Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Wakeham ·
The Day That Was Double
Between the last of October and the first of November the Wakeham valley keeps a day with no number. The municipal books cannot file it, and the parish books do not try.
- filed: Mid-November, by the visiting registrar on ordinary business
- reference: Registrar extract WK/D-862
Subject: The unnumbered day in the Wakeham valley, 31 October–1 November, with notes on the valley feast and on the age arithmetic of the resident families. Filed for the Ward Books by the visiting registrar, W. Trelawny, on ordinary business, none of it ordinary.
1. Summary. I attended the Wakeham valley on ordinary business — the copying of three leases and the swearing of one tenancy oath — and stayed through the change of the month. The valley constitutes one parish with four hamlets and has been served by one register since before the valley had walls. Between the last day of October and the first day of November, the civil calendar observes no day. The weekday column passes without the date being set down. I have compared the ward books for nine years back: every year, one unmarked night, and the invoices for that night's ringing of the feast bell, and the day-count of the ward thereafter agreeing with the diocese without remainder.
2. Compare and contrast the following practice, which I witnessed myself. At dusk on the 31st, before the light was fully off the hill, cloth was laid over every clock face in the valley — the church clock, the two tower clocks, the school clock, the dial over the mill door, the alarm clocks in the guest room of the inn where I lodged, and my own wristwatch, folded into a linen napkin by the innkeeper's daughter with an apology and pinned closed. The cloth was stitched into bags, hemmed, and numbered — each year's set a different cloth, so that, I was told, "you know by the weave what year it isn't." No sunrise was recorded for the interval: the lodgers at the inn were awake in a golden dimness I can only compare to certain photographs of the far north.
3. A day of ordinary largesse. Long tables set in the lane outside the church. Whosoever is in the valley — and strangers are brought in warmly by the deals from the upper road, where the last milestone is dressed with ribbons — is fed, danced with, and sent home with a basket. The feast bell is rung at dusk, and not again until the last cloth is lifted from the last clock, at which point the parish holds it to have become the 1st of November, with the light and the frost lines to prove the night whole.
4. The register. The parish register carries since its 1594 quire a ruled blank line for the night, and against the blank line, each year, a marginal note in the curate's hand of one word: "Fed." The ward books carry no line at all, which is why the ward's day-count runs disagreeable with the civil calendar once a year and then bears no mark of it. I showed the blank line to the incumbent, who said only: "We fed them. We do not count them." Pressed as to whom, she gave me tea instead, which I record here as an answer of a kind.
5. Age arithmetic, as observed and sworn. Three visitors, myself included, found on their return to ordinary towns that they had lost no time — the journeys ran to the minute — and yet were a day older in the face, in the wrists, in the spectacles prescription, than their own mirrors attested on the morning before. Of the residents I will set down only what dressmaker's bills, school years, and the baptism rolls together imply, without one syllable of speculation: the valley's grown residents reckon a day younger each year. I took the oath of tenancy from a farmer who swore he had lived in the valley "eight and twenty Springs," and gave his birth date without hesitation, and the arithmetic would not happily fit with any chart I own. I do not record this as complaint. It is filed as what it is: an account that will not total.
6. What I cannot explain and will have noted. The inn's recorder ran the full interval at the clock-maker's suggestion: twenty-four hours of ordinary tape — talk, plates, the dancing, one bell rung but once, and then, in a single minute near the dusk of the second morning, all the voices of the valley on one breath, counting. Upward. I will not guess the total; the counting is quick and the minute is the quietest thing on the tape, and it is filed with the bundle for anyone whose ear is better than mine.
7. Recommendation. I have none. Forms exist for lost days and for double-entered days, and this day answers to neither form. The leases in the bundle show clear and absolute title; the valley times its land well; everyone eats. I file open, with one last line for whoever inherits this extract, since the incumbent's answer is the only one on offer: the register has been fed since 1594. Others before me have asked what happens when the valley's long tables run out of years to put on them. I did not stay for the tea.