Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Salter's Row ·
My Suits Return Heavier
A suit sent out to the canal depot for recut comes back in the same cloth, under the same name, cut one size heavier all over.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Harold Vetch, tailor"
I am the tailor at No. 5 Salters Row, nineteen years under the sign of the shears, and until this autumn I did all my own cutting. In September the Row took up a scheme. The depot by the canal opened an alterations branch, and a card in the fishmonger's window asked the trade to send garments in "for recut, charged by the ounce of cloth moved." To keep the peace with the Rate Office, which had taken to asking the shops why their cloth books ran light, I sent three suits: the herringbone, the black sharkskin, and the brown homespun with the ticket pockets, which is the best of them and the dearest to me.
They went out on the Monday and came back the following Monday, brown paper and string, my own labels under the string, my name tape whole inside every collar. I will put my hand on the rotas book that the cloth is the same cloth: same yards, same sheen, the same worn places at the cuff, worn exactly as they stood the morning I packed them. Only the cutting has changed.
They are cut for a man one size heavier. Not let out at the seams, as any honest mender would have managed, but cut new from the chalk for a bigger man: chest two inches over my measure, waist close on three, the shoulders set wider, the sleeves a thumb's length long. And the name is my name throughout. The tape in every collar reads H. VETCH, 5 SALTERS ROW, worked on my mother's old machine, and inside the left breast pocket is my pencil mark, V. 1979, where I have always set the year the cloth came in. Same name, same cloth, and a larger man fitted into both.
I took the herringbone back to the counter. A clerk in a green overall read me the docket without being asked: chest, waist, shoulder, every figure two or three points above mine, and beneath the figures the printed line CORRECTED AS INSTRUCTED. The instruction is signed. I will not say it is my signature. I will say it is very like the hand I use when I sign in a hurry, and that I was not in a hurry that week, since I sat at my bench every day of it and nobody measured me there.
The clerk asked me onto the platform scale while he took the chalk to the board. Boots, cap, coat and all, I came near enough to the docket's figures that he set the chalk down, satisfied, and told me that nothing being outside the ticket, there was nothing to adjust. I let it stand. There was nothing in his voice, which was flat as a pressing cloth, to push against.
My niece, Beryl Mott, who keeps the Row's book for me, has since read all three dockets line by line and confirms the figures, the printed corrections, and the signature alike; it was her good sense that had me put everything down in writing, so that a thing written is a thing can be checked back. So the matter stands corroborated, or as near as Salters Row comes to proof, and I have done with arguing. What nobody will settle for me is the arithmetic. Every inch added to a suit is an inch taken off someone, two inches at the chest and three at the waist, and the cloth did not arrive from nowhere. Come the cold weather I should like someone to walk the Row with me and say which of us the suits were cut for, and where the other is keeping his.