the monopole center

Nobody knows. We want to be clear about that, early, so the rest of the pamphlet doesn't seem to be building toward an answer. There isn't one. There is, instead, a small collection of explanations the village has grown fond of, the way a kitchen grows fond of a chipped jug.

The retired schoolmistress says the hum is the pole "thinking out loud," and that if you sat with it long enough you'd learn its one thought, and it would be a very simple one. The blacksmith says it's resonance — the iron in the soil all leaning the same way at once — and that the day it stops humming is the day to worry. The children say it's a giant bee, asleep, underground, and that you mustn't stamp.

What we can tell you is small and useful. The hum is loudest about an arm's length from the pole and fades to nothing by the second hedgerow. It is slightly louder in frost and slightly quieter in rain. It has never once changed key. A tuning-fork held near it shivers in sympathy, which the blacksmith finds satisfying and the schoolmistress finds beside the point.

If you visit and you do not hear it, give it a week, or borrow a visitor.

The fence is not to keep the pole in. The pole has shown no interest in leaving, and we doubt a knee-high paling would detain it if it did. The fence is so that the green stays a green — so children play around the pole rather than on it, so the grass keeps its ring, so a stranger arriving at dusk knows, without being told, that here is something the village has decided to look after.

It went up over a single Saturday. Everyone brought a stake. The blacksmith forged the gate-latch in the shape of a small horseshoe, which is either a joke about magnets or simply the shape his hands make a latch in; he won't say. The schoolmistress lettered the sign. It reads, in full: the pole. please don't. Below that, smaller: thank you.

People do, of course, touch it. We don't really mind. It's warm, and there's something steadying about a warm iron pole on a grey day; half the village has stood with a hand on it at one time or another, thinking. The fence isn't a wall. It's a way of saying gently without anyone having to be the person who says it.

Once a year, on the first warm Saturday, we re-paint the sign and tighten the latch and the children re-tie the ribbons that somehow appear on the fence every winter. Nobody admits to the ribbons. We've stopped asking.

You may come and look at the pole whenever there is light to look by. There is no gate-keeper, no ticket, no rope across a path. The green is the village's, and the village's idea of a public thing is that it should be available the way a hill is available — quietly, without arrangement, and best in the early morning.

A few customs, more habit than rule: walk the ring of worn grass once, sun-wise, before you stop — everyone does, nobody knows why. Keep your voice to about the volume of the hum. If you've brought a compass, you may set it on the fence-rail and watch its needle decide it lives here now; please take the compass with you when you go. If you've a question, the box by the gate is for questions. If you've an answer, the box is also, optimistically, for those.

There is no fee, but there is a tradition of leaving the green slightly better than you found it — a piece of litter pocketed, a stake nudged upright, a ribbon re-tied. The pole, as far as anyone can tell, is indifferent to all of this. The village is not.

People bring things. They always have. A surveyor came with a theodolite and left, three days later, a slightly better friend of the schoolmistress and no wiser. A man from a city brought a meter that beeped, until it didn't, and now sits on the bench as a paperweight, beeping in nobody's memory. A child brought a horseshoe magnet from a toy chest and asked, very seriously, whether the pole would like a smaller friend.

So we keep a workbench. Not to solve the pole — we are fairly sure, by now, that the pole is not a problem and therefore has no solution — but to give the bringing-of-things somewhere to land. Each item gets set down, looked at, and, if it's interesting, drawn into the parish ledger in the schoolmistress's hand. The drawings are better than the instruments. They at least admit what they don't know.

If you'd like to bring something, you are welcome to. We ask only that you take it away again, or, if you genuinely want it to stay, that you tell us what it was for, so the schoolmistress can write that down too. A bench full of unexplained objects is a fine thing. A bench full of unlabelled ones is just clutter, and clutter is the one thing this village has agreed it can do without.

A green needs a centre. Some villages put a war memorial there, or a horse-trough, or an oak someone's grandmother is supposed to have planted. We have a pole that hums. It is, in fairness, a better centre than most — it doesn't take sides, it doesn't need watering, and on a foggy morning it gives you something to walk toward.

So the green has organised itself around it the way a garden organises around a sundial. The cricket, such as it is, is played carefully to one side. The midsummer thing — bunting, a fiddle, too much cake — happens in a ring at a respectful distance, and at some point in the evening somebody always, always leans against the pole and goes quiet for a minute, and everybody pretends not to notice, because that is rather what the pole is for.

Children, who are sensible about these things, treat the pole as a fixed point in a game whose rules change weekly: base, dragon, lighthouse, the mast of a ship. It has been all of these by teatime and back to being a pole by supper. The schoolmistress says this is the correct relationship to have with a mystery — to use it, gently, for whatever you need that afternoon, and to leave it where it stands.

If you visit on the right Saturday you'll find the whole village out there with paint and ribbons and far too much cake. You are welcome to a slice. Mind the wet sign.

By the gate there is a box. It was a bird-box once; it has a small slot, a sloping lid, and a faint smell of old wood and older rain. People put questions in it. The schoolmistress reads them on Sundays, answers what can be answered in the back pages of the parish ledger, and pins the best of the unanswerable ones to the inside of the lid, where they have, over the years, become a sort of poem nobody wrote on purpose.

If you have a question, the box is there for it. If you have an answer — a real one, the kind that would settle the argument the schoolmistress and the blacksmith have been not-quite-having for years — the box is there for that too, though we'd be a little sad to lose the argument. Mostly, what goes in the box and what comes out of it is the same thing, slightly worn smoother: the suspicion that some things are at the centre of a green precisely because they cannot be moved, or named, or fully understood, and that this is not a failure of the green.