THE REGISTER OF ARRIVALS

Being an Unofficial Account of Everybody Who Turned Up in This Parish Over Fifty-One Years, Kept Because the Realm Keeps a Magnificent Register of the Departed and None Whatever of the Other Thing.

Kept in a hard-backed book, in the wet, by Gammer Sowden, midwife of Mucklecombe and eleven miles about, who has never held an office, drawn a stipend, or been asked for a figure by anybody.

WHY I STARTED IT

Cheerful Mr Mortlake keeps a Register of the Recently & Reluctantly Departed. It is a lovely book. He is a lovely man, in the way of his trade, which is to say he is the most cheerful person in this realm and his subject is corpses and nobody finds this odd.

Every soul who dies in this parish gets an entry. Name, date, circumstance, and — because Mortlake is thorough and fond — some small true thing about them: what they were good at, who is going to miss them, what they said. The Reaping Authority has a slip. The chapel has a stone if there is money and a line in the book if there is not. There is a procedure, and it is dignified, and it works.

Now go and look for the other book.

There is no other book.

I have looked. I looked for eleven years before I gave up and started this one. There is no register of arrivals in this realm — no office, no slip, no form, no line. A person is not written down when they come. A person is written down when they are wanted for something: when they are old enough to be tithed, or old enough to be lent out, or dead. The Exchequer will find you. The Reaping Authority will find you. Nobody comes to write down that you have turned up.

Fifty-one years I have been catching them. I decided in my twelfth that if this realm was not going to keep the count I would keep it myself, in a book I bought with my own money, and I have got one thousand one hundred and ninety-four of them in here, and every one has a name in it and forty-one of them are in their own hand because they came back and put it there when they were grown, which was not my idea and which I have never once refused.

Each entry: The Arrival · The Weather · What Was Said · What Became of Them, So Far. The last is added later, in a different ink, by whoever is keeping the book when the news comes.

ON THE WEATHER COLUMN, WHICH PEOPLE FIND ODD

I put the weather in because in my first year a woman asked me what it had been doing when her boy came, and I did not know, and she cried about it — not about anything else, she was a practical woman and the boy was well, she cried because there was nothing at all to tell him.

So I put the weather in. It is the one detail I can always supply, in a realm where nothing else about an arrival is ever recorded, and it costs me nothing, and I have watched a great many grown people be inordinately pleased to learn that it was raining sideways on the morning they turned up, or — twice in fifty-one years, and both of them have mentioned it since — that it was not.

Trapp at the gauge gives me the figure if I ask. He has never once charged me for it and he pretends this is because his stipend is nominal.

1 · THE ONES WHO ARE WRITTEN DOWN TWICE

The Arrival. Any child of the Woods.

What Is Said. Very little to me. I am not from there and I do not ask.

What Became of Them. They go in my book, and they go in theirs — and theirs is the older and the better one and I have said so in company and would say it again. A child born at the Woods is entered that night, by name, in their own Ledger, by the keeper, and read back twice to whoever is listening; and that is the only place in this kingdom where that happens as a matter of course rather than because some old woman decided to buy a book.

The household upstairs gives them a number. My book gives them a line. The Woods gives them their name and reads it back to make sure it is right.

I have delivered in that country perhaps ninety times over fifty-one years and I want the following entered as the considered opinion of a woman who has seen every sort of arrangement this realm has: they have the best paperwork in the Kingdom of Sogmarsh, they keep it in the dark with a stub of pencil, and no Committee has ever heard of it.

2 · THE ONES NOBODY WRITES DOWN AT ALL

The Arrival. A child born to a household that is lent out, on an estate that keeps a roll.

The Weather. Bad. It usually is; that is not a sign, Trapp has checked it for me and it is a coin.

What Was Said. "Don't put us in nothing."

What Became of Them. I have that phrase in this book eleven times in fifty-one years and it is the only entry I have ever made that I did not want to write.

It is not fear of me. They know me. It is a perfectly sound calculation: a person who is on a list can be sent for, and a household that has watched its people be lent out and spent and crossed out has learned, correctly, that being counted has historically not been to their advantage.

So there are people walking about this parish now, grown, with families, who are in my book under a description and not a name, because that is what their mother asked for at the worst hour of her life and I was not going to argue with her.

The dry finding, and it is the whole of this book: a realm that only writes people down in order to take something from them will produce, within a generation, people who have learned not to be written down — and will then call them shiftless, and wonder why the count is short.

3 · THE FIRST DOCUMENT

The Arrival. Everybody.

What Became of Them. I asked, one winter, out of curiosity, of every grown person who came to that kitchen for eleven months: what is the first piece of paper with your name on it that you have ever seen?

Not one of them said a birth-line. There is no birth-line.

Forty-two said a tithe assessment. Nine said an indenture. Four said a summons. Two said a marriage. One said a Committee sheet on which she had been listed as a chainman.

And a man of sixty said that he had never seen his own name on a piece of paper in his life and asked me, politely, if I would write it, and I did, and he looked at it for a long while and then folded it up and put it away in his coat and thanked me, and I have thought about that more than about almost anything else in fifty-one years of this work.

The first document a person in this realm receives is nearly always a bill.

4 · THE PRACTICAL PART, WHICH IS WHY ANYBODY READS THIS BOOK AT ALL

I will not have it said that this is a book of grievances. Here is what fifty-one years is actually good for, and any young woman taking this trade should have it on the first page:

• Get the fire up before you get the water on. Everybody does it the other way round and everybody is

cold for the first hour.

• The damp is not your enemy; the cold is. This realm is wet and always will be; a wet warm room has

never lost me anybody. Do not waste an hour trying to dry a house. Spend it on the fire.

• Boil it. All of it. Twice if there is time. I do not know why this works. Clank told me a reason

once involving very small animals and I did not follow it and I do it anyway and my numbers are better than the physicians' at Murkminster, who charge.

• Take the second bucket. Always. The parish bucket is under the leak and is somebody else's and will

be wanted; carry your own, and a spare, and you will never be the woman standing in a doorway at three in the morning asking a frightened man where his bucket is.

• Ask what they want the child called before, not after. Not for sentiment. Because a woman who has

chosen a name has decided to have a future, and a woman who has not is telling you something, and you should listen to it and stay the night.

THE MIDWIFE'S CLOSING NOTE

One thousand one hundred and ninety-four.

Mortlake and I have compared books twice, over a long evening each time, which is the only social engagement either of us has ever properly enjoyed. His is official. Mine is not. His has the Reaping Authority behind it and a slip in triplicate; mine has me and a hard-backed book I bought in 1871.

And here is the thing we arrived at, both of us, the second time, quite late, and neither of us has said it to anybody else since:

This realm has decided, without ever discussing it, that a departure is an event and an arrival is merely a fact. One gets a procedure and a stone. The other gets nothing, and would get nothing still, except that a midwife in Mucklecombe was annoyed about it in 1871 and bought a book.

I am seventy-three. The book goes to Prue Quarry, who has been with me nine years and is better at this than I ever was, and who has already asked — she asked in her second year, which is how I knew — whether she might add a column.

She wants to put in who was in the room. Not the mother; the others. Who came. Who sat up. Who brought the second bucket.

I have told her it is her book now and she may rule it how she likes, and I have thought about her column every night since, because in fifty-one years and one thousand one hundred and ninety-four arrivals it had never once occurred to me, and she is twenty-nine, and she is right.

— A. Sowden, midwife, Mucklecombe, at the kitchen table, in the wet.