What happens in the video
White sheets hang across a sunny courtyard. Beside a wicker laundry basket, a woman watches a brown dog named Pip lower his head. A wooden peg lies on the paving nearby.
“Again, Pip? Where are you getting those?”
Pip turns, walks behind a hanging sheet and comes back with a small object in his mouth. The woman bends to look. “Is that…?” Pip barks. She reaches up and lifts the sheet to see what’s behind it. The camera cuts before we see what she discovers.
Continuation:
Behind the sheet sat the little boy from next door, cross-legged on the paving. In front of him stood half a wooden fort. The walls were made of washing pegs. One tower was missing most of its roof.
“He keeps taking my soldiers,” the boy said.
The woman looked at the fort, then at the nearly empty peg bag hanging from her washing line. “And where did your army enlist, Alfie?”
He pointed up.
Pip set his latest prize in the basket and sat down, waiting. Only then did the woman understand. Every time she dropped a peg, she’d trained him to bring it back. Here was an entire afternoon’s worth of pegs lying about at dog height. As far as Pip was concerned, she’d had a spectacularly clumsy morning.
Alfie explained that his grandad was coming home that evening after several weeks away. They used to build forts together. He wanted to have one ready when Grandad arrived, but he’d used up his own pegs before he got to the drawbridge.
One sheet sagged low enough to brush the ground.
“Right,” she said. “First we rescue my clean washing. Then we see about your bridge.”
They followed Pip’s route across the courtyard. Three pegs were in the basket, two lay beneath it, and one had landed neatly inside her shoe. With the sheets pinned up again, she fetched a bag of old pegs from the kitchen drawer. Some had weak springs. A few had lost one wooden half. For a fort, they were perfect.
Pip made two more attempts to dismantle the east wall before Alfie thought of giving him an official job. He laid a trail of spare pegs leading away from the fort. Pip collected them while construction continued undisturbed.
That evening, Grandad came through the garden gate. Alfie lowered the drawbridge. Pip promptly carried it off.
For a moment Alfie looked ready to cry. Then Grandad got down on his knees, picked up a tiny wooden soldier and called across the gap, “Anybody know when the next ferry leaves?”
Alfie fetched a lid from a jam jar. The soldier crossed by boat. Pip brought the bridge back, expecting thanks, and received them.
The following morning the woman found one peg in the laundry basket with a paper flag tied to it. In Alfie’s handwriting, the flag read For Pip, who works here.
