Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Mill End ·
My Shop Door at Six
The door of an ironmongery has closed at six o'clock to the minute for decades, the staff can prove they were elsewhere, and the lock is oiled on schedule whether anyone is near it or not.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Stanley Petrie, ironmonger"
My shop is the ironmongery on the Mill End corner, three floors and a cellar, and beside the till hangs the card log I have hung there since I took the lease in 1961. The log has one rule written along its top in my own ink: door — shut — 18.00. One square a day. The square has been filled every trading day since 1961, at 18.00, and I have never once seen it being filled.
I want the order of facts right, because ironmongers are believed to exaggerate and I do not. Trading stops at quarter to six. By ten to six the staff have gone — Mr Dagley signs out at the tool library across the forecourt, which keeps a book, and Miss Kelsey takes the 5.52 bus, whose tickets she sensibly keeps against exactly such questions, and I myself go across to the cafe with the day's takings under my coat and a black coffee in front of me by six, where the cafe's own bill head is my receipt. That was not always so. In my father-in-law's time the shop was manned to the last minute. But in the year we lost the high tide wharf, the older man stopped waiting at the door until six, one evening, and found it already shut behind him, and after three such evenings he sat down and wrote the log rule along the top of the card and the staff rota has bent itself around the door ever since. The door at Mill End closes at six, and nobody closes it.
The evidence for nobody is the dull kind, which is the kind I prefer. Anybody you ask can show where they were: the tool library book, the bus ticket stubs, the cafe bill. Twice I have kept the dentist waiting past my own appointment to stand across the forecourt with my watch out, and twice the watch went from 17.59 to 18.00 with the doorway standing open on a lit shop, and at 18.04, walking back with my coffee, the door was shut, the banister-nosed bell dumb, and the square at 18.00 filled in a pencil hand that is nobody's on the staff and came out of my own rack, where the pencils never leave.
The lock itself behaves like a parishioner. The properties office oils the locks of Mill End quarterly off a schedule pinned in their office since 1954, our door the third line of the sheet, and the round has never missed — not in the war days by their telling, not in the wet year, not once. The oiler, a civil man named Mr Preest, initials the sheet every quarter at our line, and he told me over the till, the one time he lingered, that he has never yet had to knock: the door is always standing open for him at the appointed hour, nine in the morning, quarter day or not. So the oil is laid on on schedule whether anyone trades or not, and whatever closes at six does not sulk about being serviced.
I have asked the street, as far as a street may be asked. The cafe keeps no watch on our windows; the bus conductor remembers Miss Kelsey and nothing else; the night sweeper from the multi-storey remembers doors being shut at all hours and declines to be more particular. Nobody has corroborated a closing. Everybody corroborates the result: at four minutes past, the door of my shop is shut, level in its frame, cold as coin through the letterplate, and the log square says 18.00.
So it stands uncorroborated, and I record it so, though I am aware the record of a man who benefits by his own door is worth what such records are worth. The question I have carried twenty years past my father-in-law, and carry now with the log and the oil sheet for company, is the one neither document will hold still for: is the door ever shut at six by anyone at all — or is it only ever found shut, four minutes and a coffee later, by the one man who keeps the square filled?