Short story · 4 min read · Set in Mill End ·
The Tins That Return Unmended
A tinsmith's booked jobs are finished before he touches a single iron, the tins coming back whole without a mark of his trade, and he enters the money paid as due and keeps it aside.
Wilf Gorse runs the tinsmith's at the foot of Mill End, the last trade down the hill before the people simply give up and call it the dip. His work is the oldest work on the street: a leak soldered, a bottom let in, a handle riveted back on three burrs. Tins come to him in net bags and in arms, each one written in his docket book with the owner's name, the fault and the charge, because Mill End believes in a book against a handshake.
For a year now his book has not been so much as a day behind, and that is the first wrong thing, though it took him two seasons to think of it as wrong. His trade lives on arrears. Half of Mill End pays at the quarter and the other half pays at the quarter after that, and a tinsmith who could show the foot of the year clean would be a sight owed to a museum. His year will be clean to the farthing. He has gone over it on the corner of the bench with a pencil sworn at for luck, and it is clean, and being clean it stands apart from every book his father kept and his father's father.
The second wrong thing is the tins. A tin leaves his bench with the solder unwet, the iron only that morning cleaned, and the week is not out before the tin is home again with its owner, whole. Not mended the way he would have mended it. There is no bright metal anywhere on it, no iron's touch, no new bottom, no filed burr; the old rivets are the same old rivets, worn the same way, and the dents are the dents the tin went out with. Only the holes are missing, gone as though the tin had thought better of them. Mrs Ada Snelling turned her biscuit tin over twice on his counter looking for the seam she had stood over in the autumn and said, well, that will save you the job then, and paid him the quoted charge, seeing the whole tin where she had carried him a leaking one. Tom Beake did the same with his grain scoop and did not look twice.
He gave the money back the first time, word of honour in the trade. The second time he could not find the owner to give it to; the third, the widow had gone into the county town with her daughter, the money was under the door in an envelope with the docket number pinned to it, and no franking on the envelope and no hand he knew on the pin. He stopped trying to send it back on the fourth. He has stopped, and instead he keeps a sweet jar on the high shelf under his putty, labelled in pencil FOR THE MENDER, and every coin that comes in for work no iron of his touched goes into the jar the evening it arrives. The jar has filled past halfway, sizing by eye, which is honest in a tinsmith.
The book is the part he has had to settle on. A payment received for a whole tin is a payment received, whoever did the whole; refusing a whole tin would have the street down him as going soft in the head. So he enters the jobs complete, name, charge, paid, the day each tin came back, and the book balances, and a balanced book does not show a folk what it ought to show. Still it is not clean in his conscience, and that is why the bench has changed shape. Evenings after close he lays the mender's tackle out ready: iron cleaned and tinned, the solder wound fresh on the spool, a soft rag folded where a hand would set down between heats. He has laid it every evening since the jar passed halfway and tidied nothing. Whose hand it is being laid ready for, he does not know, and the paying of a debt is the one order of work Mill End never asks twice about, so on the last Saturday of the month he stands the jar down on the bench by the tackle, open, and waits through it as long as the stove keeps warm. The jar has never yet gone down. Whose wages he is holding he cannot say; he only knows they have never called, and that they keep whole the tins while they wait.