BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
The village sat in the valley. The land was rich and good. The people worked hard, planting and harvesting, building and mending. Life was not easy, but it was steady, and it made sense.
One day, a group of strangers came. They wore fine clothes and had clean hands. They said they were architects. They had a plan to build something great. It would be a tower, taller than anything anyone had seen. “This tower will be for all of you,” they said. “It will be a place of fairness and justice. It will make your village the envy of the world.”
The people liked the sound of it. They gave their money, their wood, their stone. They gave their labour. They gave their trust.
The architects ordered them to build. At first, it seemed good. The base was wide and solid. But then the architects said the tower needed to grow faster. They cut corners. The walls leaned. The stairs twisted in strange ways. When the people asked questions, the architects smiled. “It’s a new kind of tower,” they said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
The people worked harder. They patched cracks and hauled bricks and hammered nails. But the cracks kept coming, and the tower leaned more. Some said it was dangerous, but others said they had to believe in it. “The tower will be great someday,” they said:
“We just need to trust the architects.”
The architects lived in the rooms at the top. They drank fine wine and looked down at the valley. When the cracks widened, they said, “It’s part of the plan. The tower isn’t finished yet. You have to be patient.”
One day, a boy walked by. He was small, with sunburned cheeks and bare feet. He looked up at the tower and then at the people working on it.
“Why do you keep building?” he asked.
“It’s for the future,” someone said.
“But it keeps falling,” the boy said. “How will it stand?”
The people stopped working. They looked at the boy. They looked at the tower. The wind blew through the cracks in the walls, and the tower groaned like an old man in his sleep.
The architects came down from their rooms. They were angry. “This boy doesn’t understand the vision,” they said. “He doesn’t see the beauty of what we’re building.”
But the people kept looking at the tower. It leaned to one side. The base was crumbling. A part of the wall had fallen away. Funds were drying up. They realised they were holding the tower up, all of it, with their hands and their backs and their hope. They didn’t know what would happen if they stopped. But now they were wondering why they had started.
The boy looked at the tower one last time. Then he looked at the architects and said, “It’s not a tower if it only stands when we hold it up.”
And with that, he walked away. To spread the bad news far and wide. Another generation educated about such architects.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine and the author of Dear Townies, Arcadia and Truth among other books including ‘Conservatism’ which publishes later this month.