Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Veyne ·
The Telegram That Signed Early
A telegraph clerk at the Veyne counter reports transmission slips arriving already signed, the signatures dated for that same evening and hours ahead of the messages themselves.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Cecil Tranmer, telegraph clerk"
I have taken dictation at the Veyne telegraph counter for six years, and I know the office's slip routine the way you know your own stairs, which is why I am writing this down.
The routine is this. A sender comes to the grille, hands the message across, I transcribe it onto the transmission slip, the slip carries the time of acceptance and the sender signs against the words, and the signed slip goes into the tray for transmission. A slip that comes up to the tray unsigned comes back down to me. That is the whole of it, and for six years there has been nothing in it.
This winter I began finding slips in the tray that were signed before the message was handed in. I will set out one occurrence plainly, because it is the clearest. At twenty past eight in the morning, opening the tray, I found a slip filled in and signed, time of acceptance given as ten that same evening. I had taken no message. I set the slip in the drawer and marked my sheet, and at ten that evening a sender did come to the grille, and handed in a message, and the message on the flimsy was word for word the wording already on the slip in my drawer, and the signature he put against it was the signature already on the slip.
I did not say anything the first time. The second time, a fortnight on, was a woman sending to her son, and again the slip was in the tray at eight in the morning with her signature on it, dated for the evening, and again the words she handed me at the appointed hour were the words on the slip, her spelling kept, her hesitation marked the way she marked it. I checked the drawer twice a day after that. There was always exactly one slip waiting.
I raised it with the afternoon clerk, Vera Cardew, and showed her one of the slips. She read it, said the signature was smudged, and went back to her frame. I put it to the counter manager and was told to bring the slip in question, and when I went to the drawer for it the slip was unsigned, in the state of any blank, and no comparison could be made. The other occurrences I noted on my own sheet, and my sheet is not evidence, as the manager was good enough to remind me.
I want to be careful about what I am claiming, because I am a clerk and not a fool. I am not claiming the messages arrived from anywhere. I am claiming that slips signed for times that had not happened were sitting in the tray, in a tray section I alone keep, and that when the times arrived, the senders arrived too, and signed. Nobody at the Veyne counter has been able to confirm seeing this, and the slips cannot be produced in the state I describe, and I accept that the record shows a clerk's story and nothing more.
So it stands unconfirmed, and I set down the question that has kept me from sleeping clean through the Thin Hour: if no one else at this counter has seen a slip signed early, whose hand has been practising my senders' signatures since six years before they needed them — or is it the other way about, and the senders practise the hand that is waiting for them in the tray?