Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Ketterby ·
The Cellar Recorder at Ketterby
A brewery worker in Ketterby finds an old wire recorder in the cellar of the Bridge Inn, set to play back the voices of the landlords who have served behind the bar since 1890, each one telling the same story about the cask that was never tapped.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: Stan Carrow, brewery cellarman
I have worked the cellars at the Bridge Inn for twenty-six years, and I know every cask and barrel in the place. It is a low, dark, cold room under the bar, with arched brick walls and a stone floor worn into hollows by generations of boots, and the casks are lined up along the north wall like sleeping animals. The brewery sends a man once a month to check the taps. Otherwise the cellar is mine.
In November I found the recorder.
It was in a niche behind the old oak cask at the far end, the one the landlords always said was empty. A squat metal box with a wire spool on top and a crank handle on the side, painted a faded cream, the kind of thing the BBC used to carry round in the fifties. The spool was wound full. The handle had been left in the play position.
I should not have touched it. But I did. I turned the crank a few times, very gently, and the spool began to turn, and a voice came out of the little brass horn.
It was a man's voice, cheerful and a bit hoarse, the kind of voice you hear behind a bar on a busy night. He was talking about the cask. *Now, that old cask at the back, you leave it be. Don't you tap it. It was here before the inn, and it'll be here after, and the day somebody pulls the bung is the day the Bridge goes under.* Then he laughed, and somebody else laughed too, a woman's voice, and the spool wound on.
I listened to the whole spool. It was an hour long. There were twelve voices on it. Each was a landlord of the Bridge Inn, speaking in a different decade. The first was from 1890, a deep, solid, Edwardian tone. The last was from the late seventies, with a Northern accent I knew from my own father. Each one told the same story, about the cask at the back, and the rule that nobody should tap it. Each one said the rule had been kept by every landlord since the first. And each one, at the end, said the same final sentence, very quietly, as if confiding it to the one listening: *and the one who listens to this will know which of us it was that did.*
I took the recorder up to the bar and played it for the landlord, Jim Pether, who has been at the Bridge for eight years. He listened to the first two voices and then went very pale and asked me to turn it off. He said his grandfather had been one of the landlords on the tape. He had never known that. The family had never said a word.
The brewery sent a man out to check the cask. He said it was empty, had been for years, the staves rotted through at the base. He tapped it with his knuckle and it rang hollow. He said there was nothing inside it at all, only dust and a few old bung corks. But when we went to lift the cask, to move it off the wall, we found a small hole behind it in the brickwork, neatly bricked up, and inside the hole a second spool, wound tight, with a card tied to it. The card said *the next one*. The handwriting was Jim's.
Jim says he has no memory of writing it. He says he has been sleeping badly since the recorder came up, and that he dreams he is in the cellar, behind the old cask, winding a crank in the dark, and that somebody is speaking to him through a brass horn about what he will one day do, and that he is not sure whether he is listening or speaking.
The brewery has taken the cask away. The recorder is locked in the office. But on quiet nights I still go down to the cellar with my torch, and I stand by the north wall where the cask used to be, and I hear it, very faintly, through the brick: a cheerful, hoarse voice, telling me not to tap what cannot be tapped, and then, from a little further off, a second voice, younger than the rest, which I think is probably my own.