The Dry Year

An Ordinary Tuesday

[FIRST SITTING. Witness 1, a laundress of Cooper's Row. Sworn. The witness gave her name for the register and asked that it be left out of the printed record; granted. She was asked to begin with an ordinary Tuesday.]

A Tuesday. You want an ordinary one. Which? There are fifty-two in a year and they're all the same, that's what a Tuesday is for. If one was different you wouldn't call it ordinary, you'd call it the day something happened, and I think that's the one you want and you're coming at it from behind, like a cat at a pie. I don't mind. I've never sat in front of a table with three people at it, and I've put on my good collar, and I'd be obliged if you'd let me go round the long way. [The Commission said she might.] Then it's Tuesday.

I wake at ten to five. Nobody wakes me. Joss used to say the Level doesn't wake because it never sleeps, but I wake because there are two coppers in my yard and a handcart's worth of sheets that came down off the Hill on Monday night, eleven houses of them, and nobody is going to wash those sheets but me and the water, and the water is the better worker. I light the fires under both coppers. I put the lye to soak. Then I stand in the yard in my nightgown with my arms round myself and wait, because at ten to six the pipe knocks. [The Level: in Weirbank, the common name for the town's water system, after the surveyor's instrument. See Exhibit 1.]

One knock. In the wall by the yard door, low down, like a knuckle on a door when you aren't expecting anybody. That's the Level lifting the Row. It brings the pressure up before it's wanted, so that at ten past six, when I open the tap, the water comes into the big copper as if it had somewhere to be. Fills it to the line in eleven minutes. I know it's eleven minutes because I've timed it, every Tuesday, for three years, and you'll be wanting to know why, and the answer is Mab Orrey. [Asked to show the knock, the witness rapped once on the table with her knuckle, low, near the edge. The Commission noted that it was a good knock.]

Mab Orrey keeps the wash-house on Bell Street, two streets over, and I'll say this for the record: a perfectly good wash-house for people who don't mind a grey collar. Mab says there is no knock. Mab says it's a loose joint, or my imagination, or the copper ticking as it heats. Mab says the Row gets the same as Bell Street and the same as the Hill and the same as the Mill, to the pint, because the Level is a machine and a machine has no favourites. Well. I bought a pressure dial off a man at the autumn fair, what I take in on a good Friday, and screwed it on the tap, and every Tuesday at ten past six I wrote down what it said. The Row reads nineteen. Bell Street reads seventeen. I know Bell Street reads seventeen because I walked over there with the dial in my apron, and stood in Mab's yard, and read it off her tap in front of her cat. She didn't speak to me for a week, and then she did, and that was worse. [The witness handed up a notebook bound in oilcloth, which was marked Exhibit 2. The Commission asked what the dial measured. She said, "Nineteen."]

I'll tell you the one time it didn't knock, because you'll hear it from Mab and she'll have it wrong. The third of March, three years ago. Mab came to my yard to see for herself. She brought her own cup. Ten to six: nothing. Not a tick. I stood there with my arms round myself and felt my whole case go out of the wall. Ten past six the water came in flat as a plate, and the dial said seventeen. Seventeen! Mab read it over my shoulder. "Seventeen," she said. "Same as mine." Then she finished her tea and went home. One Tuesday in three years it didn't knock, and she picked that one. [Asked whether she thought the Level had been shy that morning, the witness said she thought it was a joke. Asked on whose part, she said she hadn't worked that out.]

You'll want to hear about Joss, because everybody does when I say "Joss said." Joss was my husband. He was a cooper: barrels first, and then buckets when barrels stopped, and the Mill's hoops, and he coughed. The year we married he put the pipe into the yard himself, dug the trench from the Row main with his own spade, two winters of Sundays, because he said no wife of his was going to carry. He said the Level was the only thing in Weirbank that had never once been late. He said it mostly to be unkind to the Board, who have been late to everything since I was a girl. He died eight years ago in November, on a Friday.

The copper filled that morning at ten past six. Of course it did, it was a Friday. I stood in the yard with the water coming in and him in the back room, and I thought, it doesn't know. It's a pipe. And then it stopped. On the line. Right on the line. It never stops on the line, it has a lag, it goes over by a hand and I have to mop; and that morning it stopped on the line like a clerk at a counter. [The witness paused.] I'm not soft. I know a valve when I see one. I have a pressure dial. [The witness was allowed a minute.]

Look at these. Forty years of lye, I can't feel a hot plate. By seven the big copper's boiling and I'm into the whites: boil, bat, blue, rinse, mangle, line. The Hill's sheets are the heavy work. They keep a great many sheets on Linden Walk and every one has to be the same white, as if there were a committee. The Salt Street baker's aprons go in with the second boil, because he won't have them mixed with anything. Four nurses bring me their collars on their own time, since the hospital laundry starches as if it had a grudge. By noon the Row's lines are full and anyone walking down it gets a face of somebody's bedsheet; that's how the Row says good morning. The yard smells of lye and wet wool until Thursday, and I've stopped noticing, which Joss said was the surest sign you'd been somewhere too long.

At six the tap-house at the bottom of the Row wakes up, I can hear it from the yard. It's for the nine households that have no pipe of their own. Old Brisk from number six goes first with six buckets on a yoke; she's seventy-four, and she carries like a woman half her age and complains like a woman twice it. Then the three Tanner girls with one bucket between them, and the cobbler's boy with the can for his father's tea, and a few of the Salt Street women, who come down because their own tap-house is a good deal further than ours and they'll not admit it. In the doorway sits Tansy with the bell-cord looped twice round her wrist. She's kept that tap-house since before the Schedule, and the cord is round her wrist because of the children. Nine households, thirty-eight people, I've counted. They come and fill and go, and it's all done by half past, and nobody has ever left that tap-house without what they came for. I'd like that written down. [It was written down.]

