Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Ferry Road ·
The Postman of the Collected Rounds
A sorter at the Ferry Road office reports walk lists set out for rounds she has already delivered, the lists dated forward into the new year and signed for in her hand.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Iris Peabody, sorter"
I have sorted letters at the Ferry Road office for nineteen years, and I have never put a statement on record before this one.
I open my frame at ten to six, the same as every sorter on the early turn, and my pigeonhole is first thing I look at because the frame sits over my stool. On the morning in question, a Tuesday, there were three walk lists set square in the pigeonhole, printed on the office form, one for each of my rounds: the shore end of Ferry Road, the Passage, and the streets off the cut. They were set out the way the foreman sets them out on a normal working morning.
The dates at the head of the lists were not Tuesday. They were three mornings in March, one week apart. The rounds printed on them are rounds I have walked, street by street, with the item counts filled in against each road. The counts looked right to me. That was the first thing that troubled me: I could not fault a single line of them.
I took the lists along to the sub-postmaster, Frank Odell, because a printed form is not mine to query and I did not want it laid at my door. He read the three dates out loud, put the lists down, and went to the sign-on book. The sign-on book had me signed on for all three of those March mornings, at the early turn, in my handwriting. I do not remember signing. I could not have signed a date I have not lived. He turned the pages back and forward and found further advance sign-ons for me, in my hand, through the spring, at a fortnight's spacing, matching the way the March lists were spaced.
The signature is mine. That is what I keep coming back to. The collection books that come back to me checked in show my name written where my name goes, against collections on those March dates, and the ink of it sits in the page the way my pen sits in a page, which is a thing a sorter knows about her own hand. Frank had the writing photographed for the file and the comparison was done properly, by people whose job that is, and they came back with one word, which was mine.
The other two sorters on the frame saw the lists before I said anything about them, because the pigeonhole is not curtained and Gerald Simms was standing at my shoulder when I opened it. He read the dates and he said nothing for a while and then he said he had a March list in his own pigeonhole the previous week and had put it down to a printing error. He signed my statement the same afternoon. The foreman signed for the rounds, confirming the item counts on the lists agree with the load figures he books for those roads in a normal March. Frank signed last, as the officer responsible.
So it stands confirmed, in the plain sense: the lists exist, the sign-ons exist, the hand is my hand, and three men besides me have put their names to that. What nobody at the Ferry Road office has been able to confirm, and what I would like confirmed before the first of the March mornings comes, is this: if I am signed on for rounds I have not walked, who ticks the houses on the street sheets for those mornings, and why is the pencil on the ticks not mine?