THE BUCKET-WARDEN

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which a man is elected as a joke to the least office in the parish, and takes it seriously, which nobody had allowed for.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

The elected offices of a Sogmarsh parish are these: Fen-Reeve, Pound-Keeper, Hedge-Viewer, Ale-Conner, the Toll Bench, the pitch wardens, and Bucket-Warden. There is no wage attached to any of them. There is, in most cases, a liability. The realm's four verbs of power are inherited, purchased, recorded and collected — nothing that matters is elected, which is precisely why the parish is permitted to elect anything at all.

Of the seven, Bucket-Warden is the joke office. Everyone knows it. The Fen-Reeve at least gets shouted at about drainage; the Ale-Conner gets to taste things. The Bucket-Warden's duty, as recorded, is "to have regard to the parish bucket" — the one under the worst of the chapel leak, that stands there and drips and is emptied by whoever notices — and the office has for three hundred years been used as the parish's way of gently telling somebody they are ridiculous.

Which is how, in a wet October, it came to Nolly Dellow.

Nolly was nineteen, and earnest, and had said at the vestry — out loud, in front of everybody — that he thought the parish ought to organise itself better, which is the single most laughable sentence available to a young man in this realm. He was elected Bucket-Warden by acclamation before he had finished sitting down. The whole vestry enjoyed it enormously. Somebody proposed a chain of office and somebody else produced one, which was a bucket handle on a bit of string, and Nolly wore it home.

He wore it, in fact, for eleven years, and by the end of the eleven years the parish had stopped laughing, and by the end of the twenty they had put his name on the chapel wall.

He began with the bucket, because that was the office.

And the first thing he found, on going and looking at it properly — which nobody had done in living memory, because it was the bucket, it was scenery — was that the parish bucket had a slow split in the base, and had had for some while, and that the reason the chapel floor by the north pew was going soft was not the leak. The leak went in the bucket. The bucket went in the floor.

He mended it. Sixpence of his own money and an afternoon. The floor dried out over the winter and the churchwardens, who had been quietly budgeting for a new floor at a cost that would have taken the parish four years, discovered that they were not going to need one, and asked how, and were told: the Bucket-Warden mended the bucket.

That was the first time anybody had said the words seriously since 1690.

Now, having mended the parish bucket, Nolly Dellow did the thing that made him. He asked the question that was, strictly, none of his business, and which nobody had asked in three hundred years because the office was a joke and jokes do not ask questions:

"How many buckets has this parish got?"

Nobody knew. So he counted them. It took him a winter, going door to door in the wet with a bit of chalk, and what he found is the whole of this tale and is the reason the office is what it is today.

There were, in that parish, in that October: forty-one buckets. Eleven of them were split. Four households had none at all — which in a realm where the leak is permanent means four households were sleeping under a drip and mopping, in the dark, every night, and had said nothing to anybody because there is nothing more private than the exact shape of what you cannot afford. Nine households had two or more and had never once thought about it. And the chapel had, in its cellar, under some sacking, nineteen buckets from a long-forgotten harvest supper, which had been under that sacking since before Nolly was born.

He redistributed them in a fortnight. Not by charity — he never once used the word, and he was very careful about that, because he had grasped the thing about pride that most people do not. He went to the nine two-bucket households and told them the parish was short, and asked them to lend to the parish, and every one of them lent, gladly, because being asked to help is an entirely different transaction from being given something. Then he issued to the four. And he chalked a number on the bottom of every bucket in the parish, and wrote the numbers in a book, and that book still exists.

Nobody in that parish has slept under a drip since. 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.

Here is what it grew into, and I will be brief, because the tale's point is already made and the parish does not care for a fuss.

Once you have a man who knows where every bucket in the parish is, you have — without anyone deciding it — a man who knows which roofs leak. And a man who knows which roofs leak knows which households are struggling, and knows it before they say so, which in a proud realm is the only useful time to know it. The Bucket-Warden's book is, by its second decade, the most accurate record of hardship in the district, and it was compiled entirely by counting an object nobody is ashamed to own.

The parish worked out what it had somewhere around the seventh year. There was no meeting. Things arrived at the Dellow door instead — a spare hundredweight of peat, a coat outgrown, a half sack — with no message beyond "you'll know where that wants to go." And he did know. And it went. And the household that received it never learned who had sent it, and the household that sent it never learned who had received it, and the only person in the parish who held both halves was a man in a bucket-handle chain who had been elected as a joke.

They still call it the least office in the parish. They say it with their chins up now, which is a different thing entirely, and the current Warden — the fourth since Nolly — is elected by acclamation in the old way, with the old laughter, and takes it as gravely as a coronation, because everybody in that vestry knows exactly what they are handing over and it is not funny at all.

Nolly Dellow died at sixty-one, of a chest, in the ordinary way. He is on the chapel wall — 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

The office nobody wants is the office nobody watches, and the office nobody watches is the only one left where a person may quietly do the whole job — so if you would change a parish, do not stand for Fen-Reeve. Ask how many buckets it has, and then go and count them.