A Step a Day to the Third Star

Once there was a small crooked town with a bakery on every corner. Because it was so crooked, it had a great many corners.

In that town lived a tidy little man called Mr. Amos Plum, who could not bear to keep anything that was not his. If he found a button in the road, it went on the lamppost with a note until somebody came for it.

Once he found a pencil on a bench with B.T. scratched into the end. He knocked on doors all afternoon until he found Barnaby Tull, who had chewed it to a stub and left it there on purpose. Amos gave it back to him anyway. Barnaby Tull said thank you, because what else can you say?

Over the town was a sky where the stars kept house. On a clear night you could see them shaking out their rugs and hanging their washing on the moonbeams. They were always busy, and now and then they dropped things. A thimble had once come down on the church roof.

One morning Amos went out into his garden and found a teaspoon lying in the cabbages.

It was a small silver teaspoon with a star on the handle, and it was warm. The sun was hardly up, so it was not warm from the sun. It was warm the way a spoon is warm when it has just come out of a cup of tea.

“Well,” said Amos, turning it over. “This isn’t mine.”

That night he took a kitchen chair out to the garden and looked up. There was the Third Star from the Left, small and cheerful, sitting at a little tea table with a teacup. As Amos watched, the star dropped in a lump of sugar, stirred the tea with one finger, said something that sounded like “Ow,” and sucked the finger.

“There you are,” said Amos.

He knew at once what he wanted, and it was not complicated. He wanted to give the teaspoon back. The only trouble was that the star was a very long way up.

* * *

In the morning he went round the corner to Mrs. Crumb’s bakery.

“I’d like a step, please,” he said. “Bread, baked flat. Strong enough to stand on.”

Mrs. Crumb looked at him over a tray of buns. “What for?”

Amos showed her the teaspoon and told her.

“You’re daft, Amos Plum,” said Mrs. Crumb.

“I expect so,” said Amos. “Could it be wholemeal? I think wholemeal would be sturdier.”

She baked it anyway. Every baker in that town knew that a bread step takes exactly one day to set hard. Stand on it any sooner and it is only a loaf, and a man standing on a loaf is just a man with crumbs in his socks. Mrs. Crumb had one oven big enough for a step, so it was one step a day and not a crumb faster. She pressed the date into each one in currants. The first one said the third of April.

Next morning Amos carried the step home, set it on his garden wall and climbed up on to it. He stood with his hand on the pocket where the teaspoon was.

“One step today,” he said. Then he climbed down and had his breakfast.

The morning after, he set the second step on top of the first, climbed up, and said it again. “One step today.”

You may wonder how a bread staircase stands up in the sky with nothing underneath it. Nobody in that town ever wondered, so we needn’t either.

The town shook its heads.

“He’ll never get there,” said the baker on Crooked Lane.

“He’ll be a hundred,” said the baker on Bent Street.

“He’ll get crumbs everywhere,” said the baker on the corner of the corner, which in that town was a real place.

Amos only touched his pocket. The teaspoon was still warm. It was warm when the frost came that winter, and warm the winter after, and it stayed warm all the years he carried it, which were a great many.

* * *

The years went by one step at a time. The staircase went up past the chimneys, and past the church spire, and past the place where the swallows turn round and go home. Every morning Amos carried the new step to the top, and every morning the top was a little further away.

And without anybody quite deciding to, the town began to use the stairs.

Mrs. Crumb was first. She found that the air on step forty was just right for cooling pies, and no dog in the world could reach it. So every afternoon there was a row of pies on step forty, and Mrs. Crumb would climb up and say, to nobody in particular, “Well. It’s handy. I’ll give him that.”

Then the children found step three hundred, which was just high enough to see the whole crooked town at once, all its roofs leaning together like people telling secrets. They had their picnics there on Saturdays.

Then the kite fliers found the steps above that, where the wind always blew and a kite went up the moment you let it go.

Then the other bakers wanted their bread in the sky too. The baker on Crooked Lane baked a rye step. The baker on Bent Street baked a seeded one. The baker on the corner of the corner baked a fruit loaf step with sugar on top, which the children were not allowed to lick. Soon every bakery in town baked a step a day.

Now each morning the new steps came up the staircase hand to hand, past the pies, past the picnics, past the kites, to Amos at the top. He laid Mrs. Crumb’s first and said, “One step today.” Then he laid all the others, because they had set hard and it would have been rude not to.

So the staircase grew faster, and Amos grew older. His beard grew so long and white that he tucked it into his belt so as not to tread on it. In time the way down took longer than an evening, so he stopped going home at night. He slept on the top step under a blanket, very comfortably, among the near stars. The town sent his supper up instead, hand to hand: a hot pie with a cloth over it, and a note from Mrs. Crumb that said EAT IT WHILE IT’S WARM, YOU DAFT MAN.

He always did.

* * *

One evening, forty years after the teaspoon came down in the cabbages, the last step came up the stairs in Mrs. Crumb’s own hands. She was old now too, and she had climbed all the way to see. She gave Amos the step and sat down hard on the one below.

Amos laid it and climbed up. There was only one step left to take, and it was a doorstep, with a mat that said WIPE YOUR FEET in silver letters.

Amos wiped his feet. He took the teaspoon out of his pocket.

“One step today,” he said, and stepped off the stair.

The door opened before he could knock. The Third Star from the Left was about the size of a hatbox and very bright. At the sight of the teaspoon, the Third Star from the Left gave a shout so happy that people down in the town had to shade their eyes.

“My spoon!” said the Third Star from the Left. “I dropped it shaking out the tablecloth! Where was it?”

“In my cabbages,” said Amos. “I’m sorry it took so long.”

“Forty years,” said the star. “Forty years of stirring my tea with my finger! You can’t stir tea with a finger. You get once round and then it’s too hot. All the sugar sits at the bottom, the tea tastes of nothing, and the last mouthful is like syrup.”

The star sat Amos down at the tea table and put the kettle on. Then the star made him a cup with sugar in it and stirred it with the teaspoon, round and round, slowly and properly, more times than Amos could count. It was the best-stirred cup of tea in the whole sky. Next came a cup for Mrs. Crumb, and last of all a cup for the star, stirred just the same. At the first sip, the star’s eyes shut.

“Oh,” said the star. “I’d quite forgotten what it’s meant to taste like.”

“I said you were daft,” said Mrs. Crumb, holding her cup in both hands.

“I expect I was,” said Amos.

Then he looked down. The whole town was sitting on the stairs below him. There were the bakers from every corner, and the kite fliers with their kites, and the children on step three hundred, who were the grandchildren of the first children. There were Mrs. Crumb’s pies, still cooling on step forty. And all the way down at the bottom, on the garden wall, the first step still said the third of April in currants. Every one of them who had a hand was waving.

Amos waved back, carefully, so as not to spill his tea.

And that is why, in that crooked town, they still say: a step a day goes higher than anyone thinks, and somebody will always climb it with you.

Then Amos drank his tea to the very last drop, and there was no sugar left at the bottom at all.

The end.