Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Skerry Head ·
The Tide Bell of the Outer Basin
The tide log at Skerry Head records every strike of the outer basin bell against a name that the staff roster has never carried.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: "Edna Packwood, gate clerk"
The outer basin at Skerry Head keeps a bell on the end of the north pier, and the bell is struck once at each high water. The basin roster carries six names, the men the port pays to be on that water, and it has run that way since the bell was hung. In all that time the striking of the bell has not once been entered against any name on the roster.
I am the gate clerk, and the tide log is mine to keep. It is a plain ruled book at the gate: date, high water by the almanac, time struck, and struck by. The struck-by column has held one entry the whole way back, and the entry is: the bell-hand.
I did not begin the column. The log was old at my gate. But I have kept it fourteen years, and because this account is disputed I will set the log out plainly and let it be understood rather than agreed with.
The bell is struck one minute after high water. So the almanac, so the roster, and so the column: every strike time down the years sits one minute past, never two, never none. The column is headed struck by, which in a port book is a column of names. The pay list, which the port audits to the half-day, is exact. There is no bell-hand employed at Skerry Head.
The harbour office says the column carries a description and not a name, meaning whatever hand happens to strike, and that a port book may carry a description where a name is wanting. I say no hand on my roster has ever signed a strike in fourteen years, and a man who strikes signs. That is the custom of the port, and the ink of the rest of the book agrees with the custom.
The dispute is over the seventh of March gone. The almanac gave the night one high water, at eleven minutes past three. The log carries two strikes for that tide: the first at fourteen minutes past, one minute after the water and correct; the second at fifteen minutes past, on no water the almanac owns, entered struck by the bell-hand, unaltered, not struck through, in my hand, because I take the log off the night sheet as I always do.
The office holds the second line a clerical slip. I hold that a clerk who slips writes the same minute twice, and does not find her slip a fresh minute of its own to stand in. The almanac office was asked in writing for any high water it might have kept at fifteen past three that morning, and it has answered: none. A minute in a tide log must belong to a tide. This one has no tide to belong to, and it is entered just the same.
There was a hearing, which is why the account is disputed. Three of the roster swore to one strike only, and between them could not agree, asked which of the six had gone out to the bell. Two heard two strikes, and one of those afterwards moved his minute rather than hold to it. The sixth said a bell cannot ring itself and then signed his statement twice, which the office let stand and I did not query either.
The log itself is not in dispute. The office went through the book and allowed every entry genuine, kept by me, no alteration anywhere. What is disputed is the man behind the column: whether the pay list has missed a worker for forty years, or the column carries a phrase that outlived whoever coined it.
I keep the column as it comes. If some morning a roster name should stand in it, in one of the six hands and signed to one of their own strikes, the whole book would settle and the office would owe me an apology. It has not appeared, and nobody else will put his name to the fifteenth minute, though two of them will say it to me on the pier. The column stays mine to keep, and so far it is nobody's to confirm.