Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Long Acre ·
The Audit of Always Open
The rates review of a chandlery that has never once shut finds the shutters unlowered across sixty years of night books, with the staff rota complete and the arithmetic handing over clean.
- filed: "at the rates review"
- reference: "LA/RT/88"
1. Instructions. The undersigned was deputed to the Long Acre review at the standing rates session, the premises under examination being those of W. Hodd and Son, ship chandlers and oilmen, assessed since 1927 and never queried. The review requires the undersigned to state, against the printed heads, whether the premises are used by day only, by night only, or both. The printed heads have a fourth column for remarks, which is meant for hedges. It has been used, in the annexe copy of this report, for the whole of paragraphs three to six.
2. The collector's books for the full sixty-one years were laid open at the audit table and read against the weekly books, and the weekly books against the accounts. No arrears appear in any book. No query appears in any book. The rate is paid every year, four days either side of Lady Day, in coin, by the proprietor in person or by the son after him, at a figure above the assessment by two shillings in the pound, the excess constant since the assessment of 1935 and never once asked after by the assessing side, because an excess is not an arrear and does not come to the notice of anyone whose business arrears are.
3. The night books were raised by the constabulary until the practice lapsed in the fifties, one line to a street passed in the round, shutters up or shutters down. The Long Acre lines, fourteen a night for thirty years, read shutters up down the whole column, close on nine thousand entries of the same five words, unbroken at Christmas, at the epidemic, and at the three nights of the great gale when half the street's glass was in the roadway. A shop may keep hours without pity. The finding is different: no constable in thirty years ever once wrote the other line, and constables are moved by what they see.
4. The staff rota was called for and produced, bound in the firm's grey board, complete from 1927 to the present week. It is kept two weeks to an opening, names in a hand that improves through the decades as sons learn to rule lines. Leave is entered and granted as the Acts require: one week at Christmas each, a fortnight in summer by turn, the sick weeks entered when they happened, and they happened, for the sick weeks are initialled by the same hands that granted them. And the counter-staffed hours nevertheless come to the full. Across sixty-one years there is not an opening where the shop stands unstaffed between the lighting-up time and the morning. The arithmetic of the leave fits under the staffing the way a second coat fits under the first, evenly, with no wear showing beneath.
5. The rota runs a column for relief. It is initialled every week of the sixty-one years by the same two letters, T.R., and the same letters appear in the firm's minute book as the founder's sister, a Miss Thirza Rooke, buried at the crossroads parish so far as that register is booked. The initials do not stop at the burial. They run the second war, the brigade years, and last week. The firm was not asked to explain them. The only question it would not be impolite to ask is the one the column answers standing down.
6. The premises were attended by night, twice, the second time a shade after three, and both times in order as the night books have it: shutters up, the counter lamp trimmed, and a figure at the ledger desk, taken for the proprietor and troubled by no questions, the plain-clothes rule forbidding the asking. The figure wrote figures in the ordinary way, without hurry, wrist lightly resting. The hand is the steady hand of the rota's margins, which sixty-one years has taught its resting.
7. The review's form asks for the use to be struck one of three ways, by day, by night, or both, and the third is struck, as the only one the evidence will carry. The fourth column is left standing with the question the visit hands to the board: whether the two shillings excess paid these sixty years on a shop that never draws its shutters should be read as a penalty no book ever levied, or as a subscription, since one of the two descriptions fits entirely, and the board will want it on the record before Friday which.