The Weaver Who Worked at Night

• 3 minute read
• Ages 5-10
• Bedtime Stories

There was a weaver who worked at night because the days were too hot and too noisy.

His loom was in a room off the courtyard, and from about nine in the evening until two or three in the morning, the whole lane could hear it: the shuttle going across, the frame coming down, the shuttle going back.

It was not loud. It was just constant, and everybody on that lane had grown up with it.

The sound

Children in three houses fell asleep to it and did not know they were doing so.

It has a rhythm. Not a fast one. A shuttle across, a beat, the frame down, a beat, the shuttle back. If you listen to it properly it is almost exactly the speed of somebody breathing slowly, which is not a coincidence, because a man doing a physical thing for five hours settles into the pace he can sustain.

When he stopped for a rest, which he did twice a night, people woke up slightly and did not know why.

The cloth

He made one particular kind of cloth and he had made it his whole life.

It took him about eleven days to do a length of it and he had done, by his own reckoning, somewhere over a thousand of them.

Nobody in that lane owned any. It was expensive cloth and it went to shops in the city, and the people who lived twenty feet from where it was made had never seen a finished piece.

He did not mind this at all. He said once, to a neighbour, that a thing does not have to end up near you for you to have been the one who made it.

Winter

In winter he lit a small brazier in the room, and the light of it came out through the shutters in thin lines across the courtyard.

And the sound went on the same as ever, all through the cold nights, with the lane asleep around it.

The lane

He worked until he was seventy-nine.

When he stopped, the whole lane found the first few nights very difficult, and several people said so to each other, and were surprised to find that everybody else had noticed too.

They had all been going to sleep to it for years without ever once thinking about it.

And that is the strange part, which is that the most important thing about the sound of that loom was not the cloth at all. It was that it went on, every night, in exactly the same way, for people who never knew they were listening.