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The Other Side of the Page · The Evening of the Plum Table

The children's book, The Lion on the Lump (ages 6-8), on Spark & Anvil

This is the same evening as "The Lion on the Lump", the eleventh book of "The Day Before". Inkling's grandad was not on the Green.

The plum tree had done what it did every few years, which was to give far too many plums all at once and then sulk for two summers.

Inkling's grandad had picked four buckets on Saturday and four more on Sunday, and the kitchen of the lake house smelled of jam whether or not anyone was making it. On Monday he had set up the old card table at the front gate, with a sign he had painted on the lid of a box: PLUMS, £2 A BAG, 1 KILO. A tin for the money. Ten paper bags, filled at the kitchen table and folded over at the top.

He liked the table. He liked that people stopped. He did not like what had been happening since Tuesday.

They knocked. Not everyone, but most. A woman from the new houses, pleasant enough, with a bag in her hand: "Sorry, would you mind? Only it feels a bit light." A man with a dog. Mrs Hale from the end of the road, who had known him for thirty years and still wanted to see the bag on a scale. So he took them into the kitchen and put their bag on the scale on the windowsill, and it said a kilo, or a little over, and they said thank you and went away happy, and the next one knocked.

None of them was rude. That was the strange part. They were apologetic, every one, as if weighing the bag were a small rudeness they could not help. Mrs Hale had even brought him a slice of her own cake as she went, wrapped in a paper napkin, as though to make up for it. The woman from the new houses had explained, standing on the mat, that she had once bought a bag of apples at a market in town that turned out to be half a bag, and that she had felt such a fool afterwards that she had promised herself never again. He understood that. He had felt a fool himself, more than once, about smaller things than apples.

By Thursday evening he had answered the door eleven times. He had a kettle on the stove that he kept meaning to fill.

Here was the sensible thing, he thought, standing at the kitchen table with ten fresh bags. Tomorrow he would sit at the gate himself, with the kitchen scale beside him on the card table, and weigh every bag in front of every buyer. Nobody would need to knock. They could see with their own eyes that he was honest. It would take all morning, but that was all right. He was retired. He had mornings.

He lifted the scale off the windowsill.

The back door opened, and Inkling came in from the Green.

She came in slowly, the way she always did, looking at the room before she walked into it. She had been out since school with Lan, the baker's girl, and she had the look she sometimes came home with, as though she had been somewhere much further off than the Green and was still on her way back.

She looked at the scale in his hands, and at the bags.

"Why do people want to weigh them?" said Inkling.

"Because—" he said, and stopped. He had been going to say because they don't trust a stranger, and they should trust a neighbour. But the woman from the new houses was not a neighbour yet, not really. And Mrs Hale was a neighbour, and had known him thirty years, and still knocked.

And there was the scale. The scale had read a little heavy for as long as he could remember. Not much. Fifty grams, perhaps. He had always meant to do something about it, and it had always been easier to put an extra plum in the bag. If he sat at the gate tomorrow with this scale, he would be asking people to trust a scale he did not quite trust himself.

He put it down on the table.

Inkling looked at the bags for a while. Then she said, "It's not you they don't trust. It's that they didn't see it weighed."

"Well, yes."

"So they need a scale everybody trusts," said Inkling. "Not ours." She thought. "The shop's."

The corner shop at the top of the lane had a scale on the counter, the flat steel kind, for the loose sweets and the fruit. It had a sticker on the side from the council, renewed every year, with a date on it and a small crest. He had seen it a hundred times and never thought about it.

"We take the bags up," said Inkling. "She weighs them once. She writes on them." She was already getting her shoes back on.

He thought of several objections, the main one being that he had known the shopkeeper for twenty years and had never once asked her to weigh his plums. He did not say it. He put the ten bags in a box and followed his granddaughter up the lane.

The shopkeeper, who was closing up, laughed when they explained, and then did it properly. She put each bag on her flat steel scale. Each read a kilo, give or take a few grams. Two were a plum short, and Inkling fixed that from the spares. Then the shopkeeper took the pen from behind her ear and wrote on every label, in her own quick hand: 1 kg, her initials, the date.

"Ten bags," she said. "Ten kilos. You'll be cleaned out by lunch."

In the morning, he sat on the bench by the gate with his tea and watched. The woman from the new houses came, and picked up a bag, and turned it over, and read the label. She put two pounds in the tin and walked off. The man with the dog did the same. Mrs Hale read the label twice, said "Well," and took two bags.

Nobody knocked.

That evening he found Inkling on the jetty, watching the water.

"Where did you get that idea from?" he asked. "The shop's scale."

"A girl with a lion," said Inkling, and did not explain.

He did not ask which girl. He had learned that some of the things Inkling brought back from the Green came with their stories and some came without, and that the ones without did not grow one if you dug.

The tree, which had no idea any of this had happened, was still dropping plums onto the grass, one every few minutes, with a soft sound like someone knocking very politely.

He went back to the gate and took down his painted sign, and under 1 KILO he added, in smaller letters: WEIGHED AT THE SHOP.

The question for your own table

When someone in your house says "trust me", what would help them more: being trusted, or a way to show it that doesn't depend on you?

Something to do

Next time you sell, swap or lend something by weight or measure, ask someone everybody trusts to check it once, and write their mark on it.

Shared under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. More stories