Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Garrick Street ·
The Crane That Ranks Its Casts
At Garrick Street the tally book enters the yard crane's cast numbers before the casts are made, and the quarterly audit signs the arithmetic clean every time.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Ronald Fearn, yard tally keeper"
The yard at Garrick Street keeps one crane and one book, and I have kept the book nine years this November. The crane casts by rank. Not by the order the lorries queue, nor by the weight on their beds, but by a rank number given to each lift before the day begins: rank one, rank two, and down the page. Nobody still working remembers who began the ranking. It is simply how the yard is run, and the yard runs.
I keep the tally. Each morning the day's casts go into the book ahead of the work: rank, load, weight where known, and against each, in its own column, the crane's cast number. The cast number is a mechanical counter on the crane itself. Every cast advances it by one. It cannot be turned back, and it cannot be turned forward. It is the one thing in the yard that has never been argued with.
The rule is that the book is written to the crane, not from it. The counter settles the matter. When the hook takes a load, the driver calls his counter, and if the book has that load at that number, the cast is square.
For nine years the casts have been square. I want that put plainly, because what follows is not a complaint about the arithmetic. The arithmetic has never once been wrong.
The book is audited each quarter by an officer from the port office. He checks three things: that the counter's last number at knock-off matches the book's last cast; that the weights sum; that no line is altered. The lines go in in ink before the yard opens, generally between six and seven, and the yard has never opened on a page that failed.
Two quarters back the audit went further. The officer asked when the pages were written, and the pages are timed, because the yard has always timed its own book. He found what I had also found and had carried as nothing: the lines for the day go in earlier than six. On the four Tuesdays he pulled, the whole of the day's ranks stood entered between three and half past three in the morning, the gates locked, and the yard, by every roster the port keeps, empty of everyone.
Then he did the thing I would not have dared. He carried the book to the crane and read the counter first, before the day's first cast, and the counter sat at the number the book's first rank expected. Not at the last number cast, which is where a counter is found of a night. At the next one.
I said counters drift. He said this counter is sealed. I said the book was written off a forecast. He said the book has no forecast column. I stopped there, because I could not make my next sentence honest.
The audit still signs the book clean, and that part is corroborated as corroborated is meant: the officer's finding is co-signed by the foreman, and the crane driver initialled the statement of the counter, and the sums are the sums. The cast numbers come out in order. The loads come off when their ranks are called. The counter agrees with the book all day, to the last line, and the quarter's tonnage agreed to the hundredweight.
What nobody has signed for is the interval before six. The book expects the counter and the counter obliges it, cast after cast, all day; the page is clean; the day is not. The three signatures on the audit stand, and each of the three has since drawn back from the hour of the writing. The driver says three in the morning he sleeps. The foreman says the yard is a six o'clock yard. The officer, asked again, says he audits the book and leaves the book its habits. So it is corroborated entirely, and confirmed by nobody who was there, unless the hand that writes the pages at three is mine, and the book, which is otherwise correct in every column, says that it is.