The Village Fete

The fete has been held in the field behind the churchyard since anyone can remember, always on the second Saturday in July. Maureen Stack has run the cake stall for twenty-two of those years. She knows that ninety scones are enough and that a hundred and twenty are not too many.

The committee meets three times before the day. In April they decide who does what, in June they worry, and in July they meet in the marquee while it is being pitched and argue about where the raffle should go. This year the meeting took forty minutes longer than usual.

The reason was Tomas Vella. He had moved into the old bakery in February, and in June he wrote to the committee to ask whether he could bring his coffee van. He offered to give a quarter of his takings to the church roof, which the committee had not expected.

Maureen said nothing during the discussion, which everybody noticed. Afterwards she told Ruth Amankwah, who had made the tea, that she had no objection at all. "People can drink what they like," she said. "I've never sold coffee. I've sold tea, and I've sold it out of an urn."

On the Saturday the van was parked at the top of the field, near the gate, where the ground is firm. By eleven there was a queue of nine people at it. By half past eleven Maureen had counted the queue twice and had sold four slices of lemon cake.

Her granddaughter Nell, who is fifteen and helps every year because she is paid in cake, said the obvious thing. "Nobody walks down here, Gran. They stop at the top and they go home." Maureen looked at the trestle tables and at the long empty grass between them and the gate.

At one o'clock it began to rain. It was not the light rain that had been forecast; it was the sort that turns a field into mud in under ten minutes. The raffle tickets went soft. Two of the smaller stalls were packed away before anybody could be asked to help.

The coffee van has a roof, but no room underneath it. Tomas watched his queue disappear and then he did the only sensible thing: he unhooked his machine, carried it down the field in the rain, and asked Maureen whether there was any space in the marquee.

"There's the end of the second table," Maureen said. "You'll need the socket by the pole, and you'll have to share it with the urn." Tomas said that was fine. It was not fine; the urn tripped the socket twice in the first hour, and both times Nell reset it.

By two the marquee was full of wet people who had nowhere else to go. They bought coffee because it was there, and then they bought cake because the cake was next to the coffee. Maureen sold the last of the scones at twenty past three.

She ran out of change at half past three. Tomas passed her his float without being asked, a bag of pound coins, and said he would count it afterwards. He didn't count it afterwards. Neither of them mentioned it again, and the church roof got its quarter anyway.

The rain stopped at four, which is when the sun always comes out at Nether Oakley. The tables were carried back to the village hall by six men and Nell, and the mud in the gateway was so deep that the last trestle table had to be passed over the wall.

In September the committee met to plan next year. Somebody asked where the coffee van should be pitched. Maureen said, before anyone else could speak, that it should be at the end of the second table, where the socket is, and that she would bring a longer extension lead.