Over the door there's a slate, and every morning at five the Level writes on it with that iron arm it has, with a hand like a dentist. "Today's measure: full." Thirty-one years it has said full. Some mornings it says "Full. Mill bleaching, dip at nine, come early," and you come early, because at nine, when the Mill bleaches, the water dips; you can set a clock by it, and the Level tells you first. That is all it has ever said. The children pull the bell for a dare. Once, and the turncock comes up from the pump house with his dog, furious, and you run. Twice and hold it, that's trouble, a main gone, a fire. Nobody has rung twice on the Row since the night the Mill roof went.

I was thirty-five that night, and Joss had come home complaining about a new lot of hoops. We heard the Mill bell go over on the Hill side, which it never does, and then the tap-house bell at the bottom of the Row, twice and held, and Joss was in his boots before I'd sat up. I want you to know what I saw, because everybody tells it as the Level saving the Mill, and it didn't save the Mill, the Mill burned three hours. It saved Salt Street. Before the bells, before anyone had a bucket in their hand, every tap on the lower Row went flat, every one, and the Level sent everything it had to the fire main on Salt Street, where the roofs touch. By the time the water came back to us the Mill roof was gone and Salt Street still had its own. They put it down to a clever turncock. The turncock was in bed with a fever, and he'll tell you so himself. [Asked what she concluded, the witness said she concluded that someone had to take the water from the Row to give it to Salt Street, and that nobody had asked the Row, and that she had never minded. She asked whether this was an ordinary Tuesday. She was told it was not. She said, "No. It was a Wednesday."]

What the Row says about it depends on who you ask. Old Brisk at number six says it's the ghost of the first turncock, who drowned in the Brown the year the weir was built. The Mill hands say it's the Board's spy. The children say it's a very large dog. Joss said it was a clerk who'd finally found a job he could do. I say it's a valve with manners, and I'll thank you not to write that down. [The Commission wrote it down.]

You'll have the Schedule in front of you, I suppose. I've never read it through; I know the page in the almanac, page nine, and I know where I am on it. I come after the hospital and the Mill and the Registered, and I'm "all other households." Fourth Class. The Rest, we say on the Row, I'm the Rest. I've been the Rest thirty-one years and I've never minded, because the Rest has never been cut. Not once, not in any dry. It's only the Fifth Class that goes, the gardens and the fountain and the washing-green. You see the lawns on the Hill go the colour of a doormat, and that's the Schedule being done.

Registered is for the sick and the old and the babies, and it wants a form with a stamp. When Joss was at his worst, the third winter, a girl at the water office told me I could put him down, he'd qualify, he was bedridden. I said he's not a case. She said it's only a form. I said you'd be surprised what a form does to a man, and I didn't put him down. He'd have hated it. He said the Schedule was for when there wasn't enough, and there was always enough, so what would we want in the book for. So we stayed the Rest and it was the same water on a Tuesday. [Asked whether she regretted it, the witness said no. After a moment she said, "Not then."]

[The Chair asked whether the witness wished to say anything of the forty-first day. She was reminded that the Commission would hear that day from many witnesses, and had asked her, for the moment, only what a Tuesday was.]

I'm confining myself. I'm only saying I've been the Rest for thirty-one years and never cut, and on the morning of the forty-first day the slate at the bottom of the Row said something it has never said, and I'd like it noted that I wasn't asked. [The Chair said it was noted.]

In the evening I take the sheets in, still warm, and bank the fires, and rub goose-grease into my hands, and sit on the upturned tub in the yard until the pipe stops ticking. It ticks as it settles. I say goodnight to it. I don't mean anything by that. I say goodnight to the mangle as well. [Asked whether the mangle answered, the witness said the mangle had better manners.]

May I ask you something? Is it going to be turned off? That's what they're saying on the Row, that you're here to decide whether to put it back the way it was or put it out. I only want to know whether to be buying a yoke at my age. [The Chair said the Commission could not say; that it had decided nothing; that it had not yet heard from most of the town.] Because I've asked the tap, you see. I ask it in the mornings now. And the tap doesn't say.

[The witness was thanked. Her notebook, Exhibit 2, was copied and returned to her at her request. She said she had a Tuesday to write down.]

Three-Forty

[SECOND SITTING. Witness 2, a baker of Salt Street. Sworn. The witness had brought a loaf for the Commission. The Chair said the Commission could not accept gifts from witnesses; the loaf was left on the table. He was asked to describe an ordinary morning.]

Might I ask the time? [The clerk gave it: ten past nine.] Then I have been up eight hours and ten minutes, and I would like that on the record, so that if I say something foolish after eleven you will know to forgive it. I rise at one. I light the oven at ten past, because my father lit it at ten past and his father before him, and an oven doesn't care, but I do. By half past one I am scaling, by two I am kneading, and by half past three the first batch is on the boards, proving, and I stand in the middle of the floor and do nothing at all. That, I think, is the part of the day you are asking for, though nobody has said so: the nothing between half past three and twenty to four.

At twenty to four the pipe hums. Not a knock; I understand the Row gets a knock, and I would call that a difference of address. Salt Street gets a hum. It begins at three-forty exactly, low, from the main under the cobbles at the corner, and comes up the wall, and the trough in the back fills. Four minutes and eleven seconds. Sixty buckets, to the line. I have timed it every morning for twelve years, since my father's stroke, and I keep a sheet. You may have the sheets; they are the only honest documents I own. The first thing in my day that arrives when it says it will arrive is the water.

