Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Wakeham ·
The Lightning Conductor Debt
A churchwarden signs each June for tower work no parish paper admits to, in a receipt book that runs steadily down toward its last page.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Cecil Tranter, churchwarden"
I have been churchwarden at Wakeham parish church since 1974, and I will put the facts in order and let them sit: every June a new lightning conductor is fitted to the tower, I sign for the work, and there is no paper for it anywhere in the parish, no invoice, no minute, no entry in the accounts. The receipt book fills only while I am out of the vestry.
The tower took lightning twice in living memory. In 1966 the capping came off and a mason had it six weeks. Since 1974 it has not been struck again, which the insurers file under good housekeeping. The fair week is the second week in June. I walk the churchyard boundary on the Monday; by the Friday the tape runs bright from capping to earth pit, the top collar is freshly soldered, and the pit board is squared. There is never a ladder print in the grass, never a barrow mark along the path, never one shaving in the gutter under the vestry window. I have never met the men who do it, in twelve years of walking that wall first.
What I sign is a screw-down docket left on the ledge of the ringing chamber. Small printed heading, a firm's name, a Copper Row address, the words executed as instructed, and a receipt number in carbon. No invoice ever comes. The vestry minutes hold no entry. The accounts carry no payment. The diocesan list of approved contractors has no such firm, and the address was a yard on Copper Row that came down for the relief road in 1970, four years before I took the office.
The receipt numbers run the wrong way. My first June was number 12. The next year, 11. Last June, number 2. Laid out on the vestry table the carbons read like a tally being worked off from the far end, patient as a mortgage, one a year. A book that runs down is a debt being paid off, if you read it like a ledger, and I read it like a ledger because it is the only reading that keeps the columns straight. Two more Junes and the book is empty. The firm's rubber stamp never wears down, either. Ink fades; rubber does not. Ours is as crisp as the first June.
In June 1981 I was away the whole fair week, at my wife's sister's, and on the last day of the month the docket was on the ledge signed already. My signature, correct in every loop, done in the wrong ink: mine was in my waistcoat pocket, and the newer blue came out of it, while the docket's line is the older blue-black. The carbon pad lined up page against page with my copies, as though every signature had been made at one sitting, and in 1981 that sitting happened a hundred miles from the tower.
I asked the vicar. He says the parish has never engaged a contractor for the tower in his time, and that the conductor is the old one, kept clean. I asked the insurers. The schedule declares the conductor from 1974 and the premium has never moved a shilling, which the clerk called tidy. Tidy is the word for it. Nothing here is ever out of order. The order itself is the part I cannot find.
So it stands uncorroborated. The vicar will not minute it, the insurers are satisfied, and between the facts there is only my hand and a carbon pad in a drawer any of us could open. The June after next, the receipt book runs out. What nobody can tell me, not the vicar, not the bank, not the diocesan office, is what the debt has been all this time, and what falls due on the morning after the last receipt in that book is signed.