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Mingli Books · Years 7–10

The Lamp of a Hundred Houses

Every house brings one jug of oil. Nobody lies, nobody is caught, and on the fourth night of winter the light goes out.

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The lamp on the Skerry burns oil, and it burns a great deal of it, and there is no money in that town for a keeper's salary and the oil as well.

So the arrangement is this, and it is older than anybody living. There are a hundred houses in the town. At the start of winter, each house carries one jug of oil up the headland and tips it into the cistern at the foot of the tower.

A hundred jugs. One winter. It has always worked.

Nobody checks the jugs.

It is worth understanding why not, because the town is not careless. Once oil is in the cistern it is simply oil; there is no way to look at it and say which house sent which part of it. You would have to stand over each person as they poured, and standing over your neighbours while they do a thing they have volunteered to do is a way of telling them you think they are thieves.

So they pour it in on their own, whenever they can get up the hill, all through the first week.

Now. Somewhere in that town, in a kitchen, somebody is looking at a jug.

Oil is expensive. Water is at the pump in the yard and costs nothing.

And here is the thought, and I want to set it down exactly, because it is not a wicked thought and it is not a stupid one:

One jug of water in a hundred jugs of oil will not stop the lamp burning.

That is true. It is not an excuse; it is arithmetic, and you can check it. One part water in ninety-nine parts oil burns almost exactly as well as a hundred parts oil. Nobody would ever know, and — this is the part that matters — nobody would ever be harmed. The light would not so much as flicker.

The person in that kitchen is not deciding to put the ships on the rocks. They are deciding to save the price of a jug of oil in exchange for nothing at all.

Put like that, it is not really a decision. It is a free jug of oil.

There are a hundred kitchens.

I do not know how many people had that thought. I do not think anybody knows, and it is the one fact that would settle everything, and it is the one fact that the arrangement was built to make unknowable.

Everybody who had it was right.

Every single one of them, working alone in their own kitchen, did the sum correctly and got the correct answer. That is what I want you to hold on to. There is no point in this story where somebody is bad at arithmetic.

The lamp was lit on the first of the month and it burned for eighteen days, a little low towards the end, in a way that two people mentioned to each other and neither of them mentioned to anybody else.

On the nineteenth night it went out.

I am not going to describe the morning. You can do that yourself and you will do it better, and anything I put here would be me deciding how much you should feel.

There was timber on the beach for a week.

Afterwards there was a meeting, and the meeting could not get anywhere, and it is worth seeing why.

Nobody had lied. Nobody had been asked a question, so nobody had answered one falsely. Nobody had broken a rule, because the rule was bring a jug, and every house had brought a jug.

And nobody could be pointed at, because every single person in that hall could say — truthfully — that their own jug could not have made the difference.

They were right about that as well.

What they changed was this, and it is smaller than you would expect.

The pouring is now done on one day, in the afternoon, with everybody there. You bring your jug up the hill and you tip it in while the town watches, and then you stand with the others and watch the next one.

It takes most of a day and it is extremely boring.

Nobody in that town became a better person. They only stopped doing it on their own.

Afterwards

For whoever is reading alongside

This story has an unusual shape for a moral tale: it has no villain, and its ending is not somebody learning a lesson. It is a change to a procedure. That is deliberate, and it is the argument.

A word worth stealing

The hundredth jug — the completely correct observation that your own contribution is too small to change the outcome. It is not a lie and it is not an excuse. It is true every time it is said, and it is true for everybody saying it.

Once you have a name for it you will start hearing it: about voting, about litter, about a group assignment, about water in a drought, about carbon. In each case, check whether the person saying it is wrong. Usually they are not.

Two ways to read it, and they disagree

  • It is about honesty. Each person knew what the jug was for. Calling it arithmetic does not change what they were doing, and the fact that nobody could prove it is exactly what made it tempting.
  • It is about the arrangement. A system that only works if a hundred people out of a hundred behave well is not a system, it is a hope. The town was owed a better design, and in the end it got one.

Questions with no answer key

  1. The narrator refuses to describe the morning after. Explain what that refusal does. Would the story be stronger or weaker with the description in it?
  2. Find the sentence where the arithmetic is stated. Is it true? Check it. Now explain how a hundred true statements can add up to a shipwreck.
  3. Two people noticed the lamp burning low and each mentioned it only to the other. Why do you think the story includes that detail?
  4. The town's fix does not make anybody more honest. Discuss whether that makes it a good fix or a poor one.
  5. Describe a real arrangement you are part of that depends on nobody checking.

Something to make

Design a different fix. You may not add punishments and you may not make anybody kinder — you may only change how the pouring happens. Write it in under a hundred words, then name the way somebody could get around yours.

One text, four years

This story reads whole at Year 7 — nothing in it needs a device a Year 7 has not met. What changes up the years is the job, not the text. The four descriptors below are quoted from the Australian Curriculum v9.

  1. Year 7 AC9E7LE05
    how characters, settings and events combine to make meaningThere is no villain in this story, so something else has to do a villain’s work. Explain how the arrangement itself — a hundred kitchens and one cistern — does it.
  2. Year 8 AC9E8LE03
    how language and images position readers to respondThe lamp is the only colour in the book, and on the seventh picture the colour leaves with it. Explain what that plate does that the sentence on the same page does not.
  3. Year 9 AC9E9LE05
    allegory, symbolism and literary devicesThe jug is not really a jug. Work out what is being poured into what, in the argument the story is making, and name three real arrangements it fits.
  4. Year 10 AC9E10LE04
    evaluate the social, moral or ethical positions representedThe fix at the end makes nobody more honest; it only makes the pouring public. Evaluate whether that is a good solution or an admission of defeat.

Year 8’s descriptor is the one this collection was built for: its own elaboration reads “discussing how a complex picture book combines words and images to position readers to respond”. Every story here is a complex picture book, and the picture is never a decoration of the sentence beside it.

The analytical ethical work belongs under Ethical Understanding, Level 5 (Years 7–8) and Level 6 (Years 9–10) rather than under the English Literature strand, which has no moral-position descriptor before Year 10.