May Day was kept at the pond on Friday, under the Old Willow, under the Cultural Subcommittee, and on the whole with decorum. An estimated forty waterfowl attended. The long-resident frog came up specially. On the edge sat two dragonflies and one coot, and a number of older readers took the coot for the coot of the Channel Sprint and arranged their seating to suit. He was not that coot. The Clerk has since confirmed it.
The programme opened, as it must, with the lily of the valley. The sprigs had been gathered earlier in the week off the southern bank by a deputation of goslings, working under Hettie’s mother. They were exchanged with the proper words. Then the Clerk, keeper of the customary observances, reminded everyone what a sprig is and is not. It is the formal acknowledgment of a small good will owed by the giver. It is not, he said, with some feeling, a transferable instrument of credit redeemable in bread.
Music followed, from the Spring Recital ensemble, last heard in these pages in mid-April. Hettie had composed an arrangement of three notes over the previous week and agreed, after negotiation through her mother, to open with it. Three notes. The warmth that met them is not, by this paper’s records, a warmth any opening piece here has drawn before. A later item was meant as a duet for two honkers in close harmony. It came out as a duet for two honkers in close-but-not-strict harmony, the second honker having entered a beat behind the first. The occasion absorbed this.
The afternoon address fell, by long custom, to the Warden of the Sluice, who had been told far enough ahead to prepare one. It ran to four sentences. Two were about water levels. Two were about the season’s appropriate disposition. They were received, this paper notes with affection, in the spirit offered, after which the Clerk thanked the Warden in a vote of thanks longer than the address.
Then the only disturbance of the day. The dabchicks of the west pier, who had hovered unusually close to the company since morning, announced, in a voice the Clerk called “louder than was strictly necessary,” that no part of the proceedings had unsettled them, and that they wished this formally noted. With the Clerk’s permission, it was formally noted. The day went on.
At the customary hour the company recited the season’s farewell and dispersed, carrying their sprigs and what small remembrances they had kept. By evening the pond had settled into a repose the season had earned. A single soft honk went up at some distance, in observance of the day, and meaning nothing past that. The willow held the last of the light over an empty bank.