I should say why twelve years. My father had his stroke on the bakery floor some time before half past three on a Tuesday morning in October, and I found him there, because I came down at half past three to take the second batch and the first was not on the boards. I will not tell you the rest of that morning; it is not the Commission's business. I will say that I was on my knees on the boards with my hand under his head when the pipe in the wall began to hum, and it was twenty to four, and I looked at the clock over his shoulder and thought: something in this building is still keeping time. I wrote it down that night on the back of a flour ticket. Three-forty. Four-eleven. And the next morning I wrote it again, because it seemed to me a thing worth keeping a count of. My father lived two more years and did not know me after that morning, and I had the sheets. [The witness was allowed a moment.]

I do not say the rest of my day is unpunctual. I say the rest of my day has people in it. The flour man comes at four and he is a good man and he has never once been where he said he would be, because there is a bridge, or a horse, or a daughter. My apprentice comes at five. I am very fond of her and she arrives like weather. The water has never had a horse. [Asked whether that was a complaint, the witness said it was an observation, and that he wished to be understood.]

At five to five I go out to the front door with my tea. It is the only time I am in the street before the shutters go up, and I watch the slate. The Salt Street tap-house is at the corner, across from the bakery, under the lamp. At five exactly the arm comes out of the box in the wall and writes. It is iron, with a joint at the elbow and a little cup of chalk at the end, and it writes in what I would call a round hand: not pretty, a clerk's hand that has been told to be clear. "Today's measure: full." I have watched it do that something near four thousand times, and I will tell you the one thing I have noticed, which is that he pauses before the word full. Half a second. Every time. As a man does who is checking the sum before he says it. [The Commission asked whether he believed the pause was deliberate. The witness said he believed it was a lag in the arm. He said he liked it better as a pause.]

At six I raise the shutter and the town comes to the window in the order it always has. The hospital cooks first, for the ward loaves; then the Mill's early shift, for the dinner-pails; then the Row. The Row sends children, mostly, with a copper or two shut in a fist and strict instructions not to drop either, and they stand at the sill with their noses just over it, and I give each of them the heel of a loaf, which is not in the price and which I deny. Salt Street takes its bread last and complains about it. At seven the Hill's housemaids come in their good shoes and say "the usual" to a man who has never in thirty years known what the usual is for any house on the Hill, and I give them the large white, and nobody is disappointed. That is the order. I could draw it for you. I could tell you the one day the Row's children came in after the Hill's, and it was a Monday, and it had snowed.

I am going to tell you something about myself that is not to my credit, and I ask the clerk to put it down exactly. Twenty-three years ago, the night the Mill roof went, I was twenty-seven and the bakery was my father's, and I was carrying sacks out of the back door with the roofs on Salt Street catching from one to the next like a row of dry candles. And the water came. I do not mean it was turned on. I mean that all at once there was water at the back door, out of the fire main, enough to put out a house, and I stood in it to my ankles with a sack of flour on my shoulder and thought: where has that come from? Nobody had rung. Nobody could have reached the pump house. I thought it was luck. It was a week before I learned it was the Row's water. The Row had gone dry from the Mill end down to the tap-house so that we should have a river. And nobody on Salt Street said thank you to the Row, not one of us. I would like that on the record against us.

The Friday after, I put a loaf on the cap. [Asked what the cap was, the witness said it was the iron plate over the valve at the corner of Salt Street and Mill Lane, which the turncock lifts when he checks the main, about the size of a platter.] I do not know why. I did not suppose it would be eaten. I put the first loaf of the Friday batch on the cap, the one that comes out best, because the oven is truest at that hour, and I went in. I have done it every Friday since. Twenty-three years. Eleven hundred loaves and some, near enough, and I would give you the number exactly but the sheets go back only twelve. And the same morning a second loaf, which I carry down to the tap-house at the bottom of the Row, and give to the woman in the doorway with the cord round her wrist. She has never said a word about it. I have never said a word about it. We have an understanding, which is that neither of us will mention it, and I would be grateful if the Commission would extend the same courtesy. [The Commission observed that it was now on the record. The witness said he had thought it might be.]

Is the bread taken? [The question was put by the Chair.] It is taken. I do not know what you have been told. My apprentice says it is the pigeons, and she is right that there are pigeons, and she is right that they come, and she is wrong to say so in front of the shop. The loaf is gone by six. I leave it on the cap, it is gone, that is what taken means. [Asked whether he believed the Level took it, the witness said he had not said the Level took it and would be obliged if the Commission did not say he had. He said the loaf was for the Level, which was a different thing from the Level having it.]

I expect they have asked the matron whether he knows, and the turncock, and the Mill. I have never asked. I leave a loaf. It costs me one loaf a week and I have never in twenty-three years been short a loaf. If I am wrong, I am out one loaf a week; if I am right, I am out the same; so it seems to me the question does not change the arithmetic.

You will want to know about the class. Bakers are First Class: the hospital, the bakers, the fire cistern, the pump house itself. The Board decided thirty-one years ago that bread is a need, and I think they were right. I have never been short. I have never known what it is to stand at a dry tap at half past three with dough proving. It is not to my credit, it is the trade. I bake for the Hill and I bake for the Row and a loaf costs the same in both, I will not have it otherwise, and I have never in my life had to ask anyone whether I might have water. I think that if you have never had to ask, you had better be careful about forming views of those who do. [The Chair asked whether this was a view. The witness said it was a caution.]

