Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Ashby Parish ·
The House That Counts Its Own Windows
Count the windows of one tall house and you will come back one over, and the grown-ups of the parish decline to check the sum.
- status: folklore
In Ashby the children learn their counting on the tall grey house at the Pinfold corner — three storeys, carved heads over the door, walled garden — and no grown hand ever set them to it that anybody remembers. They take to it the way ducklings take to their own water. They go round it saying the windows out loud, lane side and garden side, at any hour, in any weather, and they come back to the wall with eleven.
The deeds say ten. The glazing schedule the vicar keeps for the insurance says ten, pane by pane, initialled down the edge. Eleven is what the children return, and not some children and not once: every child that goes round comes back one over, and they come back pleased about it, the way you come away from a sum that has worked first time.
They tried it with chalk in my grandmother's day, a big girl with a slate where her brothers had paper. She chalked a cross on every pane as she counted; then she counted the crosses; then she counted the windows again, under their crosses, twice over. The crosses came to ten. The windows under the crosses came to eleven. She wrote both figures on the garden wall in chalk the size of her fist and stood back like a joiner standing back from his level, and what she said is the whole matter told small: the marks keep the deeds' count, and the house keeps its own, and neither count will lend the other a figure.
You will get nothing further out of the grown-ups, and there's the strange comfort of it, if comfort was asked for. The vicar will not recount: he opens the schedule, lays his finger on ten, and shuts the book, and is kind about it the way you are kind over a clock that nobody means to wind again. The rate office sends a man with a wheel and a notebook and he takes the frontage only, and the frontage is agreed all round by everyone who is agreed. In the schoolmaster Pelly's time the class was set the house for sums, one morning, once — every sheet came back eleven where ten was called for, and he marked every child right, and sent not one sheet up to the managers, and never set that house again. He was not a man, they say of him still, to mark wrong what he had seen with his own eyes.
So the children take the grown-ups' not-counting to be arithmetic, and take it plainly, and without any tears in it: you only leave a sum undone when you know which way it comes out and the answer is wanted kept, not said. And no telling of the house anywhere along the lane gives the over window a place to look out of. Stand where it would have to stand, at the party wall, and there is brick under your hand, and the count counts anyway, brick and all, and comes back the same. The oldest of the big ones will only hand you the saying that goes along the wall with the count: the house keeps one window over the way a householder keeps one step in the hall — not for use, but for the count; and a house that keeps count is a house that knows what's owed it.
It is the bus-stop girls keep the count now. Every September, to whichever child is new at the stop, they give it out in under a minute and walk the new one round the house to prove it before the bell, out loud, either way, and eleven comes back the same as it came back for the chalk girl and for Pelly's class and for whoever stood at that wall first. The grown-ups of Ashby give the count no part in anything they say, which is its own kind of giving. So the sum stays in young hands, one over, September after September — and it is the bus-stop girls who hand the new ones the question with it, as one sum, the question no Ashby grown-up has ever taken up: what does the house see through the window nobody will own?