Archived report · 3 min read · Set in The Licensing Office ·
The Middle Name Given by Nobody
At the annual roll of married names the licensing office finds one column completed in a hand eleven years dead, and cannot close the line.
- filed: "at the annual roll"
- reference: "LO/MN/44"
1. This report is filed at the annual roll and concerns the register of married names kept at the licensing office, Murrow, and one entry in that register which the office has been unable to bring to a close.
2. The register of married names is not a statutory book. It is an office habit of long standing: each November the year's marriages are copied into a ruled volume in the registrar's own hand, the name borne at marriage, the name assumed, the date of the ceremony, and beneath these the signature by which the party elects to be written thereafter. The signature is the point of the book. Everything above it is courtesy.
3. Between the two names runs a narrow ruled column, repeated on every page, headed MIDDLE NAME (IF GIVEN). It is completed only at the party's spoken word, checked against the entry, and initialled at the foot of the line. In most years the column runs empty from cover to cover. The office prefers it so. An unfilled column is a form of order, and order is the whole of what a register can promise anybody.
4. At this year's roll the column was found to hold one word. At line 41 the marriage of Doreen Abbiss to Mr. Gerald Prew is entered in its proper place, certificate verified, both signatures genuine, dates in sequence; and in the middle-name column, ruled fair, no erasure beneath it, stands the word Mildred.
5. The registrar has recorded his finding in the margin, because there is nowhere else for it to go. The hand is not his own, and he knows it absolutely. It is the hand of Mr. Frederick Larner, registrar here before him, under whom he served his articles: the hand that set his spacing, corrected his ruling, and signed his first declarations. The specimen is exact to the middle fifties, the ink pressure, the shortened cross of the d, the way the tail of the l turns in at the last moment rather than away. Larner retired in 1971 and died in 1974. This register was begun in 1975, in the present registrar's hand, at his suggestion. Larner never wrote a word in it. There was never a year, after 1975, in which he could have.
6. Checks made: the ruling passes under the word unbroken; the word sits square inside its column and touches neither rule; the ink, by an old man's eye and then a jeweller's loupe, is of the same age as the rest of the line, which is not a sentence this office likes written down anywhere. The signature beneath is the bride's. Nothing else on line 41 is out of order.
7. The party was written to, in the terms the office uses when it cannot state its purpose. She replied by return that she has no middle name; that her mother's name was Mildred; that she refused it, aloud, at fourteen, and has not been offered it since by anyone in any form. She asks what the name was doing in the book. The office has no answer she would find printable, or, at the hour of filing, any answer at all.
8. The office possesses no instrument for striking out a name that nobody gave. The register of married names has no amendment procedure, being, as set out above, not a statute; and the registrar declines to rule the line through, on the stated ground that a line ruled through would be his hand, and the column is not yet proven to be closed.
9. The entry therefore stands, and the book returns to the drawer beneath the counter, with the others. What the file leaves open is narrower and worse than the question of removal. This year's roll is complete, ruled, and signed, thirty-nine lines and a margin of findings. Next November a new page will be opened and a new column ruled, and some fifty marriages will be copied in. The registrar has put one question to that page, not to any person, and the office records it here in his own words: whether it will begin at line 42.