THE BUCKET-WARDEN'S BOOK

Found paper — a small hard-backed notebook, chalk-dusted, much thumbed at the corners. Four generations of Wardens in four hands. The parish's truest register, kept by counting the one object nobody is ashamed to own.

THE PARISH OF MUCKLECOMBE · THE OFFICE OF BUCKET-WARDEN No wage. Mostly liability. Begun by N. Dellow, elected by acclamation, in a wet October.

THE FIRST PAGE, IN THE FIRST HAND

Duty of this office, as recorded: to have regard to the parish bucket.

I have had regard to it. It has a split in the base and has had for some while and the reason the chapel floor by the north pew is going soft is not the leak. The leak goes in the bucket. The bucket goes in the floor.

Mended. Sixpence, my own, and an afternoon.

Nobody asked me to count the rest. There is nothing in the duty about counting the rest. But I have been sat here an hour and I cannot get past it: how many buckets has this parish got?

Nobody knows. So I am going to go and count them.

THE COUNT — that first winter, in chalk-numbers, entered as he went

Note against the four: they have been sleeping under a drip and mopping in the dark and had said nothing to anybody. I have thought about why for three days. It is because there is nothing more private than the exact shape of what you cannot afford.

Note against the nine: not one of them had ever thought about it. That is not meanness. Nobody counts what they are not short of.

Issued to the four. Borrowed from the nine — I have written BORROWED and I mean it; I asked them to lend to the parish, because the parish was short, and every one of them lent, gladly. I did not use the other word and I am not going to. Being asked to help is a different thing entirely from being given something.

Every bucket in this parish is now chalked with a number and the numbers are in this book.

THE SECOND HAND — some years on

I have the book from Dellow. I did not understand at first what I had been handed and thought it was a list of buckets.

It is not a list of buckets. Work it through: a man who knows where every bucket is knows which roofs leak. A man who knows which roofs leak knows which households are struggling, and knows it before they say so — which in this parish is the only useful time to know it, because nobody here will ever tell you.

So I keep the count. And when a thing arrives at my door — a hundredweight of peat, a coat outgrown, a half sack, with no message but "you'll know where that wants to go" — I do know. And it goes.

Neither end ever finds out about the other. That is the office. It is not written down anywhere but here.

THE THIRD HAND — a page of the standing count, kept quarterly

Nobody in this parish has slept under a drip since the first count. It cost nothing. It took one winter and a bit of chalk and it had been available to anybody, at any time, for three hundred years.

THE FOURTH AND PRESENT HAND — the first page of the current Warden

Elected by acclamation, in the old way, with the old laughter. They still call it the least office in the parish.

They say it now with their chins up, which is a different thing entirely.

I have been handed a bucket-handle on a bit of string and a book with four hands in it, and I took it as gravely as a coronation, because everybody in that vestry knew exactly what they were handing over and not one of them was laughing by the end.

Count begun. 71 in the parish. 3 split. Nobody short.

ON THE INSIDE OF THE BACK COVER, IN THE FIRST HAND, THE ONLY THING DELLOW EVER WROTE THAT WAS NOT A NUMBER:

They gave me this office to tell me I was ridiculous.

It is the only office in this parish that nobody watches, and so it is the only one where a body may quietly do the whole job.

I would not swap it for Fen-Reeve.

Archivist's note. Nolly Dellow is on the chapel wall at Mucklecombe — not among the benefactors who paid for the roof, but on the small plain stone below them, which the parish put up itself, and which reads in full: NOLLY DELLOW · BUCKET-WARDEN · HE COUNTED THEM.