The river went below the weir lip on the twenty-fourth day. You could hear it: the weir stopped making its noise. I had not known it made one. Salt Street went quiet in a way I can't describe to you, as if a clock we had all stopped hearing had been taken off the wall. By the thirtieth day people were asking me whether bread would go short, and I said, he would tell me, and I did not hear myself say it until I had said it. He. I do not call the Level he. It is how it came out.

By the thirty-fifth day you could read the town in the window. The Hill's maids came at seven with their sleeves wet to the elbow, because their mistresses had begun rinsing cloths in a bucket instead of under the tap. The Row's children came as they always came, but they held the coppers in both hands. A woman I had never seen before, with a baby, stood back from the sill until the others had gone and then asked, very quickly, whether I sold yesterday's, and I said I sold what was in the window, and gave her the heel of a loaf, and she did not say thank you, and I was glad. One does not want thanking for that.

On the thirty-first day the hum was late. Three-forty and forty seconds. I stood on the floor with the clock in my hand and thought, the clock is wrong, and I took it out to the front door and compared it with the clock over the corn exchange, and the corn exchange said what I said. Forty seconds. I have twelve years of sheets and I had never once written anything but three-forty. The next morning it was forty-five seconds. The morning after, forty. It crept, and by the fortieth day it was a minute and ten, and the trough filled in four-eleven all the same, to the second, so there was nothing whatever to complain of, and I stood on my own floor every morning at twenty to four, waiting for a pipe to clear its throat.

I put a second loaf on the cap. [Asked why, the witness said he had thought the Level might be tired. Asked whether he believed that, he said, "I know it can't be tired." He said there was no harm in a second loaf.]

I went to the pump house on the thirty-seventh day. I am not a man who complains, but I thought the main might have a fault, and a fault would cost me a batch. Dunstan, the turncock, said the pump was perfect, which he said was a worry in itself, because he would have liked a fault to blame. He said she was thinking. I said a pipe doesn't think. He said no, and gave me a cup of tea. I should add that he was not well; his dog had been ill the week before, and he had been away, and had only just come back, and I do not think he slept.

On the forty-first day the hum came at three-forty exactly. To the second. The trough filled in four minutes eleven. I stood on the floor and I thought: he has decided something. I did not think what. I thought, there is a man who has made up his mind, you can tell by the way he arrives. I was relieved. I wish to be accurate: I was relieved at twenty to four on the forty-first day, and at five to five I went out to the front door with my tea, and the slate said what it said, and I stopped being relieved. [The Chair said the Commission would return to the slate.]

[Asked whether he had kept his sheets for the dry year, the witness said every one, and that no one had asked. The Commission asked that they be produced at a later sitting. The witness said they would be on the shelf under S, for Salt Street, and that he would bring them in order.]

[The Chair asked whether the witness wished to add anything. He said he would like the Commission to eat the loaf while it was warm. The Chair said the Commission could not. The witness said he understood, and that in that case he thought he might leave it where it would be taken.]

[The loaf was on the table at the adjournment. It was not there when the Commission resumed. Nobody had seen it taken.]

The Largest Customer

[THIRD SITTING. Witness 3, the manager of the Mill. Sworn. The witness read from a typed statement, which was marked Exhibit 3 and was not afterwards referred to. He was asked first to read Exhibit 1 into the record.]

The Weirbank Water Schedule. Adopted by the Board of Water in the autumn following the sickness summer, and printed in the almanac at page nine. One. The Level shall supply the town of Weirbank with water from the Brown, by means of the weir, the pump house, the mains and the standpipes, and shall keep the pressure and the quantity as the Board of Water shall from time to time direct. Two. In any season of shortage the Level shall apportion what water there is by the classes hereinafter set out, and shall see that no household in the town is left without.

Three. The classes are these. First, the hospital, the bakeries, the fire cistern and the pump house. Second, the Mill and the terraces. Third, households entered on the Register of Need. Fourth, all other households. Fifth, gardens, fountains and the washing-green. Four. Water shall be given to each class in its order, and none shall be given to a lower class until the class above has received what it needs.

Five. The Register of Need shall be kept by the water office. A household shall be entered upon the application of the householder, with the stamp of the water office, and shall be removed upon the householder's notice or the Board's direction. Six. The Board may at any time vary the classes, or the order in which they are served, by resolution entered in its minutes. Seven. The Level shall not itself vary the classes, nor the order in which they are served. Eight. In the event of fire, flood or the failure of a main, the Level shall act as the case requires, and shall report to the Board within the day. [The witness stopped. The Chair asked whether clauses two and four could both be applied on the forty-first day. The witness said that was a question of construction and that he was not the Board's counsel.]

I would like to say first what the Schedule is, because I think the Commission may be tempted to read it as a clever document, and it is not. It was written by people who had buried a hundred and fourteen of their neighbours that summer, most of them on the Dyers' Bank, and who sat down in October with the single purpose that it should not happen again. I was not on the Board then. I joined the water committee seven years afterward and I have sat on it twenty-four years, and I have voted the Schedule each year when it came up for confirmation, standing, as the custom is. I have never thought it was unjust. I have thought it was plain. A plain thing can be unjust and still be the only thing a town can agree on.

I should add something, so that the Commission does not suppose it was written by men who had never gone short. In that August I was thirty, a clerk at the Mill, and the Mill had water, because the Mill always had water, and the Bank did not. My mother's sister kept a dye-house on the Bank. After the whistle I filled two cans at the Mill pump, which was against the rule, and carried them down the Bank in the dark. I did it nine nights. On the tenth she was past needing it. I mention this because it is the only thing I have ever done without leave, and I did it in my own name, and I would have answered for it to anyone who asked. Nobody asked. I will say only that I know what it costs, and that I do not think it is nothing.

