Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Alder Hill ·
The Lamp-lighter of the Ninth Lamps
An old lamplighter's evening round carries nine lamps the borough list has never declared, and he is paid for them all the same.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Peter Colls, lamplighter"
I lit lamps on the hill for twenty-six years, back when the job was poles and a pole-lamp wick on a long rod, and I stayed on after the county put the timers in, because the timers were never trusted on the north side and somebody had to walk it anyway. My round was the ninth lamps. That is what the borough sheet called it, and the name stuck before anyone knew what it meant, because when I took the round over in '61 it was the ninth beat on the borough list and nothing more.
The borough list was a printed card, one to a round, and my card carried forty-odd lamps with their positions, the baker's corner, the squeaking gate by the allotments, the pair outside the infants' school, and so on up to the turning circle at the top. Forty-one, if you count them the way the card counts them. Forty-one taps of the rod, forty-one wicks, forty-one entries in my wage book. The borough paid by the lamp and by the lamp they got.
I want to be clear about how that arrived. I did not find a lamp burning where no lamp stood, and I did not come round a corner into anything strange. I was checking my wage book against the card at the depot, the way you do before a pay audit, and the arithmetic would not come right. Fifty taps some nights. Forty-one on the card. I counted the lamps at noon the next day, in daylight, one by one, and I counted forty-one, and the daylight count has never changed to this hour.
But after dark, between the second lamp on the card and the turning circle, my tally said nine more. Never lit where the daylight said they should stand. Never in the same place twice. A wick to set at the mouth of a passage that at noon was a wall, or a standard in the middle of a waste piece of ground where nothing was ever built. Nine lamps, and each one wanted lighting like any other, and each one, when lit, drew off my pole like a good honest light and held its flame steady in the wind off the moor.
That is the part I have never managed to set down right. I never altered my card. I never put the nine in the wage book, and the audit never asked, because the audit's copies and my copies agreed, and on the audit's copies there were fifty lamps on the ninth round. Illegal numbers be damned; the borough's own sheets stood at fifty, and mine held forty-one, and the difference between those two papers sat in my wage packet every fortnight for twenty-six years in nine lamps' worth of pay. I asked the pay clerk once, at the counter, plain, why my round was entered at fifty. He looked at the ledger, and the ledger at his elbow said fifty, and he said, "Because it's fifty, Mr Colls," and gave me my packet, and I went home and did not ask again.
You learn what to do with pay like that. I lit the nine. I want that set down too, because men assume I tested it, or refused it, or made my mark somewhere the borough would have to notice. I did none of that. The nights were cold and the nine were on my way regardless, and a lamp left dark on Alder Hill was, whatever else was true of it, a lamp left dark. I named none of them, even to myself. A thing you name you belong to.
When I retired in '87 they gave the ninth lamps to a younger man, Fred Ives, and the borough updated the card to the new standard form and dropped the pay to the new single rate, no count of lamps at all. Fred walks the north side now with a torch and a timer key and forty-one notches in his memory, and if his tally runs past the card after dark, he has not said so to me, and I have not asked, because I know the price of asking.
It is the not-name I mind most, if I mind anything. Twenty-six years of carrying a flame up a hill to stand before something that wanted lighting, and never once letting my mouth think the word that would make it mine.
What she could not tell me, and what I would give a year of pension to have told me plain, is whether the ninth lamps are still standing there on the hill after dark tonight, dark and needing a wick — or whether, with me gone, someone else has taken the round and lit them.