Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Grit Bin Account
A road steward's grit ledger balances to the shovelful, except the one bin that is full every frost morning and empty of frost every night.
- dated: "the salting weeks"
- narrator: "Olive Greenaway, road steward"
5th. Division says salting starts tonight, first frost due, so I walked the round of the borough bins and counted stock against the ledger. Seventy bays, nineteen bins carried, each with a card and a fill number — 2 hundredweight standard, 3 for the hill bins. Told my two volunteers the hill at midnight, and when the cold comes off the water we go out and take the count.
6th. First frost hard as a tray, roads like enamel. We salted until half three, and I'll own it was good work, the whole borough done by four and the Sunday paper saying nothing, which is the way you want it. Ledger opens here: fills issued this night, twenty-one. Subtract the usage we spread, being 2 cwts off each low bin and 3 off each hill bin. It balanced. First time this winter.
9th. Ledger does not balance. The bin at the mouth of the quarry lane — card says CARD 14, no name, no road on the card beyond a grid reference — is at full stock every morning. Brim full, level as a sandcastle. We have not filled it since the 6th. Usage says we opened it three times on the hill rounds and took 3 cwts off it, so a stock column that climbs by 3 a night while every honest bin falls: not a slip of the pen. I ran the whole ledger again over the supper table. Nineteen bins fall. One rises. The sum of the page is out by a growing number, 6 by today, and my volunteers call it a filling error and I let them, because they are nineteen and deserve sleep.
12th. Went to the quarry mouth at nine tonight, before the round, to watch the bin myself. No frost yet. There never IS frost down there — that is the joke of the card, that we salt cold roads all over the borough while this one bit of lane lies as warm as a kitchen. Snow comes over the hill and stops in a line at the gatepost. I sat in the van from nine to two with the engine going, lights off. Nothing came. Nothing passed. At half two I got out and the bin was rising — level coming up with no hand on it and no sound, grit after grit, like a kettle filling upside down, and I stood at the gate and could not make myself write the observation down. Got home at four. Did not sleep.
15th. I took the decision I said I'd never take over a stock sheet, and closed the account. Card 14 ruled off in red, usage entered as NIL, stock as UNVERIFIED, and a note: DO NOT SALT THE QUARRY LANE, IT DOES NOT NEED IT. Sent the ledger in to Division. Sum of the page, Card 14 excluded: balances to the shovelful, all winter, every night but the ones on the hill.
Here is what I put at the bottom of the red-ruled page before I sent it, because an account closed has to say what it closed against. Every salt bin in the borough gets emptied and filled by men with shovels and cards, and its stock falls; and one bin on the one warm road in the borough fills nightly from nobody, at the exact hour the frost is failing to form, and my last entry is a question being posted to whoever in Division keeps the other ledger.
If the quarry lane never needs salting — if that road is warm at the hour a town like this one means between the hours — then what has been falling on the hill roads all winter that my grit is the only thing we have to claim against it, and what has been granted, nightly, against mine?