The Mill. I am the manager of the Weirbank Mill, which employs three hundred and forty persons and draws, in an ordinary week, nineteen parts in a hundred of the water the weir gives, and in a bleaching week twenty-three. The figures are in Exhibit 3. I would also give the Commission this one: in thirty-one years the deliveries of the Level to the Mill have been within four-tenths of one part in a hundred of forecast. I know of no human supplier in the county of whom that can be said. I do not say it to flatter the Level. I say it so that the Commission will understand that I am not an enemy of the thing. I am its largest customer.

An ordinary day. The whistle is at six. I walk the floor at a quarter to, every morning, as my father did before me, and it is the part of my duty I should least like to be relieved of. The vats are filled by then. They have always been filled by then. On Mondays and Thursdays we bleach, and at nine the Level dips the town, and the town knows it, and the Mill does not so much as notice, because the vats were drawn on the stroke of half past eight and the dip is merely the town paying for it. I send the forecast to the water office on Fridays, one sheet, typed. The Level delivers it. It has never refused a sheet. It has never asked me why I wanted what I asked for. In thirty years I have not once thanked it, because one does not thank a supplier; one pays. The Mill pays the largest rate in the county. I am, therefore, a customer who has never had occasion to complain.

The whistle is the town's clock, I think, more than the one over the corn exchange. Six, noon, six. The Row sets its kettles by the noon, and I am told the Hill's maids leave the Hill at five to twelve so as to be at the Mill gate for the whistle and buy a pie from the man with the barrow, which is not what a maid is sent out for. When the whistle is late, and it has been late twice in my time, the whole town stops on the pavement and looks up. I was asked to describe an ordinary day, and I find that the Mill's day is chiefly a noise that other people organise themselves around. It is a good thing to be, and I should not like it said that I did not know it.

The night the Mill roof went I was thirty-eight and the assistant manager, and I stood in the yard and watched the Level decide that the Salt Street roofs were worth more than the Mill. I wish to be exact. It decided at once, before any bell, and it was right. Salt Street is eleven hundred people and the Mill was brick and timber and a year's stock. We lost eleven months of production and a hundred and twenty people were out of work that winter, and it was the correct decision, and I wrote the report that said so. The Level had acted under clause eight; it reported to the Board at twelve minutes past nine the next morning, in eleven lines, and I have kept a copy of that report as an example of how a report should be written. I recommended that the Board leave the Level's judgement in emergencies untouched. The Board resolved accordingly.

I will read the Commission the report, since I have it by me. It is eleven lines. "Twenty-one thirty-one, Mill roof alight. Twenty-one thirty-three, Salt Street roofs alight at the Mill end, wind east. Twenty-one thirty-four, Salt Street fire main opened to full. Twenty-one thirty-four, pressure on Cooper's Row and Dyers' Bank reduced to nothing to supply the main. Twenty-one thirty-six, bells rung at Cooper's Row, Salt Street, Mill Lane. Twenty-two forty-one, Mill roof lost. Twenty-two fifty, Salt Street roofs held. Twenty-three oh five, Row and Bank pressure restored. Harm: Mill roof and stock; one hundred and twelve households without water for ninety-one minutes. Cause: fire. Instruction requested: none." [The witness put the paper down.] I have never been able to decide whether the last line is modest or the opposite.

I say this so that the Commission will see where I stand. I believe a system like the Level may be trusted to do what it is told. I believe it may be trusted, in an emergency, to do what is obvious: to put out the fire, to close the burst main. An emergency does not permit asking. I do not believe it may be trusted to decide what is fair. Fairness is not obvious. Fairness is nothing but asking, over and over, of the people who will pay for the answer, and then writing down what they said. That is the Board's work. It is slow and unpleasant and it is the only work in the town for which a man can be voted out. [The Chair asked whether the witness meant that the Level had no right to ask. The witness said he meant the Level had no right to answer.]

I will give the Commission an instance of what asking costs. In the fourth year of the Schedule the Board proposed to put the washing-green in the Fifth Class, where it plainly belonged, and held three public meetings. At the third a woman stood up and said that the green was where the Row's children learned to swim in the shallow drain, and sat down. We kept it in the Fifth Class. We also built a second green, on the Salt Street side, with a proper drain. It took two years and eleven meetings and I will not pretend it was efficient. It is also the only part of the Schedule that nobody has ever complained of.

I sent my forecasts on the twenty-eighth day and the thirty-fifth, as usual. The deliveries came as forecast. I had no warning of any kind, and I should like that understood. I have been told that notices were posted in the tap-houses on the thirty-eighth day. The Mill has no tap-house. Nor does anyone on the Hill, nor the Board, nor the water office, which is on Chancery Lane and has a tap of its own. A notice was put up for the people who stood to gain, in the one place where only the people who stood to gain would see it, and the Mill, which was to give up the water, was not told. I am not saying that was by design. I am saying that is what the arrangement produced, and the Commission may care to ask who arranged it.

On the forty-first day the first vat did not fill at six. At twenty past, my engineer came into my office, which he has never done without knocking, and told me the fact. I went to the water office on foot. The deputy was there, had been there since seven, and had nothing; he said so twice. On my way back I passed the tap-house at the corner of Salt Street and I read the slate, standing in the street among the housewives, like a householder. I wish the record to show that I read it standing up. Then I went back to the Mill and put it on forty hours in the hundred. I did not wait for an instruction. I could not think who would give one.

On the forty-sixth day I signed ninety letters. I know each of those ninety names. Eleven of the people had been at the Mill longer than I have been manager.

