Thursday

Somebody put the bucket under the leak in the night and it was full before anyone was up, and it went on in the same place all day and most of the next, and by the end of it that was the only thing you could hear on that side of the room. It was emptied four times. Nobody moved the bucket.

Julian was out early looking at the water coming down the path and then he had them digging, and the trench they cut runs from the top of the path down past the stilts and out to the rocks, and it took most of the morning and it works. He stood and looked at it a long time after. Somebody said it should have been dug in the spring.

The rain came on the tin and did not stop.

They were all in by the middle of the day. The porch has the bench along it and the step and that is all there is. Once people are sat there they do not get up. I did not get up either.

Tess came round with tea in the enamel mugs for the ones who had been out in it and went back out twice more with the thermos. The girl in the burgundy raised her mug at the camera. She has done that before.

The dog slept on the rug and was the only thing dry in the room.

The pot catches now, from wherever it was stood too near the heat, and it is scrubbed after every use, and the water for it has to be brought up from the well because what is in the butt is no good for that. The one who does the cooking has never scrubbed it.

Somebody said the chickens would be in under the stilts and they were.

It is a small porch and there was nowhere else, and by the second afternoon nobody was saying much, and two of them had been on the bench since the morning and stayed on it, and I had my things at that end and left them where they were.

Late on the second day it went off into mist. The children were putting leaves into the trench and following them down, and one of them called out every time one went through, and that went on a long while after the rest had stopped watching.

They went down for the wood that had come in. Most of it is stacked at the end of the path now. Two of the better pieces are still down there because they were too wet to carry up.

The bucket is still under the leak.