Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Alder Hill ·
The Birth Still Outstanding Forty-One Years On
The Alder Hill register of births carries one entry with a midwife named, a date left blank, and a file that is opened again every year before the return.
- filed: "before the annual return"
- reference: "AH/BR/02"
1. This report is filed before the annual return and concerns entry 87 of the fourth quarter register of births for the Alder Hill district, which has stood outstanding for forty-one years, and the practice by which its file is opened again each autumn and closed again, unaltered, each winter.
2. The entry reads as follows. Surname of child: not stated. Name, if any: blank. Date of birth: blank, the space ruled for it carrying the word OUTSTANDING written large in the clerk's hand of the period. Name and surname of father: given, and verified once and never again. Name and surname of mother: given, and verified. Qualification of informant: Maude Thorogood, midwife, her signature present and witnessed. The midwife attended. The mother recovered. Somebody was born. All the register asks for, four columns later, is a date and a name, and it has been asking since the winter of 1945.
3. The law is hard about this and the office is obliged to follow it where it can. A name must be supplied within twelve months of registration; after that the entry is what it is, a fact with the middle of it missing. The office did what offices do. It waited out the first year properly, wrote to the midwife at her certified address, wrote to the parents, kept the carbon of every letter, and, receiving no useful reply, marked the entry outstanding and moved the file to the tray of last resort, which is a real tray, at the end of the shelving, this being a district that keeps its failures where it can see them.
4. By the annual practice now standing, the file of AH/BR/02 is opened each year before the return is drawn up. The clerk of the day writes three letters: to the midwife's address, to the parents' address, and to the district nurse if one is serving, for form. The midwife's letters have returned marked gone away every year since 1946, in the same hand on the same buff envelope, though the midwife retired in 1951 and her last known address was surrendered to the county in 1958. Somebody has been steadily declining to receive her post for longer than she was alive to decline it. The parents' letters are not returned at all. They are never answered either. The house in Corvey Row stands where it stood, occupied, the rate book is current, and the electoral roll has carried the same two names for forty-one years, no third name ever being added and no notification of any child ever received by the school board, the clinic, or the ministry.
5. In 1969, one year only, the pattern broke. The third of the year's letters, addressed to the midwife who had then been dead eleven months, was answered: a page of careful copperplate, unsigned, bearing no address but the district's, and supplying what the office had asked for, which was a date. The copperplate gave the day, month and year of the birth fully, correctly, and at some length about the weather. The registrar on duty that year did his work properly: he checked the date against the register, and found that it fell one day beyond the final day of the fourth quarter of 1945, and one day before the first day of the register that would properly have received it, that register being closed, certified, and forty-one years past amendment. The date was admissible to no book the office holds. The reply was filed. No signature was sought, no correspondence was pursued, and the entry, being unprovided with any date the office may lawfully write down, remains outstanding.
6. The file has been opened again this year under the same practice. Three letters stand in the dispatch tray; two have already come back marked in the familiar ways. The arithmetic of the thing is set out here as the file requires: one district, forty-one returns, one outstanding entry, and one date, supplied once, that fits nowhere. Either the district is very good at closing its files, or one file has been very good at not being closed, and the clerk of the day is required to state, before the return is drawn up, which explanation he endorses.
7. He has not endorsed either. The question left open at filing is the one the copperplate did not answer: where the birth belongs, if it will not sit in the quarter it was borne in, and whose hand the office should expect next autumn, if it is to expect anyone's.