Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Kessin Reach ·
The Man Who Lost In Order
A pawnbroker's clerk on the pledge shelf finds that the goods of a man who lost everything come back to the window one at a time, in the very order they were given up, years apart, each ticketed in odd pence.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Derek Mould, pawnshop clerk"
I have taken in pledges at Kessin Reach since 1961, and I keep the pledge shelf the way the old firm kept it, by ticket order and no other. What I have to set down is about one customer, and I will give it plain, because nobody else will hold it for me.
The man is Mr Bratt. In the spring of 1963 a fire went through the yards on the Reach and took his house with his workshop behind it. Nearly a month after, he began to come in, Tuesdays, and pawn what he had saved. He always told me the order he was going in, and the order never shifted. The mantle clock first. Then the good dinner set. Then the concertina he played at weddings. Then the brass spirit-kettle, and after that, when there was nothing else, his father's brace of steps. Five pledges, five dates, all in my hand in the day book.
I did not see the man for years after. I saw his things. In the spring of 1977 the mantle clock came back onto the shelf. It was not redeemed and it was not sold, and I never saw it brought in, though I am at the counter six days of the week. The ticket was filled out in a small even hand I do not know, the name column blank, and the price not in shillings but in pence. Three pence.
The dinner set came back in 1979, at five pence. The concertina in 1981, at seven. The spirit-kettle last March, at nine pence. Each in the order he declared the spring of the fire, each years apart, each taken onto the shelf out of nothing I could catch at the door. Nobody redeems them. They sit, and are dusted, and the pence column shows what I have told you.
In 1977 I began a page at the back of the day book, BRATT, ORDER, 1 to 5. I copy the dates across and I keep the arithmetic for my own satisfaction, since there is nothing official in five pledges fifteen years apart. I will say what I keep noticing, which is that the pence come out tidy — three, five, seven, nine — and that I am lighter than I should be about writing eleven in that column, for the steps, whatever year it is now.
The manager will not walk the shelf with me. His word is that pledges go out and come back, and that odd pence are the small change of the trade, and he has told me twice, kindly enough, that a man who minds a shelf too long starts to see his own ledger in it. Mr Bratt himself I will not say much of. The Reach has him keeping a room somewhere by the docks, and whether he is in a position to come and pawn anything again I could not tell you and would not ask him.
Nobody else has confirmed any of it. That is the flat of the matter and I have kept the page in the day book all the same, because the clock was the first to be pawned and the first to come back, and there is an order the shelf respects that I only have on one man's word. What I want somebody to settle for me, out of a book bigger than mine, is who it is that pawns what was already pawned, in the order it was lost, and why the pence column is the only thing on Kessin Reach that never gets out of step.