THE YEAR NOBODY CORRECTS

A Tale of Sogmarsh — being the Clerk's account of 1672, in which one tired man filed two papers in the wrong order and the realm has been living in the result ever since.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

The Clerk sets this down because he is the Clerk, and because the alternative is that it goes unrecorded, and this office has quite enough of that.

There are two facts in the register which every soul in this realm knows separately and no soul has ever put beside the other, and the Clerk, having nothing better to do one wet winter and access to the older drawers, has put them beside each other, and wishes now that he had not.

Fact the first. The status of House Haver — that aristocratic family which declines to exist, in order to dodge the audit — is entered as PROBABLY HYPOTHETICAL, and has been, unaltered, since 1672.

Fact the second. The Haver Goose Tournament has been won, every year without exception, by the Goose, since 1672 — including on the celebrated occasion when it reached the final against itself, and won, and took the Perpetual Trophy, and did not acknowledge the committee.

The Clerk invites the reader to look at those two years for a moment. He looked at them for the better part of a fortnight.

Here is what is in the drawer, and the Clerk warns the reader that it is a great deal duller than they are hoping, and that this is the point of it.

In the autumn of 1672 a clerk of this parish — he is named in the margin and the Clerk will not repeat it, he has descendants and they are decent people — was working through the quarter's returns. It was a bad autumn. The register for that month is in a hand that starts square and ends like a man falling downstairs. He had, by his own note on the reverse of the third sheet, "been at the turnips three days" — the rotten count, which anyone who has done it will tell you does something to a person.

He had two papers on his desk.

The first was the Haver family's return — the annual declaration of persons, holdings and liabilities, which the Havers had submitted late, in a hand of enormous grandeur, and which is the document upon which their standing as a family is entered.

The second was the tournament result — the Goose, first; the field, nowhere — which comes in on a similar sheet, of a similar size, from a body with a similar seal, because in this realm nobody has ever seen the value in different paper.

He filed the tournament result under FAMILIES.

He filed the family return under FIXTURES.

Then he went home. He meant to correct it in the morning. He wrote himself a note about it, and the note is still there, at the foot of the sheet, in the falling-downstairs hand: "put right thurs."

He did not put it right on Thursday. The Clerk has looked. There is no evidence he ever came back to it at all, and the Clerk has formed his own view about the health of a man who wrote a hand like that at the end of that particular week, and will keep it to himself.

The consequences are as follows, and the Clerk sets them out in the order the office incurred them.

One. The FAMILIES register, consulted the following spring on the matter of House Haver, was found to contain — where the family's persons and holdings should have stood — a goose.

Two. The office, being an office, did not conclude that a mistake had been made. The office concluded that the return was defective, and wrote to the Havers requiring clarification.

Three. The Havers, who had submitted their return correctly and in a hand of enormous grandeur, and who had already grasped in a general way that being uncertain was cheaper than being taxed, replied — in the words which have gone into the language of this realm and which the Clerk records here as the load-bearing sentence of the entire affair:

"Certainly not."

Four. The office, having a defective return and a refusal to clarify, and having no column for we have lost your family in the fixtures, entered the only status available to it for a matter attested by everybody and evidenced by nobody, and entered it provisionally, pending resolution: PROBABLY HYPOTHETICAL.

Five. Meanwhile, in the FIXTURES register, the tournament committee found itself in possession of a document listing the persons, holdings and liabilities of an aristocratic family, and, being also an office, did not conclude that a mistake had been made either. It concluded that it had received an entry. It entered the Havers as a competitor, once, in 1672, and they have never withdrawn, because withdrawal requires a letter and the Havers have not written one since — and a competitor who does not attend forfeits, and a forfeit gives the walkover to the field, and the field, that year and every year since, has been the Goose.

Six. In 1672 the field consisted of the Goose and, owing to a further clerical matter the Clerk declines to go into, the Goose. It reached the final against itself. It won. It has retained the Perpetual Trophy ever since on the strength of a competitor who cannot withdraw because the office is not certain it exists, and does not acknowledge the committee, which the Clerk considers fair, since the committee has never acknowledged its own filing.

That is all. That is the whole of it. Three hundred and fifty-odd years of the realm's most cherished mystery and its most reliable sporting fixture, and underneath both of them there is no curse, no bargain, no old dark thing in the wing that appears on no survey — there is a man who had been at the turnips three days and put two papers in the wrong two drawers and wrote put right thurs and did not.

The Clerk knows what the reader wants. The reader wants it to be more than that. The reader has been raised, as we all have, on the notion that a thing which has stood for three hundred years must have something underneath it. The Clerk has spent his working life in the drawers of this office and can tell the reader, with the confidence of a man who has looked, that what is nearly always underneath a great standing mystery of this realm is a tired person, a bad week, and a note about Thursday.

The Clerk did, naturally, propose that it be corrected. He is the Clerk. It is a two-minute job: swap the sheets, amend the register, restore House Haver to the families and the Goose to the fixtures, and the error of 1672 is undone.

The reply came back from Murkminster in eleven days, and it is pinned above the Clerk's desk, and it reads:

The Committee thanks the Clerk for his diligence.

The Committee observes that House Haver has enjoyed the status of PROBABLY HYPOTHETICAL for three hundred and fifty-one years, has paid no tax throughout, and has raised no objection. Should the status be corrected, the Crown's claim for arrears would fall due, and would be calculated from 1672, and the Committee has performed this calculation and does not wish to discuss it.

The Committee observes further that the Haver Goose Tournament is the oldest continuous fixture in the realm, that it is much loved, and that the Goose's title rests upon a competitor whose existence the Committee would, by the proposed correction, be obliged to confirm — with the result that the Goose's three hundred and fifty-one victories become, retrospectively, contested.

The Committee is advised that the Goose would take this badly.

The matter is regular. No further entry is required or invited.

So the sheets stay where they are. House Haver does not exist, and does not pay, and answers certainly not to all enquiries. The Goose wins in the spring. The register carries the error of 1672 in the same ink as everything else, and will carry it after the Clerk is dead, and after whoever reads this is dead, and it will still be the same two sheets in the same two drawers, and nobody will ever put right thurs.

The Clerk records the whole of it here, accurately, without hope, because that is his office.

Every unshakeable institution in this realm rests on something a tired person did wrong on a Thursday — and it stays standing not because nobody has noticed, but because by the time somebody does, the cost of being right has grown greater than the cost of being wrong, and it has grown that way one quiet year at a time.