The Keeper. Part 1. An Invitation

It was the summer holidays. School was out. Arthur and his family had packed up their things at the end of July and had moved from their home in the outskirts of London to their grandmother’s little cottage in the Lake District. Built by his great-great-great-grandfather over a hundred years ago, it was situated on the side of a steep, sloping hill and surrounded by a garden so chock-full of apple trees and fruit bushes that there was always something ripe and ready to be picked. It was, without doubt, the holiday that the family most looked forward to each year. And ever since he could remember, Arthur had spent the majority of his summers there.

The time, as usual, had flown by. Those four weeks which had seemed to stretch out before him, full of the promise of exciting adventures, had suddenly turned into one, and the number of adventures: precisely zero. But then, what had he really been expecting? Nothing ever happened at the cottage, and that was OK—it was still way better than being back in the city.

Then, one day towards the end of August, quite unexpectedly, something did happen. Arthur, oblivious to the fact that it was about to, had stayed in bed that morning playing games on his phone as usual, until the rumblings in his stomach had made it impossible to ignore them any longer. Utterly famished, he’d gotten up and ventured into the kitchen to find a large pot of porridge perched on the stove by the window. Still warm, a search for the whereabouts of the strawberry jam had revealed that his aunt had once again attempted to hide it all in the back of a cupboard. And realising that the situation called for him to be extra crafty about it, he poked his head around the door to check that she wasn’t about to walk in and catch him red handed—quite literally in this case—and sneakily helped himself to a large dollop or three. With the jam safely hidden under a layer of mush, he stole outside into the garden to eat it.

One interesting but highly regrettable fact about the summer holidays was that the older he got, the less relaxing they seemed to become. This, he reasoned, could be entirely explained by the lists of chores, tasks, to-do lists (whatever you want to call them), which now appeared every morning like clockwork. And, if that wasn’t bad enough in itself, they were becoming longer and more tedious every year. Clean this… do that… change something else. Most of them, completely unreasonable. After all, what was the point in making your bed or tidying up your things when you were only going to need to sleep in it or use them again? Resistance, however, was useless, and that morning had been no exception.