Rehearsal week opened on Monday morning beneath the Old Willow, in conditions your correspondent, who has stood at this willow on no fewer than six mornings this season, will call its first attempt at being dressed for an occasion. The lower branches had been arranged, in a manner the Cultural Subcommittee called preliminary, to clear the line of sight to the small floating leaf on which Item the fourth is to be delivered. The south bank approach had been roped off. The rope, in keeping with the available materials, was a length of reeds twisted by a party the Clerk would not name. A small notice had been pinned to the trunk at about one wing’s height.
The notice, in the Clerk’s hand, reserved the south bank approach from the late afternoon of Sunday the twenty-first for audience assembly, under the order made at the twenty-third of May’s special sitting. Any waterfowl wanting an early position should consult the Clerk in advance, and not, as the notice put it, “merely arrive.” A second notice, pinned beside the first in the Cultural Subcommittee’s hand, named the four performers. Hettie, Mabel, the smallest gosling, the eldest gosling. It set a first joint rehearsal of all four for Tuesday afternoon at the customary hour. Whether that is the rehearsal at which the running order gets finally settled, the notice did not say, and the Cultural Subcommittee, pressed, would not be drawn.
The Clerk of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee was at the willow all morning, an absence from the reeds your correspondent noted with the care it deserved. He had with him a small bundle of paper, a second-hand timepiece of disputed provenance, and a wax pencil. Asked whether he had formally taken up the timekeeping post, he said he had not, in any sense binding on his first duty to the Reed-Bed Subcommittee, but that he had begun, strictly informally, to consider how the items would be timed. The timepiece, he noted, was not yet under his control.
The willow had the look of a venue put in order without quite being tidied. The older drakes of the south bank arrived in their usual numbers at the third honk to watch. They called it “right enough,” and, more carefully, “we shall see by Friday.” One of them remarked, in a tone the correspondent took for approval, that the willow had not been this attended since the spring recital. It is a comparison the willow does not, of course, dispute. The reeds along the south bank were drying. The light, for the season and the hour, was already encouraging, though this paper reserves its more considered judgement for the dispatch of the eighteenth.
Hettie’s mother was not at the willow. The Cultural Subcommittee’s acting chair confirmed her arrangements were settled and that Hettie would be there for Tuesday’s rehearsal at the appointed hour. Mabel was not at the willow either. The Clerk said she had been “in receipt of all relevant correspondence” and was understood to be in good order. Neither performer, the Cultural Subcommittee was at pains to add, is expected at the willow until the rehearsal proper convenes.
The week, then, begins at the venue’s end and not the performers’. By Tuesday, on the Cultural Subcommittee’s schedule, the willow will hear the programme entire for the first time. Whether it will sound, on first hearing, like what it is to become by Sunday evening is not a thing the rehearsal itself is best placed to answer. This paper has watched a spring recital and knows the difference a week makes.
The willow stands. The week is under way. More to follow, presumably.