Diary fragment · 2 min read ·
Older by an Hour
A laundress keeps a small ledger against the hour her nights take, and the ledger will not settle.
- dated: "harvest weeks"
- narrator: "Ada Cornwell, laundress"
Harvest weeks — the first morning.
I woke at six to the tram bell as always, and the glass over the basin had a woman in it one hour past the woman who went to bed. I will write it plainly and be done with it. One grey stripe, left temple, the width of a bootlace. One ache, left hip, the sort you earn kneeling on cobbles, and I have not knelt. I dressed the stripe under my hair and carried the ache down to the wash-house like a ladle I had forgotten to put away.
Harvest weeks — the second day.
The stripe sat where it sat. The ache kept its house. I bought a proper notebook from the stationer's and began a count, because if a thing is to keep books on me, I will keep mine on it. Bed at ten, up at six: eight hours by every clock in this city. Yet the glass gave me one hour more than it gave yesterday, and one only — an hour standing on its own, owing nothing to the eight. I checked it against the tram shelter's mirror, the long glass at the wash-house, and the little square in the foreman's door. All three agree. I rule a line under it each morning and write the tally: one.
Harvest weeks — day nine.
Steam days run together, so the notebook is my one true calendar now. Each morning's entry has three columns: hours owed (still one), stripes (still one), aches (still one). It is very tidy. I cannot say what the tidiness is for, only that a count held steady nine mornings feels less like an injury and more like a shift roster. Mrs Deller asked had I been poorly. I said harvest. She said harvest tells on the hands, not the face. I said the steam, and she let it go, and I let it go, and the tally stayed at one.
Harvest weeks — day twenty.
Two stripes this morning. The new one sits lower by the ear, bootlace-width again. Two aches now: the hip has taken a lodger at the right wrist. So the columns move together, hours with stripes with aches, and never once out of step, and I compliment myself on keeping a neat book of it and do not say the rest. The rest is arithmetic, and I do not finish arithmetic that has no column for the answer. I wash what comes, I lay what is washed, and in the evenings I rule my three columns. What I want set down, plain, before the harvest weeks close, is the question the ledger will not take: twenty days, twenty hours, and no two alike in my glass — whose hours are these, and when the count runs out to the full length of me, who does the reckoning then?