Yetty's Day

The spare rope had been in a box all season and had done what rope does in a box, which is become one solid knot roughly the size and the temper of a cat.

Three fluffs had a go at it. Three fluffs gave it up, cheerfully, in under four minutes each, which is about the length of time a knot gets before everybody decides it is unreasonable.

I had a go. It did not move at all.

"I can't do it," I said — and then heard it, and sighed at myself, out loud, in the yard. "I can't do it... yet."

So I took it to a crate in the sun round the side of the barn, where nobody was, and started at one end.

I want to describe this properly, because everybody was extremely nice about it afterwards and nobody has any idea what it was actually like.

It is not brave. It is boring. You find a loop. You follow it. You lose it. You find it again. Nothing visible happens for a very long time — forty minutes, an hour — and then the whole thing is suddenly looser everywhere at once, all at the same moment, and then it goes back to being boring again for another twenty.

There is no part of it that feels like progress while you are in it. That is the entire difficulty and it is the reason three fluffs put it down.

Fizzy came past twice.

The first time: "Just cut it."

"There isn't any more rope."

The second time, an hour later, Fizzy stopped and stared, because the cat had become an apple.

"How much longer?"

"Don't know," I said. "Bit more."

Boingy came past at some point covered in nettle stings, having gone down the bank the fast way, and said something encouraging from a lying-down position, which I appreciated more than I let on.

I got the last loop out at half past two. Forty feet of good rope, in one piece, coiled properly.

And nobody made a fuss, because by then everybody had forgotten it had ever been a knot. That is the usual reward for that sort of afternoon and I am used to it and it did not bother me at all.

What I noticed, sitting on the crate afterwards with a coil of rope and nothing to do, was that the hour had been quiet. Nobody standing over me. Nobody asking how it was going every four minutes, or making an encouraging face, or — worst of all — offering to have a turn.

I do not think I could have done it in the yard. I think that is worth knowing about myself.

Fizzy found me by the window at about ten and said he had been wrong twice and loudly, which I had not expected and did not need.

"It was mostly boring," I said.

Fizzy said that was the most honest description of heroism he had ever heard, which I think was a joke, and then said something I have been thinking about since: that Fizzy is the one who never gives up and that today somebody had out-lasted him by sitting still.

I would not have put it that way. I do not think of it as out-lasting anything. But I did sit still for an hour and a bit, and the rope did come out in one piece, and the two of those are connected.

Beamy read the envelope out — Yetty — the knot, one hour — and the room made a noise, and Neaty, who had spent her own afternoon being told she was wrong about a number, caught my eye across the room and did a small nod.