Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Maes-y-Dydd ·
The Room Count of the Boarding House
A licensing clerk has counted eleven beds in the same boarding house for nine years, and nine years of paperwork has counted twelve.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Gilbert Stannage, licensing clerk"
I count beds for the District. The work is called inspection, and it is mostly arithmetic. Each January I take the roll of licensed lodging houses in Maes-y-Dydd, walk the stairs of every house on it, and mark what the licence says against what the building holds. In nine years I have noted worn treads, a latch gone slow, one meter wired to the landing lamp. I have never before had a number disagree with me, and be believed.
Winslow House is licensed for twelve beds. It holds eleven. Eleven rooms over three floors, one bed to a room, and in the hall every figure on every notice says twelve: the fire notice, the rate demand, the licence above the clock. Mrs. Joan Hartley has kept the house since 1974, and keeps it well — warm, clean, swept before eight. She is not a careless woman. She is not a lying one either, which is the only reason I have walked back nine Januarys.
Her books go in twelves. The laundry list leaves the house as twelve sheets, twelve pillow cases, twelve towels, and comes back counted the same. The rate card prices the week per bed, and the house is assessed on twelve bed-spaces, which she has never once appealed, though appeals are free and she is careful with money. There are twelve hooks on the key board, eleven keys on them through the day. At breakfast she lays twelve covers. She has laid them every morning for nine years, in a house with eleven names on the residents' book, and in nine years she has never had to buy a thirteenth cup.
The first winter I put it to her plainly. Twelve or eleven, Mrs. Hartley. She said, twelve is what the licence is for, and eleven is what the house is short of. It is not a mistake, and I do not carry it. I keep the difference swept. Then she asked after my mother's knee, who is nobody to her, and the winter carried on.
A slip in the household books could pass for clerking. The census will not pass it. In 1981 I sat with the enumerator, Derek Rideout, while he took the return for Winslow House: twelve usual residents in one hand, eleven I could match to beds, and a twelfth line filled in small, the letters sitting easy in the space the rule had left, as if the line had been printed around them. The surname was Crellin, initial A. Neither of us found a Crellin in any other return for the district, that year or either side of it. Rideout said, I take what the house gives me. The house gives twelve.
So it is corroborated, which is rare, slow, and arrives on all sides at once. The laundry confirms twelve. The district valuer confirms twelve. The fire officer's plan of 1961 carries eleven bedsinks and a pencil note at the end of the landing — twelfth, lst. — initialled in a hand the staff lists for 1961 do not contain, and the landing there ends in a wall. I put my palm flat to the wall when I checked it. It was a wall.
The licence fell due again this January, and I signed the figures as I have signed them nine times: twelve licensed, eleven found, difference carried, which is the house's own phrase and not the form's. I have never seen the twelfth bed made up for anyone in particular, and I have never found it stripped. The question I carry out of the house each year, past the key board with its eleven keys, is the smallest one in it: with eleven beds full and every breakfast run at twelve covers without a thirteenth cup ever bought, who is the shortage being kept for?