It is commonly understood that a boy and a girl went up the hill to fetch a pale of water.
It has never been properly understood that this routine occurred regularly during the morning, giving them a supply of water for the day. If you think you know this story, you don’t know the half of it. What is not generally known is that whenever this occurs their doppelgängers creep down the hill late at night and gather up, as only doppelgängers can, any remaining water that was not used during the day and return it to the diminishing supply of water in the well. The fact of the matter being that the only person aware of this situation was concerned about dwindling water supply. Once again, if you thought the girl who was particularly fond of curds and whey just sat around on her tuffet eating, you’d be wrong about that too.
For a youngster, she was pretty smart, despite her never being able to conquer her morbid fear of spiders and doppelgängers; especially her own. She knew that if the village well ever ran dry, her favourite delicacy would dry up with it. Although one might think that knocking up a bowl of curds and whey was just a matter of stirring milk and vinegar together over a heat source, you’d be wrong. If nothing else, without water, how would you wash the bowl out? Anyway, it came about that on this particular morning, the one most people know about, the occasion when the boy took a tumble, things were about to change. Whatever made these children think that wrapping vinegar and brown paper around his head would fix things up was never made clear.
However, when the doctor, the one that nearly drowned in a puddle in Gloucester, visited the following day, he indicated otherwise. The boy’s dizzy spells and poor sense of balance had the doctor prescribe medication along with the advice that he should rest up entirely for a month. Now, considering the fact that just carrying the heavy metal bucket up to the top of the hill was more than one person alone could manage easily, bringing it back down full of water definitely required two people.
This is where the plan dreamt up by the smart kid that sat on a tuffet thinking a lot, began to take shape. Only she knew that the boys fall was not brought about by clumsiness alone. On that day, she stood behind a tree somewhere just below the crest of the hill holding a peashooter. This being a tube through which dried peas are blown. At the critical moment, as the boy passed, a rapid yet unseen movement by the girl caused a hard pellet to hit the side of the lad’s neck with a sharp sting, causing him to jump, let go of his side of the bucket’s handle and take a headlong dive all the way down to the bottom of the hill.
Having accomplished this, she called in on the two children as though she was merely visiting the sick. Her ulterior motive being to offer them her limited services for fetching water, during the boy’s absence from duties. Her efforts, she explained, would be severely curtailed by a medical condition that she was normally reluctant to talk about.
She confided in them and explaibned that she suffered from a condition known as myositis, a rare disease that weakens the muscles. She went on to describe how she would only be able to make the journey up the hill and back every other day. This would enable her to recover each time. All this was poppycock, of course. Despite this deception, the other girl said she was very grateful for the offer and gave her a glass of water to show her appreciation. It was in this way that the new routing began, thus halving the amount of water being collected.
It would seem that the tuffet girl had determined, by what means it is hard to say, that despite delays in the supply of materials and a current skill shortage, this reduction by way of a more frugal use of water, should take them through to the point when a plentiful supply of water was piped to the village, provided by the desalination plant currently being built.
