The Kite That Belongs to the Whole Hill

At the top of Kestrel Hill, where the path gives up and the grass takes over, there is a wooden box about the size of a bread bin, fixed to a post. It has a sloping lid to keep off the rain, and no lock. Inside, wound neatly on its reel, lives a red kite with a yellow tail.

Nobody is sure who put it there. The oldest account belongs to a man who walks his spaniel up the hill every morning. He says the box appeared one April, nine years ago, with a card pinned inside the lid. The card is still there, gone soft at the corners. It says: Fly me. Wind me back properly. Thank you.

And people do. Children fly it after school, with a grown-up holding the reel. A woman who runs past on Sundays stops halfway round and flies it for exactly five minutes, which she says is the only part of the week when she looks up. Two brothers who argue all the way up the hill do not argue while the kite is in the air, because one of them has to hold the string and the other has to let go.

The kite has had adventures. It once spent a night in a hawthorn tree and was fetched down the next morning by a tall teenager with a long stick, who told nobody. It has been mended four times: a new spar cut from a garden cane, a patch of blue cloth on one corner, and two new tails. The second tail is knitted. It flies badly and is much admired. Each repair was done by somebody different, and none of them signed their work.

One autumn the string wore through, and the kite sailed away over the valley. For eleven days the box stood empty. In that time a surprising number of people climbed the hill, lifted the lid, and stood there for a moment looking in. A few left notes. One of them said only: Oh.

On the twelfth day the kite was back in its box, a little muddy, on a brand new line. A farmer two miles away had found it draped over a gate. He knew it at once, because he had flown it himself one windy afternoon when he was supposed to be counting sheep, and he drove it back up the hill on his quad bike before breakfast.

The real idea behind it

The hill and its kite are made up, but the kind of thing they stand for is real, and you have probably walked past one. A shelf of swapped books in an old phone box. A table of eggs at a farm gate with a tin for the money. A box of spare dog balls by the entrance to a park. None of them has a lock or a guard, and most of them carry on quietly for years.

They last because something that plainly belongs to everybody gives everybody a small job. You put the book back, you leave the coins, you wind the string properly, and in doing so you become one of the people the thing belongs to. A kite is an especially good choice, because it needs only two things: a wind, and somebody willing to wind it in again. The hill provides the first. The neighbours, it turns out, are happy to take care of the second.