Anyway, I know we definitely aren’t off to a good start when I find Izz and Fern in there unceremoniously dragging out cardboard boxes full of clutter from the little cloakroom cupboard while Patrick’s legs dangle from a great big hole in the cloakroom ceiling, his T-shirt drenched, sounds of hammering at pipework coming from the dark space.
‘Good news is, it’s confined to the cloakroom,’ Izz tells me as soon as I burst in.
‘What caused it?’ I call up the ladders.
‘Frozen…’ – Patrick strains, his arms aloft, stretching to tighten something – ‘pipe.’ With that, he hands down a length of copper corroded through with green.
‘Looks like it’s been ready to burst for a while,’ I observe expertly.
‘There, that should stop it.’ Patrick makes his way down the ladder, breathing heavily, his hair both wet and dusty. ‘Nobody’s been up there since the place was built. There’s pigeons roosting under the eaves as well. It’s a right mess.’
I should be listening, of course, commiserating with him after his exertions, worrying about the bloody great big hole in the cloakroom ceiling or all the plaster at our feet that the weight of the water brought down, but there’s something about Patrick’s arms streaming with grimy moisture and the way he’s clutching the wrench as he lowers himself back down to ground level that holds my attention far too long.
Luckily, Izz has her common sense switched on and is asking all kinds of sensible questions about the state of the rest of the pipework and whether we need to alert the council, and of course Fern is standing by Izz’s side taking in everything through the lens on her phone.
‘If we tell the council,’ Patrick says, lifting a hand to Fern’s phone and politely lowering it, ‘there’s a good chance they’ll come in and shut us down for Christmas.’
This does the trick of waking me up. ‘Why would they do that?’
‘Well, that bit of pipe you’re holding’s as old as the rest of it. When they reconnected the power last night and the old boiler fired up, the pressure – and no doubt the ice in the system – was too much for it and, crack, we’ve got a leak. The council will probably want to rip it all out.’
‘Yeah, but not this week. Think how long it took them to order Izz’s replacement lollipop; that was months of red tape and budget talks.’
‘That’s true,’ Izz confirms. ‘Nobody could agree which budget it should come out of. I told them if I’d known it was going to cause so much of a fuss I’d have ordered one off Amazon.’
‘You think they’d shut up the hall?’ I ask Patrick.
‘Do you want to risk it?’
I picture Mr Scrimengor and his surveyor mates arriving later this morning with their hard hats and their budgetary restraints and slapping tape across the entire place. Condemned until repair works tendered and carried out. ‘I doubt they’d be willing to wait until after Christmas to declare the place a health and safety nightmare. Maybe we should keep quiet until Christmas Eve when we’re all gingerbreaded out?’
‘Canyou buy lollipops on Amazon?’ Fern throws in, but we three are looking up at the hole and then at one another.
‘Are you able to patch up this hole?’ I ask Patrick.
‘Since it’s just the cloak cupboard, I could. It was only plasterboard, but it’ll take me the best part of the morning, and I’d have to tell Mr Bold why I wasn’t at the school.’
‘We can help,’ I say, hands on hips, looking at all the sopping wet boxes.
Soon Patrick is measuring and cutting, hefting and painting while we sweep up soggy plaster, dry and polish the tiled foyer floor, and rummage through the damp cardboard boxes of accumulated junk that have been shoved inside the cloakroom over the years: mouldy cricket leg pads, decades’ worth of lost and never found scarves and gloves, old newspapers, a broken kettle.
‘I’ll stick it all in the school skip,’ says Patrick helpfully.
‘What’s this?’ Fern is picking painfully slowly through her own sagging cardboard box under the watchful bug eyes of the late King’s portrait. She’s holding up a red plastic disk. ‘There’s loads of them.’
‘Ah!’ Izz is on the move, abandoning her pile of rugby boots furred with age. ‘I know exactly what that is. Treasure!’
Patrick stops in his work and we all crowd round to examine the find.
‘They’re cine reels,’ Izz clarifies, and of course, Fern’s already reaching for her phone to capture the discovery.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going live, just filming,’ she says, seeing my face fall.
Some of the reels are still in their cases and original cardboard wrappers. Others are loose, just the delicate tape in its round red casing.
‘Laurel and Hardy,’ Patrick reads, inspecting each in turn. ‘Charlie Chaplin.’
Now Izz has her hands in the box. ‘We used to come to the hall to watch these.’
