A Roof Before the Rain

A work-scene tale of Sogmarsh: being a wedding, a failed roof, three thatchers who lay a course three different ways, and one stolen dry hour. The maintenance economy, in a single roof. Companion to THE WORKING WORLD.

Hodge and Lettie were to be married at noon — in their own cottage, under their own roof, before the Loaf-priest and the whole reed-country — and in the small hours of that very morning the roof, which was old reed and had been old reed since Hodge's grandfather's day, gave up over the hearth, and let the night's rain in onto the very stone the two of them were to stand upon and be wed.

You cannot move a wedding in Sogmarsh. The priest is booked, the Loaf is baked, the guests are already poling and trudging in from three parishes, and the day is the day. Nor can you be wed in the wet, under a hole, with the rain coming down on your own hearth — not because it is unlucky, though it is, but because a couple who cannot keep the rain off their own heads on their wedding morning have made a start the reed-country will remember for forty years and mention at every christening after.

So the roof had to be re-reeded before noon. The sky — which the whole fen can read — said rain by mid-afternoon at the very latest. And the roofers of the reed-country were the Rennies; and there were three of them; and they had not agreed on how to lay a single course of reed since before the eldest of them was born.

They came at first light and went up on the ridge and looked at the roof, and did not lay one bundle, and began instead to argue.

"Butt down," said Gaffer Renny. "It's always been butt down. Butt down sheds the wet, and my father laid it butt down, and his father before—"

"Butt down holds the damp in the thatch, Gaffer," said Sim, who had learned the new way off a man from the coast. "Everyone past the Slough lays it tip down now."

"Everyone past the Slough," said Gaffer, "has a wet loft and a short life."

"You're both of you wrong," said Wat, "and if you'd let me dress the ridge my way—"

"We'll not have your way, Wat," said the other two, together, which was the only thing the three of them agreed on all morning.

And below, at the foot of the ladder, in her wedding dress, stood Lettie — watching three men argue on the bones of her roof with the sky greying behind them and not one course laid; and the first guests already arriving to find the bride so employed; and the reed itself sorted on the wet grass into its grades — roof reed, basket reed, and worthless stuffing reed — and a fresh argument breaking out over whether Wat had truly brought good roof-reed or fobbed them off with basket-reed and pocketed the difference, which is the argument the reed-country has with a reed-grader every day of the world.

The morning went. The guests gathered under the eaves out of the coming wet. The Loaf-priest came, and waited, and was given tea. The sky went from grey to slate. And still the three Rennies argued on the ridge, immovable, as men of a trade are immovable — while the wedding bore down on them from one side and the weather from the other, and the dry hour between shrank to nothing.

It was not the priest that ended it, nor the bride's face, nor the shrinking hour. It was a single fat drop of rain, which fell out of the slate sky and landed, precisely, on the back of Gaffer Renny's neck.

And the argument that no man could end ended in that one cold drop. The three Rennies looked up, and looked at each other, and said not one further word — and fell to it. And they laid that roof, all three, in the last stolen hour: Gaffer's butt-down at the eaves, Sim's tip-down up the long of the slope, Wat's own third way dressing the ridge — three men who could not agree on a single principle, thatching one roof together at a dead run because the rain was coming and the girl was in her dress; and it went up, course on course, far faster than any one of them could have laid it alone, and it was done — the last bundle pegged, the ridge dressed and combed — in the very moment the rain came down at last, in earnest, on a new roof that kept out every drop.

So Hodge and Lettie were wed at noon under the new reed, dry, with the rain drumming a benediction on it and the whole reed-country packed in below, and the three Rennies at the back with their tools still in their hands and the mud to their thighs, each of them privately and immovably certain that his own third of the roof was the only third that would not leak.

And here is the whole of it — the whole of Sogmarsh, in one roof. Where the three methods meet — where Gaffer's butt-down runs into Sim's tip-down, and both run up into Wat's ridge — that roof will always, a little, leak. Not much. A drip in a hard blow, into a pail Lettie will learn to set out without thinking, the way Mercy Crimp sets hers a hundred miles off. And every year Hodge will go up and patch the seam; and every year the three Rennies will come and argue whose third is failing; and it will be all three thirds and none of them; and the patching and the arguing will go on exactly as long as the roof does — which is to say as long as the marriage, which will be long.

Because a roof in Sogmarsh is never finished, and neither is a marriage, and neither is the realm. You do not get to lay it once and have done. You lay it; and it lets the wet in a little where the joins are; and you patch it, and you argue, and you keep each other dry one more year. That is the work. That is the whole of the work. And under it, if the reed is good and the company is better, you may yet be wed, and fed, and dry, and short of nothing at all at the turn.