The Day Harpenden Needed a Smaller Bucket

My first customer in Harpenden answered the door wearing a post office on her head.

Only a small one, knitted in red wool, but it still took me a moment to decide where to look.

‘Don’t ask,’ she said. ‘There’s a pin between my teeth.’

I stood politely with a bucket in each hand and a third hooked over my wrist. Behind her, a knitted policeman dangled from the lampshade. It looked as though I’d arrived halfway through a very soft emergency.

Mrs Fenella Pargeter was preparing a miniature village for her neighbours to admire that afternoon. Every building had been knitted by hand: a bakery with woolly buns, a library, six cottages and a duck pond made from an old blue beret.

The post office, she explained once she’d removed the pin, was balanced on her head because every other surface was occupied.

‘Would you mind popping it beside the butcher’s?’

I did, very carefully. I’m still learning plenty about window cleaning, but I felt qualified to deliver a post office.

Outside, two folding tables stood beneath a garden parasol. I helped carry the village out before getting on with her downstairs windows. Mrs Pargeter arranged tiny residents along the pavements, moving one chap three times because he apparently wouldn’t queue properly.

Then the first raindrop landed on my nose.

‘Only a passing shower,’ she said.

The second landed in the duck pond. Within seconds, the shower had become the sort of rain that seems personally annoyed with gardens.

We rushed towards the tables. Water had collected in the sagging parasol, directly above the village square. As Mrs Pargeter reached for the library, one edge of the fabric dipped.

I didn’t think. For once, I simply had the right number of buckets.

I shoved my spare underneath just as a whole parasol’s worth of water poured down. The bucket caught most of it. My left shoe caught the rest.

We carried the buildings indoors, but Mrs Pargeter’s shoulders had dropped. Her hallway was crowded with trays, and there wasn’t room for visitors to walk round them.

‘They were looking forward to it,’ she said. ‘So was I, really. It’s been rather quiet here lately.’

Through the kitchen window, I noticed the little greenhouse at the bottom of her garden. It held three empty pots, a folding chair and several years’ worth of greenish glass.

‘Could we put the village in there?’ I asked. ‘If we make the windows worth looking through?’

She looked out, then back at me.

‘A village in a glass house,’ she said. ‘Well, the residents can hardly complain about the weather.’

With her permission, I cleared the empty pots and carefully cleaned the sound panes, inside and out. She fetched old boards for shelves. Together we arranged the village facing the glass, with the blue beret pond in pride of place.

By the time the neighbours arrived, the rain had eased to a drizzle. They wandered round the greenhouse under umbrellas, crouching to peer through the sparkling panes. A little girl called Tansy spotted that the knitted policeman had no trousers.

Mrs Pargeter laughed so hard she had to sit down.

Soon she was accepting offers of knitted allotments, a miniature bus shelter and, urgently, police trousers. Someone brought her tea. Nobody seemed in a hurry to leave.

As I packed away, she tucked a woolly bun into my spare bucket.

‘For your help,’ she said.

I walked back to the van with one wet sock, three buckets and a bakery item I couldn’t eat. Best-equipped apprentice in Harpenden, if you asked me.