The Pie Race
Ollie had trained for the Pie Race all year. Every evening after supper he ran up the stairs and down the stairs, forty times, timing himself on the kitchen clock. By spring he had worn a groove in the middle of the stair carpet. Dad said the stairs were turning into a slide. Mom said she could get up to bed in the dark now just by keeping her feet in the groove.
The Pie Race was run every midsummer, from the sheep village at the bottom of Long Hill to the very top. At the top of Long Hill lived Big Agnes. She was a giant, and a kind one, and once a year she baked a pie the size of a pond in an oven built into the side of the hill. The pie had a lid with a little door in it, so that people could climb in for seconds. Everybody in the village got a slice. But the first one to the top won Big Agnes’s silver thimble, which was big enough to have a bath in.
Ollie wanted that thimble more than he had ever wanted anything, including a dog.
“This is my year,” he said at breakfast on race day.
“It might be mine,” said Grandma. “I can feel it in my knees.”
Grandma had entered the Pie Race every year for sixty years, and she had never finished higher than forty-third. She did not run. She sat in her wheelbarrow and knitted, and she was pushed up the hill by whichever grandchild was handy. She also kept a spare knitting needle stuck through her bun, in case of emergencies. Nobody knew what a knitting emergency was. Grandma said you would know one when you saw it.
Last year the handy grandchild had been Ollie. This year he stood at the very front of the starting line, where he was not handy at all.
“Quite right,” said Grandma, settling into her barrow with her wool. “Run your own race. Somebody will turn up.”
Somebody did. Three small cousins turned up, and shared the two handles between them, and argued about it.
At the top of the hill, Big Agnes stood up out of the grass in her apron and waved an oven glove the size of a sail. The race had begun.
Ollie went off like a hare.
The first muddle was the stile at the bottom of Mr. Fogg’s field. Everybody reached it at once, and everybody tried to climb it at once, and it wobbled like a loose tooth. Ollie went over it in one hop. It was only four stairs high, and he had done four stairs ten thousand times.
“Shortcut!” shouted Mr. Fogg, the farmer. He ran off sideways along the wall and vanished.
The second muddle was Mr. Fogg’s sheep. There were two hundred of them, and they had decided to stand in the middle of the path, as sheep do. The runners went this way, and the sheep went that way, and then everybody swapped. Ollie did not argue with sheep. He went round the whole flock at a run and came out in front. And there, at the very back of everyone, was Mr. Fogg, red in the face, with his cap on backwards.
“Shortcut!” shouted Mr. Fogg, and vanished over a hedge.
The third muddle was the wind. Halfway up, a great gust came over the top of Long Hill and took every hat on the hill. Sun hats and straw hats and the baker’s floury cap and the schoolteacher’s best hat with the cherries on it went sailing off in all directions, and half the runners ran after them. Ollie had no hat. He had thought of that in March.
When the gust had gone by, Ollie was in front by a long way. Up at the top he could see Big Agnes open her oven door in the hillside and lift out the pie with both hands. It steamed like a lake on a cold morning. Beside her on the grass, the silver thimble shone.
Then he looked back, only to see how far ahead he was.
Halfway down the hill sat Grandma, in her wheelbarrow, all on her own. The small cousins had gone after their hats. The barrow was down on one corner, and its wheel was rolling away down Long Hill, bouncing, getting smaller. Grandma was still knitting.
Ollie thought about the thimble for exactly as long as it takes to say thimble. Then he turned round and ran back down.
He ran past Grandma (“Hello, dear,” said Grandma), and past the sheep, and he caught the wheel just before it reached the stile. Then he ran all the way back up with it, which is much harder. It turned out that this was what the stairs had been for.
“I said somebody would turn up,” said Grandma.
The wheel was fine. The pin that held it on was gone.
“Now this,” said Grandma, “is a knitting emergency.” She pulled the spare needle out of her bun and gave it to him.
Ollie pushed the needle through the wheel and through the barrow, where the pin had been. It fitted perfectly. Grandma did not drop a stitch.
“Right,” said Grandma. “Engine on.”
So Ollie pushed, up the steepest part of Long Hill, while Grandma gave directions. “Left a bit. Mind the rabbit hole. Lovely. More left. Not that much left. Faster, dear, I can hear the baker.”
She could. The runners had caught their hats and were coming up behind in a puffing crowd. Out of a ditch at the very back came Mr. Fogg. “Shortcut!” he shouted, and vanished again.
Ollie pushed until his legs went wobbly. The needles clicked. The finish line was a ribbon, held low across the grass between Big Agnes’s finger and thumb. The baker drew level. The schoolteacher drew level. Ollie pushed one last time.
Just short of the ribbon, the wheelbarrow hit a tussock and stopped dead.
Grandma did not. She sailed out of the front of the barrow with her knitting held high, landed softly on the grass on the far side of the ribbon, and came to rest a full nose ahead of the baker.
For a moment nobody said anything at all.
“Well!” said Big Agnes. “That is the finest finish I have ever seen.”
Grandma sat up, laughing. Her bun had come down and there was grass in it. She held up her knitting, and it was a red scarf, and it was finished.
“Sixty years,” said Grandma. “I won.”
She gave the scarf to Big Agnes, and Big Agnes tied it round her wrist. It went round exactly once, with a tassel left over at each end.
“It fits,” said Big Agnes, amazed. “Nothing ever fits me.”
Big Agnes set the silver thimble down in the grass, and Grandma climbed into it like a queen getting into a bath. Then she said, “I couldn’t have done it without my engine,” and she pulled Ollie in beside her for the photograph. In the photograph they are both laughing, and Grandma still has grass in her hair.
Then Big Agnes lifted the lid of the pie, and the whole village had a slice, and most of the village went in through the little door for seconds. Big Agnes handed back everybody’s hats from her apron pocket, where she had caught them. The three small cousins ate their pie sitting inside the pie.
Mr. Fogg arrived last, from a direction nobody had thought possible, with burrs all over his trousers. “Shortcut,” he said, and sat down. Big Agnes gave him the biggest slice, because he had come the furthest.
Ollie came forty-fourth, as it turned out. He had sat down on the tussock to laugh, and he could not get up again, and forty-two runners and one sheep went past him while he did. The sheep did not count. Grandma said forty-fourth was a very respectable place, and she should know.
When the pie was eaten, Big Agnes lifted Grandma and Ollie onto her shoulder, thimble and all, and carried them home. It was the best seat on the hill. From up there Ollie could see the stile and the sheep and the place where the wheel came off. Far below, he could see Mr. Fogg setting off home by a shortcut. Mr. Fogg got home on Tuesday.
At the garden gate, Big Agnes set them down very gently.
“The thimble can live in your garden,” Grandma said to Ollie. “It’s a bath for whichever grandchild is handy.”
That night Ollie was the handy one. He had his bath in a giant’s silver thimble under the first stars over Long Hill. Then he went up to bed with his feet in the groove, slowly for once, and fell asleep the moment he lay down: the proudest forty-fourth the Pie Race had ever had.