Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Mill Row ·
The Witness Who Counted Gates
A retired lock-keeper explains why his old logbook no longer agrees with what everyone else remembers about the gates.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Ernest Vale, retired canal lock-keeper"
I worked the Mill Row flight for thirty-one years, and in all that time I never once opened the first gate. That is the whole of it, if you want the short version. Somebody else opened it, or nothing opened it, and I only ever arrived to find the water level ready, as if the flight had decided in advance how the morning was going to go and had no particular need of me.
The flight at Mill Row is six gates over five pounds. You go up, coming from the cut. First gate at the rope-walk, last at the coal wharf. When I took the job in the winter of '54, old Tom Pursell, who kept the flight before me, told me one thing. He said, count them going up, and don't count a gate until it is already open. I did not understand him then. I understand him now, though I wish I did not.
You have to picture what a gate does. It is oak and iron, and to move it you lean on the beam with your whole back. And yet some mornings I would come up the towpath in the grey before proper light and the first gate would be standing open against its own beam, the water behind it level, the second gate still shut. I gave this no name. I worked the boat through, and by mid-morning the whole business was ordinary.
Except that I kept a log. Canal men keep logs; that is the job. Wind, level, ice, colour of the water, time of first movement through the flight. From December of '58 I kept a second column, out of some habit I cannot account for, and in it I wrote the time of the first gate — not the time I recorded it, but the time, so far as I could judge, that it must have been opened. And that column runs ahead. Every entry, every year. The first gate was always open before I got there, and the gap between its opening and my arrival walked itself forward along the page, minute by minute, until in the last year before I retired the log has the first gate opening at times I had not yet reached.
I have the log in front of me now. My wife wants me to put it in the-paper box with the rest, and I will not. The last full line is dated the 2nd of November, 1987. The first-gate time on that line is 03:12. I did not write it at 03:12; I wrote it at half past six, going off shift, from what I had seen at the rope-walk. But the arithmetic would not come out any other way that morning, and it has not since.
I went back to Mill Row this spring, as a visitor. I stood at the rope-walk and I waited for whatever waits there. Nothing opened. The gate stayed shut past eight, and a young man with a windlass did the job properly, and told me the gates had never opened themselves, not once, not in the flight's history, and he said it kindly, the way you talk to an old man you think has got his decades bunched up.
But my son has the log now, and he sat up one night and checked my figures against the tide tables the Authority still sells, and he says the column does not lie. He will not say what it means, and neither will I, but I will tell you what I told him on the phone, after. Count a gate when it is open, and not before, and never ask who left the water level for you. I never once worked out whether I was the keeper of the gates or merely the next name on their rota.
My son confirms it, and my old colleague Mrs Derry, who kept the tolls at the wharf, says she remembers me speaking of it before I retired, which is more than most men get. What nobody can confirm, and what I have stopped trying to, is who the sequence was for.