The Dunstable Dawn Chorus, Featuring One Squeegee

My first customer in Dunstable asked whether I could make my bucket sound more like a bucket.

I looked down at it, then back at him. “It’s been practising for years, Lionel. I’m not sure there’s much room for improvement.”

He stood beside his front gate wearing enormous headphones, with a wooden spoon in one hand and a small recorder in the other. Before I could ask, he tapped my bucket gently and listened with the serious expression of a man assessing a church bell.

“Too hollow,” he said.

“Well, it hasn’t had breakfast.”

That earned me a smile, but only a small one. Usually Lionel Bramble had a joke ready before I’d pulled the hose out. That morning, something was troubling him.

I run KP Window Cleaning, and knowing a round means knowing more than where the awkward side gates are. I knew Lionel’s sister, Mavis, had moved to New Zealand six months earlier to be near her daughter. I also knew he still put two mugs out sometimes before remembering.

He showed me a message on his phone.

“I love it here,” Mavis had written, “but isn’t it daft? I miss the sound of your gate.”

So Lionel had decided to send her a recording of an ordinary morning at home.

Unfortunately, ordinary mornings were proving surprisingly difficult to organise.

The sparrows had stopped squabbling the instant he pressed record. His neighbour, Fenella, had agreed to wheel her recycling bin along the path, then become so conscious of being recorded that she’d lifted it instead. And Lionel’s gate, which had squealed faithfully through twelve winters, now opened in perfect silence.

“I oiled it on Sunday,” he confessed. “Trying to be useful.”

Then the wind got up.

He played me his best attempt. Through the headphones came a mighty rushing noise, followed by Lionel saying, very faintly, “Oh, for goodness’ sake.”

“I’ve spent all morning on it,” he said. “She’ll be going to bed soon.”

I started on his front windows while he sat on the doorstep, turning the recorder over in his hands. My brush swished across the glass. Water pattered onto the sill. Behind me, the hose reel gave its familiar little rattle.

Lionel looked up.

“She used to know you’d arrived without looking outside.”

“Well,” I said, “perhaps we’ve been making this too much like a concert.”

We put the recorder just inside his open porch, sheltered from the wind, and stopped trying to persuade the street to perform.

I carried on cleaning. Fenella came back for the lid she’d forgotten and called across to ask whether Lionel had finally become a radio station. He laughed properly at that. A sparrow landed on the fence and delivered a remarkably cross opinion. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked twice, then apparently decided that was sufficient.

For the downstairs pane beneath the porch, I used my hand tools. As I drew the squeegee across the last corner, it gave a small, indignant squeak.

Lionel pointed at it with both hands.

“There! That’ll do for the gate!”

By the time I’d packed away, Mavis was on a video call. Lionel played her our morning, holding the recorder rather too close to the phone.

She listened without speaking. Then she laughed.

“Fenella’s still forgetting that lid, then.”

Lionel settled onto the doorstep, smiling now, and turned the phone so she could see the clean windows and the patch of sunlight crossing his path.

I left them chatting while I wound in the last of the hose. Just before I shut the van door, Mavis called out that the windows looked lovely.

“And tell that bucket it sounded very handsome.”