The Charm

A Willerby Story

The Willerby village school closed at the turn of the last century, so the village children must travel to either Parkway or All Saints in Beckworth.

By ancient custom, Willerby is not part of any commonly recognised county so there is no school bus, which is a source of considerable inconvenience and annoyance to the families living here.

Perhaps the worst part is the parking at drop-off and pick-up time.

Both Parkway and All Saints are in residential estates where every house has a drive with a “no parking at any time” sign on the gate.

By two-thirty and sometimes earlier, for up to a quarter of a mile all the spaces between the drives are filled with cars full of waiting mums and dads reading magazines or books, or most likely scrolling their phones.

Later than that and everybody knows it not worth bothering to try for a space and better to hover and try to swoop in late and grab a spot from someone better organised who’s managed to successfully round up and corral their offspring.

This is Darwinian.

Horns blare and furious looks exchanged by people who’ve known each other years.

It’s a bad time for everyone except for one lucky parent from Willerby – the current holder of The Charm – who will always find one of the closest spaces to their child’s school gate free with enough space around it to make backing in smooth and stress free.

This lucky family is much envied.

Every ten years or so, when an entire brood is out of primary and off to the High, the Charm is tombolled off at the end of the annual Willerby harvest supper and auction, where all the excess produce of the village gardens and allotments is sold to support the church and Birmingham Children’s Hospital, which has saved the life of more than one village child.

One year the tombola came faster than expected because Shanti – the holder of The Charm – got a big promotion and the whole Patel family were selling up and emigrating to Toronto where it would be of no use to them.

Sally hoped more than anyone to be the next holder of it.

Sammy – her seven-year-old - found the morning routine tough and was hard to organise.

He’d start to get dressed but then be distracted by the cat and arrive to brush his teeth, giggling, in just his pants, one sock and his coat. He’d do his best with handwriting practice but then forget what the paper was for and use it to try and make an aeroplane. He’d resolve to make his own breakfast but then become fascinated by the sound of popping cereal and use the food dyes to turn his bowl into an inedible witch’s brew and have to start all over again.

Invariably, regardless of how carefully things were organised the night before, the last minutes before leaving the house were chaotic, tense and sometimes tearful when tempers were lost and angry words exchanged.

It didn’t seem fair – Sally thought as she watched the Patels swoop in last minute in their BMW – that they with their perfectly brushed hair and designer satchels – had won The Charm when their lives seemed charmed enough as it was.

But there was no point dwelling on that and not time to anyway, not when there were PE kits and dropped hats to gather, endless forms to fill in, errant wellies to stuff back into the forest school bag and the sudden flashes of guilt at all the pages unread and spellings to manage.

Dan often reminded her it wasn’t fair on anyone to expect things to be as easy for them as it was for others and while Sally got that, of course, she also felt it dangerous not to do everything they could to keep up.

There was no easy mode world for Sammy, she reminded Dan, just the same one that everyone lived in together.

Still – she thought, the Thursday before the auction – looking through the window of the Patel’s car at the unremarkable feather, bone and twine bundle tied to their rearview mirror, the Charm felt like a break they’d surely get more benefit from than any of the other primary age Willerby households.

But there were eight eligible families which didn’t make for great odds

But hope was free.

…

The auction was on Saturday evening in the village hall that had once been the school, kitty-corner from the playground on the Green and within sight of the Green Man, in which many of the participants had spent the afternoon limbering up.

The village tables were arranged cabaret style in front of a long trestle on which the produce was piled high; carrier bags of plums, apples, damsons and pears, punnets of blackberries and exotic variegated red, black and white tomatoes. Crates of potatoes, onions and leeks were stacked beneath and around the tabletop and behind it in smaller packages were the village’s most prized items – honey that somehow actually did cure hayfever, chillis Bill grew in his greenhouse that over years he’d bred so hot they could cause interdimensional hallucinations, and the strange but delicious Phoenix-Fruit that grows nowhere else but Bal’s allotment.

Very occasionally there were even more exciting items; one year a young, blue-hooded dwarf dropped by and casually donated a fist sized pure gold nugget worth tens of thousands of pounds. Instead of being auctioned off it was passed around for everyone to hold and take photos with before being sold for the communal good of the village through a discrete specialist in Birmingham’s jewellery quarter.

And, stacked in between all of it wherever there was space, were the courgettes and marrows that everyone grew to monstrous sizes, but nobody wanted; by village tradition these were handed out as compulsory “bonuses” with the more desirable items.

Sammy was wild with excitement and had to be stopped from bidding on everything that David – the village auctioneer – held up.

“For goodness’ sake, Sammy, don’t spend all your money in the first five minutes,” Dan said to him, “and no squashes – we can’t even get through the ones we’ve grown ourselves!”

