Witness account · 3 min read · Set in The Slag Hills ·
The Cellar Fridge That Runs
The allotment keeper's shed stands over a fruiter cellar with no electricity in it, and the fridge he can hear running down there keeps its hours by a shift pattern the works above closed out years before he heard it.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Cyril Redmayne, allotment keeper"
I keep the third terrace of plots at the Slag Hills allotments, and my shed stands at the head of the stairs to the old fruiter cellar. This much is on the books: the cellar belongs to the fruiterer who traded off the valley road and went under before the war, and the allotment committee has the key account of it, and the supply to it was cut and sealed in nineteen sixty-three by the board. No light, no socket, no meter. The board's own surveyor went down with me in April with his detector and his clipboard and wrote, and the writing reads: no mains, no live, no current at any point, meter board empty, seal intact.
The fridge runs.
I do not say a fridge is down there and I do not say I have seen one. What I say is what I hear, and I have heard it three years: a hum, a fridge's hum, the size and the manner of a fridge's hum, rising off the cellar through the shed floor and the slates of my seed trays so that the seed trays rattle the smallest rattle there is. I went down with a torch more than once to house the sound and it housed me instead; stood everywhere a man can stand in forty feet of bricked vault, and the hum came off the back wall where the cooling rack's shadow shows painted and no machine behind it that a torch reaches.
The hum keeps the shift clock. This is the part that makes it mine to file and not some keeper's fancy. The works up the valley — the cement works, closed eleven years, chimneys standing purchase-less — kept three shifts, and their hooter ruled the terraces until the hooter came down. The hum has that life in it. It runs quiet off mid-morning; comes on at two in the afternoon like shift handover; knocks off at six. On it again at ten of the night, and through the whole night shift, and off at the six in the morning to the half hour, week on week, and dry on the Sundays shift work never kept. I set my watering by it now, and so do two keepers on the terraces below, because a clock is a clock and their clocks disagree and the hum agrees with the one the valley worked to.
What the cold is for I have kept off the account until now. There is a shelf in the cellar, brick, swept, and the shelf is cold to the hand — cold like the shelf of a working refrigeratory, and colder the back of the shelf sits. I have left a pint of milk down there out of plain economy, no reason to lie about a man's milk: the pint kept four days and my shed milk does not keep two hours. The shelf holds now what the plots can spare — butter wrapped, a basin of dripping — and it holds them the way a shop's cold shelf holds, and the committee are glad enough of the butter at the show.
They corroborate. Albert Doe on the second terrace has heard the hum and will say where and when it knocked off, he and his brother both, and the surveyor's writing is in the file for the no-electricity, and the works timekeeper that lives on the branch met my hours sheet and said the hum's shifts were the works' shifts to the quarter hour in the years he booked them. What none of them corroborates is any machine, because none of them has sheltered the hum with a torch as I have, and the surveyor has gone up the valley since to other boards.
My question, asked at the cellar stairs with the six o'clock hooter-hours quiet behind me: the fridge keeps a dead works' shift pattern and a working chill with no current to run either — so who is it down there keeping night shift on no supply, and what is the cooling of it being stored for.