Witness account · 3 min read · Set in The Terraces ·
The Milk Float That Keeps Its Round
A roundsman describes a terrace whose bottles come back to the step washed before his milk arrives, and a ledger paid ahead of its week.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Brian Penny, dairy roundsman"
I run a milk round off the depot, and I will say it straight: on one terrace on my round the empties come back to the step washed before I have delivered to it, and the depot ledger for that terrace is ruled off and paid ahead of the date, and the checker has signed for both facts every week of the year.
A round is arithmetic and habit and not much else. I do ten to five, off the electric float, before the buses, in the same order every morning, because at that hour a man does not want to be thinking. The terrace takes nine pints: three at number 15, one at 17, two each at 19 and 21, none at 23, which has been closed the whole of my time on the round, and one at 25. Six steps off a shared path, and the same order in all weathers.
You deliver forward and take the empties as you go; that is the whole trade. Except on that terrace. I set a bottle in a porch, walk to the next step, and when I look back the washed empties are already standing where the full one was: rims clean, labels soaked off, no drip ring, the bottles always in the same three positions on the stone. The first time I put it down to early risers and asked at number 15. The woman there does not come down before the wireless goes on at seven, she told me through the letterbox, and the empties were dry at ten to five. The tap on that side of the terrace was capped off by the Corporation years before I had the round.
I have tested it plainly. One Friday I carried the nine bottles up in two loads, left nothing standing anywhere, came back down, and stood in the road a full ten minutes. By the time the street lamp went off, the washed empties were back on the steps, dry, squared to the stone edge, in the same positions as every other morning. I checked the float for a second crate I might have forgotten. There was no second crate, and the weight book at the gate made no complaint when I brought the float in. That book balances the round to the pint, week on week, and no round in my experience balances to the pint.
The office copy of the round ledger is where I stopped asking out loud. The column for that terrace is ruled off in the office green, initialled, and entered as paid, and it is ruled off ahead: on a Tuesday last spring I read it down as far as Friday, closed and initialled, Friday being three days short of happening. When the week arrived, the entries were correct to the half penny. The office says carbons. The carbons in that book are the wrong colour for the rest of the file, and I have said so, and been told to get on with my milk.
Norman Sellar had that terrace for a month in 1983 and handed it back inside the week. When the depot asked why, he said you get no complaints on it, and would add nothing else, and took an early pension in the spring. I am not saying he took the pension on account of milk. I am saying the dates fit, and nobody at the depot has ever disputed the dates.
So it is corroborated, in so far as anything at that depot is: the weight book and the ledger both carry Walter Ives's initials weekly, the manager countersigns the money column, and nothing has ever been queried, because nothing is ever short. Two sets of initials say the round is regular. Neither of them says who washes the bottles dry at ten to five on a terrace with a capped tap, and neither says who rules off a money column three days before the money could exist or initial half a week that has not happened. Regular is the word used. For whom it is kept regular, I cannot get one signature on paper to tell me.