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Thursdays at the Whetstone: The House Rule

The second Thursday in November was the night the back table at the Whetstone filled up. Nobody had arranged it. It was raining, and the café was warm, and people who usually came on other evenings drifted in and found that the regulars had pushed two tables together and that there was room.

Mr Ferreira came early. He had driven buses on the Green for thirty-one years before he retired, and he still arrived everywhere five minutes before he was due, as if a timetable were waiting. He brought a biscuit tin. It had once held shortbread and now held cards, three packs of them, soft at the corners, held together with elastic bands that had gone brittle.

"My grandmother's," he said, setting it on the table as gently as if it were a cake. "And my mother's, and mine. I want to write something down before I forget it, and I want witnesses."

Nana Fives moved the teapot to make room. The Captain, in his cardigan with the missing button, put down his newspaper. Inkling's grandmother, who listened longest of anyone, folded her hands round her cup.

"In our house," said Mr Ferreira, "we play Crazy Eights. You know it? You match the suit or the number on top of the pile, eights are wild, and the first to get rid of all their cards wins. Except that in our house there is one more rule. When you are down to one card, you must knock on the table. Like this." He rapped twice with his knuckles. "If you forget, and somebody notices before your next turn, you draw two."

"That's not in the rules," said the Captain.

"It is in our rules," said Mr Ferreira. "Three generations. My grandmother knocked. My mother knocked. My grandsons knock, and they knock very loudly. But they are the last ones who know it, and they will not remember to teach it, so I want to write it down."

"Then write it down," said the Captain cheerfully. "A rule that has lasted three generations doesn't need defending. Three generations can't be wrong."

Nana Fives looked at him over her glasses. "How would anyone know?" she said.

"Know what?"

"Whether they were wrong," said Nana Fives. "Families keep all sorts of things for three generations. Recipes that are too salty. Doors that stick. My father always put the milk in first and said it was the only way, and he was wrong for sixty years." She tapped the tin. "Old isn't the same as good. It might be both. I'd like to find out."

Mr Ferreira did not seem offended. If anything, he looked interested. "How?" he said.

That was when the woman at the next table leaned over. She was a small, upright person with grey hair cut very short and a cardigan the colour of a pillar box, and she had been pretending to read for some time.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I taught infants for thirty-four years and I can't hear the word rule without putting my hand up. May I?"

They made room. Her name was Marguerite, and she brought her own cup.

"Before you test it," said Marguerite, "say it. In one sentence. As if I had never played cards in my life and had to play from what you tell me, with no questions."

"When you have one card left, you knock," said Mr Ferreira.

"I knock," said Marguerite. "Then what? What if I don't?"

"Ah. Then you draw two."

"When? Straight away? Who decides?"

Mr Ferreira tried again. "When you are down to one card, you knock on the table, and if you forget, you draw two."

"I've forgotten," said Marguerite. "Three turns ago. Nobody noticed. Now someone does. Do I draw two now?"

"No. Only if someone notices before your next turn."

"Then that's part of the rule," said Marguerite kindly, "and it wasn't in your sentence."

It took him four tries. The Captain offered help on the second and was waved away. On the fourth, Mr Ferreira said, slowly, like someone reading out a bus route he had driven ten thousand times and never once said aloud: "When you play your second-to-last card, knock on the table; if you don't, and anyone says so before your next turn, draw two cards."

Marguerite nodded. "I could play that," she said. "Write that one down."

"It is strange," said Mr Ferreira, writing it on the back of a menu. "I have played this all my life. I did not know what it was until I tried to say it."

"Nobody does," said Marguerite. "That's why you teach it. You find out what you knew."

"Now we test it," said Nana Fives.

She had a pencil and a notebook, as she always did. She proposed ten games with the knock and ten without, timed on the café's clock, and she would keep a tally of something else as well. When the Captain asked what, she said, "Laughs," and would not explain.

They played for nearly two hours. The rain came down outside and the windows steamed up. Twice the café owner brought more tea without being asked. Inkling's grandmother played, and so did Marguerite, and the Captain, and Mr Ferreira, and they swapped round so nobody played every game. Somebody's teenager wandered in to collect a parent, was dealt a hand, and stayed.

Without the knock, the games were perfectly good games. Somebody would get down to one card and the others would notice, eventually, and try to stop them, and mostly fail. They took about sixteen minutes each, by Nana Fives's clock. The table laughed, by her tally, three times in the ten games.

With the knock, something changed that nobody had predicted. People got down to their second-to-last card and then, with the card halfway to the pile, froze, and remembered, and knocked, sometimes so late that everyone shouted. Or they forgot, and four people pointed at once. Everybody was watching everybody's hands. The games got faster, because a player down to one card could not hide it, and the others went after them at once. They took about twelve minutes each. And the table laughed, by Nana Fives's careful count, eleven times.

"Twelve minutes instead of sixteen," said Nana Fives at the end, turning the notebook round. "A quarter shorter. And nearly four times the laughing."

"Laughing isn't a measurement," said the Captain.

"It is if you count it," said Nana Fives.

The Captain considered this, and then, as he always did when he was losing, stated the other side better than its owner had. "So the knock does two jobs," he said. "It makes a hidden thing visible, so the game ends sooner. And it gives everyone a reason to watch everyone else, which is where the laughing comes from. It isn't good because it's old. It's good because of what it does at the table. And we only know that because we played it both ways."

"Better than I'd have put it," said Mr Ferreira.

"It's my only talent," said the Captain.

Inkling's grandmother had been quiet for a long time. Now she reached across and took the menu with the rule written on its back.

"Here is what I'd do," she said. "Write the sentence. Under it, write what you found: ten games each way, twelve minutes against sixteen, eleven laughs against three. Then, when your grandsons are grandfathers, they won't keep it because Grandpa did. They'll keep it because it says, right there, why. And if it ever stops working, they'll know what to test."

Mr Ferreira copied it out neatly onto a clean card from the tin. He wrote the sentence, and under it the numbers, and under that the date. Then he put the card in the tin on top of the oldest pack.

The question for your own table

Is your family keeping a rule because it is old, or because it works? You only find out by trying to say it in one sentence, and then playing it both ways.

Something to do

Pick one house rule from a game in your cupboard. Say it in one sentence a stranger could play from. Play five games with it and five without, and count one thing you care about: how long, how close, or how often anyone laughed. Write the rule and the result on a card and keep it in the box.

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