Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Calder Row ·
The Month of the Fog Count
The school register audit counts fog days like truancies for October in the ward books, and October in the ward books has thirty-three.
- filed: "At the end of the fog month"
- reference: "CR/ED/12"
1. I was sent to Calder Row in the last week of the fog month to sit with the ward school's register books, because the District audit had turned them twice and found different numbers each time, and because nobody in the licensing chain wanted to put their own name to a decision about a primary school's attendance ledger alone. The hall is a concrete box with four strip lights and a smell of wet chalk that never leaves. The head teacher, a quiet woman called Imreth Casla, gave me the books without argument and left me to it. She said only one thing before she went: "Count October last only. Not this one."
2. She meant, I think, out loud, that she did not want to be in the room while I did it. I have written before in these reports about clerks who leave a room the moment a certain page is open, and I have usually assumed superstition. Here I began to think it might be procedure. The October book was on the bottom shelf, and it had been wrapped in brown paper and tied, like a parcel. The other months were stacked loose on top of it.
3. The plot of a register book is not awkward to follow. Each child has a line. Each day has a column. Absences are marked with a small grieving stroke, attendances with a plain tick, and at the foot of each page a day is given to the fog. Calder Row sits low against the water and the fog comes up the row like a tide with money, so the school has always recorded fog days separately: days the children did not attend because the buses could not see the road. Standard practice, in the low districts.
4. October last has thirty-three fog days at the foot of each of its pages. Not site counts. Every page. Thirty-one days in October, thirty-three recorded. And not recorded as corrections, either. The figures sit in the printed boxes, square and unhurried, as if the rules of the books understood them perfectly. The huntsmen of these ledgers, the inspectors before me, had each drawn a small careful line under the number and, I think, gone home.
5. I did what any auditor does. I counted the columns. October has days one to thirty-one, and the columns agree. I counted the ticks and strokes against the roll, and the arithmetic is right. The fog count is the only thing wrong, and it is wrong twice, not by one day, which could be a slip, but by two days, which looks like a determination.
6. On the fourth day of my visit I asked Imreth Casla where the third lost day had gone. She looked at me for a while and then said, in the flat tone of someone who has said it before, "You count the days when the fog came down the row. You do not count the nights it did not lift." I wrote that down. I have transcribed it here as she said it. I understand it less now than when I heard it.
7. Here is the part I will underline and no one above me will read. On page fourteen of the October book, a child called Berrin Tull has been marked present on a day on which, by the foot-of-page count, the fog lay so heavy that the road behind the school was closed. There is a tick, confident and large, in the column of a day the school says it could not have held. No other line in the book contradicts. The teacher's initials beside the tick are the head teacher's own. When I raised it, Imreth Casla said the boy had come to school that day because of the fog, not in spite of it. She would not explain.
8. I have finished the audit. My report is that the arithmetic holds, the roll is sound, the fog count exceeds the calendar by two days and that some of the excess reads as memory rather than error. I am recommending the book be rebound in its paper. I have signed my name, which is what they wanted me for, and I notice I have not looked at page fourteen since. The register is closed now, and the school has had thirty-one fog days this October. Nobody has troubled the difference. There is an infant who, when she is asked what she does before the bell, answers faithfully "I wait for it to come up the road," and nobody has troubled her either. I have put my name at the foot of the page and closed the book, and I have left the parcel paper in the drawer where it was.