“But I want the big one!” Sammy protested, jumping up and down and waving his arms. “I want to take it to school for show-and-tell.”

David lifted his gravel but before bringing it down, met Dan’s eye and raised his eyebrow.

Dan sighed, then half-smiled and nodded. “OK, Sammy but no more than this one – and remember this’ll go on for an hour and the most exciting stuff always goes at the end.”

“Sold to Sammy,” called David, bringing the gravel down with a satisfying bang, “for two pounds. Next up – a jar of Jamal’s sour plum preserve, which comes with..,” he paused for the inevitable groan, “not one, not two, but three communal courgettes.”

Dan and Sally made only a the most cursory attempts to seriously restrain Sammy who’s joy in the delightful ceremony of it all swept away their objections like hot water through snow.

“We can have a day making pickles and use them as Christmas presents,” Dan said, as their table filled up with bags of sour cooking apples, unripe pears and the squashes they’d insisted they wouldn’t buy.

But there had to be a limit somewhere and half-an-hour before the end Dan cut him off.

“Sammy’s reached his limit,” he called out across the room, to good-natured booing, “and is to be ignored from now on.”

As the auction meandered its way to its end, Sally flashed a look behind her at the Patel’s table and in her happiness felt the cut of envy and hated herself for it; on their table were three jars of strawberry jam and a bag of potatoes. Arjan and Shanti were talking quietly together while Kira, their eldest, did her homework. Eight-year-old Dilip was reading The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.

It’d be easier if they weren’t nice – she thought, making herself feel even worse – but they were.

Dan caught her looking and put his hand on her arm. “There are different sorts of families,” he said quietly, “and ours is perfect.”

Sally looked at him and smiled. “I know,” she said, “but it isn’t the easiest, is it?”

And then it was at last time for the evening’s biggest event.

“Most of you know the rules,” said David, placing the old wooden drum with its winding handle on the trestle table that was now clear aside from a few yellowing and sad looking courgettes that nobody except the orchard pigs would take. “One ticket each, write your name on it, don’t show nobody else, and drop it in. I’d tell you not to cheat but if you’re willing to do that over a magic spell nobody knows the origins of, you’re a fool who deserves whatever curse you get.”

“I just know we’re going to win, mummy!” Sammy said, bouncing up and down as Sally wrote her name on the pink slip with a Sharpie. “I just know it!”

Dan put his hands gently on his son’s shoulders. “There isn’t a very good chance of that,” he said, “I know you find this hard, but we probably won’t win and if we don’t, try not to get too upset, OK?”

“But we will win!”

Sally sighed as she dropped her ticket into the tombola, as sure as she could be that the evening would finish in disappointed tears.

“Arjan, Shanti, you need to put yours in before we roll,” called David when the other seven families had all been up and gone back to their seats. “Not yourselves, obviously, but anyone else who’s gone for it.”

“Oh!” Shanti said, “I didn’t know that.”

Sally sighed again. The Patel’s were pretty much best friends with the Jacksons from the bottom end of the village, who still had two children at All Saints, so that was a sure bet, lengthening the odds still further.

“All set,” David said, beginning to spin the drum, “can I get a drum-roll?”

Much of the crowd were now merry-to-tipsy and more than ready to play along with the theatre of it all – the hall echoed to the sound of palms drumming on tables and knees and an instinctive “whoaaa,” rising in pitch until David stopped turning the handle and held up his hand for silence.

He reached in the drum and pulled out a ticket.

“And the winner – for as long as they have children at a Beckworth school – is..”

Sally closed her eyes and held her breath.

“I aint going to pretend I’m not pleased,” David said with a huge grin as he unfolded the slip of paper. “The winners are Dan, Sally and Sammy.”

The roar of approval from the village drowned out even Sammy who was suddenly standing on his chair, jumping wildly up and down and shouting “I told you, I told you, I told you,” at his mum and dad, who first hugged tightly, then kissed and then danced an actual jig right there on the herringbone floorboards.

…

The party at the end of the auction went on late and, David left the clearing up until the next day.

After the washing up, recycling, sweeping and mopping was all done he went to put the tombola away in the lockable cupboard until whenever it would be needed again. Just as he was about to close the door, he remembered the tickets inside and fetched it back out.

He opened it and shook it gently over the bin.

One of them had come unfurled.

It said Sally on it.

David reached into the bin, pulled out another, unfolded it and read that it too said Sally.

And so did the third.

And the fourth.

All of them did except the last, and that said Sammy on it, in Shanti’s perfect boarding-school cursive.

He went to the nearest chair and sat down, grinning. “Well, I’ll be.” He said to himself. “Well done, Willerby. Well done.”

Warmed by the slow flames of early autumn, he walked home thinking as he went of all the different kinds of magic and which ones were most important of all.