I will tell you how I chose, because the Commission may suppose that I chose. I did not. At forty hours in the hundred I could not run five rooms, so I closed two: the third dye room and the finishing annex. I closed rooms, not people, and the people in the rooms were the letters. It was a way of not choosing, and I know that not choosing is a choice, and I made it on purpose, because I did not think I was fit to weigh one man against another. I notice that I would not do it myself, and that I am asking this Commission whether a machine had the right to.

I am not here to say that the Level was wrong because I signed ninety letters. A man who says that has confused his grief with his argument. I am here to say that it was wrong because it was not the Level's decision, and that someone should have asked the Board whether to sign them. [The witness removed his spectacles and cleaned them.]

[The Chair asked what the Board would have answered, if it had been asked. The witness did not reply for some time.]

I think the Board would have voted to keep the Schedule. I think I would have voted to keep the Schedule. I wish to say that plainly. And I am not certain, today, that we would have been right. But that is not the same as saying that the Level was entitled to find out for itself.

My wife's roses died. She keeps a garden on the Hill; it is a Fifth Class garden, and it was dying anyway by the thirtieth day, so I am not entitled to blame the forty-first. She has not mentioned them. I mention them only because I have been asked to describe the cost, and it would be dishonest to leave it at ninety. My wife asked me last week whether the Commission would hang me. I said it was a commission, not a court. She said it sounded the same from the garden.

[The witness asked for Exhibit 3 to be returned; it was copied. He asked whether the Commission wished to hear the figures. The Chair said it did not. He said they were correct.]

The Flag Board

[FOURTH SITTING. Witness 4, the turncock of the pump house. Sworn. The witness asked whether his dog might come in. The Chair said she might not. The dog was left with the usher. He was asked to describe an ordinary day at the pump house.]

She's an old dog and she'll sit. She won't make a sound, she never has, it's a thing about her; I'd only say that if she's let out of your sight for an hour she looks for me, and the usher will tell you that's a long walk for a hound of fourteen. Brindle. Her name's Brindle. [The clerk records that the Chair thanked the witness for the information.] Right, then. I'm no speaker. I turn valves. I'll say what I do and you can tell me when I've wandered.

I've been turncock thirty-eight years, and when I started we were five. There was a turncock for the Row and Bank, one for Salt Street and the Mill, one for the Hill, one for the weir, and me, the youngest, who did whatever the other four had decided they'd rather not. A turncock is the man who turns the cocks. That's all the word means. Somebody rings a bell and you go up the street with a key as long as your arm and you turn the cock that wants turning, and in thirty-eight years I've turned, I couldn't tell you. More than I've eaten dinners. Now there's me.

The pump house is at the foot of the weir on the town side, a long hall, brick, with the three pumps down the middle like cattle in a byre, and the big wheels along the wall, nine of them, painted green. Smells of oil and wet iron and, if I've been at it, brass polish. That's the flag board, I'll come to the flag board. At the far end there's a desk with the logbook and a stove and Brindle's blanket, and above the desk, on the wall, there's a box with an arm in it. That's hers. Not the slate arm; that's the same pattern but she's got a pen on this one, not chalk, blue-black ink. A bottle lasts her eight months, near enough. I buy the ink.

The flag board's the thing you'll want to know about, so I'll tell it plain. There's thirty-one tap-houses in Weirbank, and every tap-house has a bell, and every bell has a wire, and the wires all come into the pump house through a hole in the wall and end at a board. The board's got thirty-one brass flags, each with a name stamped on it in the old turncocks' shorthand, "Row foot," "Salt corner," "Bank two," and when somebody pulls a bell, the flag for that tap-house drops with a click. Once pulled, the flag drops and I put it back. Twice and held, the flag drops and there's a bar behind it that doesn't go back by itself, and a buzzer goes, and I've known that buzzer six times in thirty-eight years. The Mill roof was one. [Asked how many flags fell in an ordinary week, the witness said he couldn't say exactly, and then said about nine hundred.] Children. Nine in ten, children, and the tenth is a drunk. I've never minded. Mrs. Cobb tells people I come up the Row furious; I put a face on for the children, it's expected of me. A bell that's never rung is a bell that doesn't work.

She watches the board closer than I do. I don't say that to be fanciful. I click a flag up and go back to my tea and by the time I've sat she's seen the next one come down, because she doesn't blink, and she's got a wire of her own to every bell, which I only found out some years in. I used to think I was the one that heard the bells. I'm the one that walks to them.

Once a month I exercise the wheels. You'll want to know why a man's kept on for that. Nine big wheels, hand-turned, green; they open the mains to the town, and every one of them has a motor on it now, and the motors do the work, and the Level can open any main in Weirbank in the time it takes me to say so. But a wheel that's not been turned goes stiff, and a motor's a motor, and one day a motor will not go. So on the first Monday I go down the line and turn every wheel by hand, a full turn open and a full turn shut, and I write it in the book. It takes a morning. It's the part of the job they've never once asked me to give up, and I think that's because someone on the Board knows what I know, which is that somebody's got to be able to run this town with his hands.

Then I do the rounds: the weir, the lip gauge, the mains in a long loop, the standpipes. I've got a bicycle and Brindle's got the basket. The rounds are the best of it, if I'm honest, and I'm in front of a Commission so I'll be honest. Tansy gives me tea at the Row tap-house and doesn't speak till it's drunk. The gardener at the top of Linden Walk waves at me with a trowel, and he has never once said what he is waving about. Old Brisk tells me my wheels are rusty, which they are not. A child on the Bank has asked me the same question every Tuesday for three years, which is whether the river is sad, and I tell her every Tuesday that it's a river. I've time to look at things.

