Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in The Terraces ·
Why the Memorial Is Polished Mostly
Two names on the war memorial shine and the rest go grey, and this is explained at great length by people who do not know.
- status: folklore
The memorial stands at the head of Millward Steps where the terraces fold into each other, a stone shaft with a bronze list on the seaward face, forty-four names in all, and above them in smaller letters the words LET THEIR ORDER BE KEPT. Nobody now says what order was meant. The letters are of the period when every public sentence was a promise or a warning, and the men who cast them are not available for correction.
By any reasonable custom the bronze would be gone black by now, the way such lists go in towns where the damp has the last word. It is not black. It is, as every visitor notices within a minute, half black. Two of the forty-four names are bright as coins, and the other forty-two are in the grey-green that bronze chooses for itself, and the contrast is exactly visible from the bottom of the steps, and is, everyone agrees, wrong in a way that no one has yet been able to put a hand on.
The obvious theory is that two families remain in the terraces with a rag and a tin of polish and a debt. This theory is repeated on the steps monthly. It is wrong, and the terraces know it is wrong, because the families of the two bright names moved out before the war with the trains were old, and no successor has taken up the habit, and attempts to do so have been quietly rebuffed. A woman named Vera Cormick polished her own front step and the name of her grandfather on the same afternoon for eleven years, and she will tell you — she is ninety now and tells everyone — that it was never her work that made the letters bright. She says she polished the name and it dimmed again by Friday, and something else polished it again by the middle Sunday, and that she gave up doing twice a job that one unknown hand did better.
The unknown hand belongs to the caretaker. Or rather: the caretaker does the round, and the round is even, and this is where the explanation everyone reaches for comes apart.
There has been a memorial caretaker in the terraces continuously since the year the shaft went up, the post passing without notice from man to man, never advertised, never once vacant longer than a week. The present holder is a quiet man named Dennis Ackroyd, who also empties the bins at the library and no one has ever heard him state an opinion. Dennis walks the round on the first Sunday of each month, rag and tin, and he begins at the top left of the list and works rightward across every name, and he does this with such evenness that two of the terraces once followed him at a distance of half a garden to see it done. He polished all forty-four. He took the same count of strokes on each line. He spent no longer on the two names than on their neighbours in either direction.
And by the following Sunday the forty-two had gone back to grey, and the two were bright.
You can see this makes trouble for the obvious theories. If Dennis's polish holds a month on every name equally, then something subtracts it from forty-two of them and declines to subtract it from two. If the two names are being polished by piety, the piety runs at a rate exactly equal to Dennis's rag and fails where he fails. The terraces have had ninety years with the arithmetic and have not closed it.
There are two sayings about it. One is that the names are bright where the dead themselves would want to be remembered, which is the sentimental version, and is told to children and does not bear a minute's examination, since the two names belong to men who by every account were the least likely of the forty-four to have arranged anything after death. The other saying is older and lower, and is that the memorial is a document, and a document is kept legible where it is still wanted, and the two bright names are bright because something is still reading them — and the saying stops there, exactly where the saying stops.
Dennis himself has been asked, once, directly, at the tenants' meeting, by a man new to the terraces who had not learned the local form of the question. Dennis considered him for a while and said that the round covered every name and that the round was even, and that if a name would not hold polish that was between the name and the bronze, and then he closed the tin and the meeting understood itself dismissed.
Who tells it today? The caretakers tell it, or rather they decline to, and the terraces keep it for the first Sunday of the month, when the smell of metal polish comes down Millward Steps at nine exactly, on its way to a list it makes even and a brightness it does not make.