Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Aldershaw ·
The Calipers of the Warden
An inspector's measuring tape keeps returning one door width that belongs on no schedule of any building in the district.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Arthur Wicks, buildings inspector"
I survey for the district and keep the measuring books for the Aldershaw blocks, and I will state the matter flatly: in seven openings in those blocks my tape reads thirty-three and a half inches, which is a door width, and there is no door fitted at any of them, and I am the only surveyor on the staff who gets that number.
Council sizes are not a matter of taste. A bedroom door is two feet six. A front door is two feet eight. Thirty-three and a half appears in no schedule ever issued to me, and in brickwork it is worse than odd, because such an opening spans four courses and then about half a brick more. Builders cut bricks in halves for arches and sills. Nobody cuts one in half to close a stretch of flushed wall between two voids that go nowhere. Yet somebody has done it, seven times.
The openings are these: the half-landing recess at Stair 2 of F block; a slot beside the refuse chute on the ninth floor of B; the party wall between the two drying rooms in the undercroft; four more I have entered in the book without comment. All are plastered flush both sides, with no lintel shadow, no plugs, no frame holes. Steel tape and linen tape agree to the half inch on every one. I have measured the F block recess fourteen times. It has never once said thirty-three and never thirty-four. It says thirty-three and a half, level and square, the way an opening measures when a joiner has already ordered the door that will fit it.
The plans show nothing. The accommodation schedule shows nothing. Where my tape reads, the drawings carry a plain return of wall. I took Sandell from the south office to the Stair 2 recess and put my own tape in his hands, and he measured thirty-three and one eighth. Fred Pask, the joiner's mate who did the kitchen refits, measured the same recess at thirty even, and said so with a grin, because thirty is the standard and a man likes the standard to hold.
I bought a new tape from the ironmonger on Division Street, plain box, ordinary make. The new tape reads the seven openings at thirty-three and a half and everything else true: window heads, door cases, tank plinths, all to the schedule. It is only the seven that answer differently, and only to me. A broken tape you can send back. This one is not broken.
Since then I measure alone and enter the number and say nothing at the office. The stair cores those recesses sit in are closed pending allocation. The allocation register stands open against each one, ruled and dated, the applicant column blank, the review date struck forward a year at a time in somebody's green pen. The flats round about stand void. The caretakers clean the cores on Fridays, and not one of them will tell me they have ever cleaned inside a recess.
My pocket book holds fourteen entries now, in sequence, pages intact. Fourteen lines, fourteen readings of thirty-three and a half. I have checked the course count against the tape a dozen ways. The courses say thirty-two. The tape says thirty-three and a half. Each is correct about its own business, and the difference between them belongs to nobody I can name on that job.
Nobody has confirmed any of this. Sandell laughs about it at the south office, Pask has stopped grinning, and the stores order book shows no door requisitioned in any such size, because stores keep requisitions and there is none. I keep measuring because whenever I go back the number is still there, level, patient, unissued, waiting on its door the way the allocation register waits on its tenant. What I have not been able to settle for anyone, since no one will sign beside me, is the plainest line on the whole page: what does a builder measure an opening like that against, and for whom, when the people it is cut for have not yet arrived?