Archived report · 3 min read · Set in Salter's Row ·
The Book of Forwarded Addresses
At the redirection audit the Salters Row book is found keeping its own entries past the dates printed on it, in one hand, and every address it writes is current.
- filed: "at the redirection audit"
- reference: "SR/FA/02"
1. This record concerns the redirection book of the Salters Row post office. The book is a bound counter volume, leaves numbered in print, date columns ruled at the head of each page for the years 1984 through 1987. A redirection is entered only on production of the counter request slip: name, old address, new address, first and last dates of validity. The slip is then filed and destroyed at audit, as the standing order provides.
2. This audit was taken against the office's request-stub file by two officers of the Archive with counter supervisor Ruth Callow attending. The entry count in the book exceeds the stub count by one hundred and twenty-one. The surplus entries are correctly made in every particular. They simply have no originating paperwork, and no officer on the current roster recalls taking any of the requests they record.
3. Entries continue past the printed columns. The last page ruled for 1987 is not the last page carrying entries. Beyond it the blank leaves sewn into the binding have been ruled by hand to the same gauge, and the entries run on through the coming year, and past the coming year, in dates spaced a fortnight apart like any working fortnight.
4. The hand throughout the book, printed pages and hand-ruled pages alike, has been compared against specimen signatures held at the office. It is the hand of counter officer Oswald Fenwick, who served Salters Row from 1981 until his transfer off the counter in the spring of 1985. Fenwick's whereabouts are not held in this Archive. His own redirection stands entered in the book: his mail follows him, and each address it reaches is current when the post arrives, and each of those addresses is one he is not recorded as having moved to.
5. A currency test was run on a sample of twenty entries taken from beyond the binding. Letters were posted to the old addresses on the books, on dates the book had not then reached. All twenty were delivered onward from the old addresses to the new, and all twenty arrived within the working time the book allowed, correctly redirected, fees assessed, none returned. The postal service does not query a delivery that arrives where it is addressed to arrive.
6. The ink of the surplus entries has been examined against the counter's stationery stock. It is not the counter's ink. It has not been the counter's ink since the change of supplier in 1984, before which date the entries are in the ink proper to them.
7. The point was put to the office that entries require originating slips, and the office replied that slips are destroyed at audit, and that the audit destroys them. This office accepts the reply. The book is not, on the evidence available, writing anything that a slip could later contradict.
8. Filed without finding. The book remains in service at the counter, as it is the only redirection book the office possesses, and a marker ribbon has been set at the last printed page so that counter officers can see the point at which they stop being the ones writing in it. The question carried forward to the next audit stands at that ribbon: when the binding runs out of blank leaves, where does the hand take its entries, and who binds the next book?