Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Haldane Place ·
The Form I Filed Twice
A registry clerk describes the morning a form he sealed away in 1965 returned to his desk with the date advanced one day.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Walter Frisk, Clerical Officer"
I have worked in Room 6 at Haldane Place since the spring of 1961, and in that time I have sealed eleven thousand four hundred and some forms, because sealing them is the work. When a form is done with — copied, countersigned, closed — you fold it into the buff sleeve, you press the wax, you press the stamp, and you drop it in the tin box for the runners. After that it is no longer yours. Nothing stays on your desk past its filing.
On the 11th of March, 1988, at five to nine, there was a form on my desk that was no longer mine.
I should say what it looked like. HMR/88b, Acknowledgement of Unreported Kent. Buff sleeve, red wax, the Room 6 stamp at the fold. My stamp. I recognised my hand on the outside of it before I recognised what was inside. The date field on the sleeve read the 12th of March, 1988. Tomorrow, as I sat there with my tea going cold against it.
I opened it over the waste chute, the way we are taught, so that any loose paper goes where it can be accounted for. Inside was a form I remembered doing in 1966: the kent of a man named Cyril Bound, a lamplighter, late of the passages off Haldane Place. I remember because it was my first week with the wax alone, no supervisor at my shoulder, and because Bound's counterfoil signature was a careful one, the sort that takes four seconds. It was there.
So the form was proper. Filed, closed, sealed, run. There is nothing in procedure that can bring a form back. A sealed form cannot be reopened, only cancelled, and cancellations need a form of their own, which starts the whole trouble over.
I did what anyone would do. I walked it down to Records Control on the ground floor, and I showed it to Mr Lappin, who has been there as long as I have, and I said, this came back. He looked at it a while and then he said, this never went out, Frisk. And he turned his ledger round, and against HMR/88b, in the column for March of 1966, there is an entry in his writing that says ISSUED. But the date beside it is not March of 1966. It is the 12th of March, 1988. He cannot account for it and he will not discuss it past a certain point, and I have learned when Lappin has reached that point.
Here is the part I keep returning to. I have the form still, at home, in a biscuit tin under the bed, which is against every regulation I have ever been given. On the morning of the 12th, standing in the kitchen before work, I looked at it, and the date field read the 12th. It was no longer tomorrow. The form was simply dated the day it was, and I understood that from its side of things, if a sleeve can be said to have a side of things, nothing had happened at all. The 12th had only just caught up with it.
I told my daughter about it, because I tell her very little else that matters, and she said, Dad, you sealed a duplicate and forgot. That is the sensible reading, and I can produce no argument against it, except this: the room numbers. My desk in 1988 is Desk 6. The form is addressed to Desk 6. But in 1966 my desk was Desk 3, and men were moved to 6 in the reorganisation of '71, and whoever addressed it addressed it to me as I am, not as I was.
Nobody has corroborated any of it. Lappin has stopped answering on the subject, and the runner who worked the tin box that morning has been moved to another floor, which is not suspicious, only administrative. He would be the one who could confirm it, and he says he remembers nothing, and I believe him, because I remember it for both of us.