.

Because I had asked for somebody to light it with me, that morning, out loud. And in the end there were two of us: Hopsy brought the flame and I put it to the wick, and it took two fluffs instead of one, and it was not less bright for that.

At the party I had a perfectly good time, in the ordinary way, and I did not have to be the brightest thing in the room, because the room was already bright.