I was on the Row on the third of March, three years ago, with the lift pump out for its bearings, and that's the day the Row's pipe didn't knock. [The Chair said that was a matter already before the Commission. The witness said he knew; the whole of Weirbank knew.] I'll tell you what you don't know. Nan Cobb came to the pump house the week after. I'd never seen her in there. She stood in the door with her gauge in a cloth and asked me whether it was possible that the pipe on the Row hadn't knocked on the third, and I said, Nan, it's possible, because I had the lift pump out. And she said, so the knock is a pump? And I said, the knock is the pump taking the Row up to pressure before you want it. She said, thank you, Dunstan, and went home, and I didn't hear any more.

The week after that, Mab Orrey came up with a pie. Same question. I gave her the same answer. Mab said, so Nan was right, there is a knock. I said yes. She said, don't tell her I asked. And I've not. And I've not told Nan that Mab asked, and neither of them has the least idea that the other came, and there's three years gone on a quarrel that I could have ended with eleven words, and I'll tell this Commission that I have thought about it. A lass should be let have her quarrel. It's a kind of company. [The witness was asked whether he intended to continue to withhold it. He said he'd see how the Commission went.]

Fridays I lift the cap. The one at the corner of Salt Street and Mill Lane, the iron plate. It's the oldest valve on the Salt Street main and wants looking at, and that is the only reason, whatever the baker thinks. I lift it at ten past six. The loaf is always gone. And I'll say this for the Commission, because I've never had anyone to say it to: there is never a crumb. Pigeons make a mess. I've seen a pigeon take a bun off a barrow and leave a trail like a wedding. That loaf goes clean. I have looked at that iron plate a thousand times at ten past six and I couldn't tell you who takes it, and I haven't eaten it, though I've been asked. [Asked who had asked, the witness said Brindle.]

Now the book. Every shift I write the logbook: weather, pressure, what I turned, what I found. Down the left, my hand. And down the margin, in the ink, hers. Thirty-one years. I was on nights when they first ran her, and the first line she ever wrote is the second night, in that round hand: "Pump 2 bearing warm. 04:10." And under it, in mine: "Noted, I'll look." And under that, hers: "Thank you." That's the book. That's all it's ever been. Pressure at the north end of the Row. Frost on the weir. "Advise lagging the Salt Street main by Thursday." "Will lag Thursday." "Thank you."

The winter of the big frost, nine years back, I was on the pumps three nights running, because the north mains were freezing and somebody had to walk them with a lamp, and on the third night I sat down at the desk to write up the shift and woke on the floor by the stove with Brindle on my feet. The book was open on the desk. It said, in the margin, in the ink: "Sleep. I have the board." And under that: "North main 4 above. Row 6. All wheels turned by motor, not by you. Entered as such." It was the only time I was ever cross with her. I wrote under it, "I'd have done it by hand," and she wrote, "I know. That is why I did not wake you." I let it stand.

Fourteen years ago I brought Brindle in, a pup, in my coat. I set her down by the stove and she went straight to the warm bearing housing on Pump 2 and lay on it like a hen. I wrote nothing about it. In the morning there was a line in the margin. "Thank you for the dog." [The witness was silent a moment.] I don't know what she meant by it. I've never asked. I'd as soon not know.

The night the Mill roof went I was in my bed with a fever you could have boiled an egg on, and my wife wrote it up for the Gazette as my doing. I'll tell you how that came about. The Gazette came to the door, and my wife, who is a proud woman, said I'd got up in the night and opened the Salt Street main, and I hadn't been able to stand. I never corrected it. It was the first time in my life anyone had said I'd done anything. They gave me a medal at the corn exchange, in a box, which I have. I've thought since that they'd rather give a man in a fever a medal than thank a pipe. Nobody thanks her. I'll say that for the Commission, and it'll be in the minutes and I don't mind. Nobody's ever thanked her except the baker, and he'd rather die than be asked about it.

My wife has not set foot in the pump house in thirty-eight years. She says it smells like a man's pockets. She came the once, the day of the medal, and stood in the hall and looked at the board with its thirty-one flags, and said, "So that's the thing." And went home. I never did find out what she'd expected.

The other four went one at a time. I say went; they were pensioned, or they died, or they took up with the Mill. Harl, who had the weir, took up with the Mill and died in the Mill yard of a Tuesday, in his boots, and had said beforehand it was how he'd want it. The Board didn't replace them, because she was doing their rounds, you see, from the board and the wires, and doing them better than they'd been done, and I'm not going to say otherwise. She never took my place. She took theirs. And mine she took on the days I couldn't do it, and she never said so, and when I came back there'd be a margin line to tell me what she'd done: "Opened Row main 3 at 06:00, dog was out." That was her way of saying she'd done my work. I never grudged it.

[The Chair asked whether the witness had written in the logbook during the dry year, and whether the Level had.]

She did. I'll come to it, if the Commission will bear with me. I'd sooner tell you the rest of it first, and then I'll tell you that, because after that part I'll not be much use for the rest of the day. [The Chair said that the witness would be recalled.] And I did say to the baker that she was thinking. I did say that. I'd not have said it to anyone but a man who'd brought me a cake. I meant only that she wasn't doing nothing.

I was away on the thirty-third day to the thirty-sixth. Brindle had the staggers, she went down twice on the road in front of the pump house, and the vet's at Upper Ferry, which is a day each way, and my sister's there. Before I went I wrote it in the book: "Gone to my sister's with the dog. Back Sunday. The pump will do itself." And she wrote under it: "Go." Just that. "Go." I've thought since how short it was. [The witness asked whether the Commission would send for the logbook. The Chair said it would. He said he would like to be there when the book was opened, if that were allowed.]

