The cellar
The keeper's root cellar: one stone room under a farmhouse where a few hundred potatoes of many kinds sleep through one long winter.
It is a keeper's cellar. An old seed keeper chose every kind that lies here, which is why a Scottish immigrant, a crooked Norwegian landrace and a modern red can share one room, and why each bin has a label in pencil: the label is how a variety knows its name.
Dark, except at the hatch and the window over the Chitting Tray. Cool, about 4 to 10 °C. Damp, but never wet. That is how real potatoes keep through a winter, and the only air a potato person can live in.
From the door inwards
The Hatch
The trapdoor at the top of the stair: the only way in, the only light, holy and dangerous.
The Bins
Wooden slatted bins along the dry wall, one per kind, each with a label in the keeper's pencil.
The Empty Bin
A clean, empty bin at the end of the row, labelled in the keeper's hand for the Andean varieties who are not here.
The Sacks
Hessian sacks slumped on the floor: crowded, warm in the middle, and where rot starts.
The Shelf of Jars
A plank shelf of pickles and preserves above the sacks: glassy, sealed, unchanging neighbours.
The Curing Corner
The warm, very damp corner by the chimney wall where the cut and bruised heal a new skin.
The Drain
The low wet corner where water collects: cold, slippery, and where free water invites disease.
The Mouse Walls
The gaps in the old mortar where mice come and go: smugglers, traders, raiders.
The Chitting Tray
Shallow trays under the small window where the chosen are set out, eyes up, in late winter.
Outside, and never drawn from inside
Upstairs
The house above the hatch, and the kitchen in it. Never shown.
The Heap
Outside, where the rotten go back to the soil. Shown only as a direction the Rot Wardens carry someone in.
The Field
Where everyone was dug from and where the chosen will be planted. A memory and a promise; chapter two.
How the world works
- A person is one tuber: the real body of their variety, its length, bend, skin and eyes. Nothing is stuck on.
- After the dig everyone sleeps. Each variety wakes at its own time, as real dormancy runs from about 30 to 150 days, and waking is the end of childhood.
- Sprouts are restlessness and age. Old age is softening and wrinkling, and the long keepers are the elders.
- Nobody eats. A body is a stored summer, and it needs dark, cool, damp air.
- Light turns the skin green and bitter. Frost kills. Rot spreads through a sack. Warmth wakes you too early. Cold makes you sweet.
- Humans are weather: a lamp at the hatch, a hand, a draught, a label in pencil. No human face is ever shown.
- It is always this winter. Nobody's age is counted in years, only in winters remembered.
- In spring the keeper chooses who is set out on the Chitting Tray to be planted. The story sides with the crooked and the culled, never with the grading.
Every rule has a reason in real botany or real storage practice, with sources in the canon files.
Loose company
The cellar folk fall into a few loose groups, each with a real reason in how potatoes behave.
The Light-touched
The greened: those who slept too near the hatch and came back bitter, green-skinned and strange.
The Rot Wardens
The ones who find the soft and the wet before rot spreads, and carry them to the Heap. Necessary, feared, tender.
The Sleepers
Long-dormancy kinds who prize stillness, patience and keeping well.
The Sprouters
Short-dormancy kinds who wake early, grow ideas and lean toward the light.