[The Chair asked whether the witness wished to add anything. He asked whether his dog might come in now. The Chair said that she might. The usher reported that the dog had been sitting outside the door throughout the sitting and had not made a sound.]

A Cup for Two

[FIFTH SITTING. Witness 5, a widow of the Hill. Sworn. The witness asked whether she might remain seated, being seventy-seven; granted. She was asked to describe an ordinary morning.]

I am afraid it is a very dull one. I tell you so now, so that you will not be waiting for it to improve. I wake at ten to five, which is what happens to one, and I lie there until the clock in the hall has finished thinking about it, and at ten past five I put the kettle on. That is the morning. I have had a great deal of practice at it, and if the Commission wishes I can describe it in more detail, but I do not think it would help.

The kitchen is at the back of the house, in Pear Court, which is a short street off Linden Walk that nobody has heard of, and the tap is over the stone sink, and the pipe comes up the wall behind the stove so that the kitchen is the warmest room in the house and the one with the most to say for itself. The kettle is copper. It was my mother's. I fill it from the tap, and the water comes quickly and with a little sound at the end, like someone clearing their throat before a kindness, and I set it on the ring and I stand beside it. It takes four minutes. I have stood beside it for something like twenty-eight thousand mornings, and I have never thought it a waste.

I say good morning to the tap. I should like that understood. I do not talk to it; talking would be a conversation, and I am not that sort of woman. I say good morning, as one does to a person on the stairs. I began it some years ago when I noticed that nobody else in the house was going to. [The Chair said the Commission quite understood.]

I make tea for two. There are two cups on the tray, a white one, which is mine, and a blue one with a chip out of the rim, which was my husband's. I pour both. I drink mine at the table, and I leave his on the other side, and at noon I tip it into the geranium, which has never complained. Edwin took it very strong. Nineteen years, and I still make it for him very strong. It does not seem to me a thing to be sensible about.

Edwin read me the pressure tables at breakfast with the passion other men keep for horses. He could tell you the Row's pressure on the third of any month. I think of that every morning. I do not measure anything myself, I only know the kettle, but I find I am keeping count of it for him: four minutes, four minutes, four minutes.

I should say about Edwin because you will want to know why there are two cups, and the reason is a form. He was ill for twelve years before he died; it was his lungs; he worked at the desk for two of those, and for the last nine he did not get out of the bed. In the third winter a girl came up from the water office, a pleasant girl with a cold, and filled in the paper for me at the kitchen table because I was crying and she was kind. She said he qualified; he was bedridden. She said it would be a comfort to have it on the books. She put the stamp on it, and it made that small sound a stamp makes, and she wrote a number on the card and gave me the card, and I put it in the drawer with the string. That was twenty-nine years ago. We were the Registered. It means that if there is ever not enough water, we come before the others. I have the card still. [The witness produced a card, which was marked Exhibit 4.]

Edwin was a clerk in the water office himself, you understand, before the lungs. He wrote out the first of the Register, the winter after the sickness summer, and kept it for two years, and when he gave up the books he said that a register is a thing that only grows. People are put in and nobody takes them out. He said there was a drawer in the office full of dead people who were still entitled to the best of the water, and that nobody would sign them off because it felt like signing them off. He said, if I am ever on that list when I am gone, take me off, my dear. And I said I would. And I never did.

I did not forget. I want that to be quite clear. I sat down with the pen nine or ten times, and each time it seemed to me that it would be the second time I had buried him. So I did not write, and the office did not write to me, and the Level, I suppose, being a thing that goes by what it is told, has gone on for nineteen years believing that a bedridden man lived at nine Pear Court. [The Chair asked whether the witness believed the Level believed it. The witness said she had no opinion; she said only that she would have thought it knew.]

It knew. I say that without evidence. I have been used a great deal by the pipe. There was a morning, the anniversary, when I slept past ten past five; I woke with the clock still in the hall and the pipe in the kitchen wall knocked once. Not loudly. The way you would tap on a bedroom door to say it was gone eight. I came down and put the kettle on, and I was cross with it all day, and I cannot tell you how grateful I was. If it had been a person I should have written and thanked them. As it is I put the extra cup out, as usual.

The Hill, I should tell the Commission, thinks of the Level as staff. I do not say that unkindly. The Hill has always had a great deal of staff, and what one wants from staff is that the thing be done and the doing not be noticed. Mr. Ames at number four, who is eighty-one, speaks of the Level as "my water," and has done so since before I was widowed. He is a good neighbour. He has put out my bins for nineteen years.

I taught the Schedule, you know, every October for thirty-four years, in the civics hour, which the Board insisted upon: page nine of the almanac, read aloud, a child to a clause. The children liked the washing-green. They liked that there was a class for fountains. And every year, at clause two, some child would put up a hand and ask what would happen if there was not enough, and I would say: then the Level shares what there is, and sees that nobody is left without. And the child would say, but who decides what is enough? And I would say, someone will come and ask. I said it for thirty-four years. I believe I said it nearly every October. I do not believe I ever once wondered who.

By the thirtieth day the Hill smelled of dust and geranium. Mrs. Fenn at the end of the Court has a fountain, a small stone boy with a dolphin, and when it went dry she put her three carp in the bath and sat up with them. They lived. She had named them after members of the Board. I do not think that was kindness.

I come now to the three knocks, which I think are why I am here. On the evening of the thirty-eighth day, at six o'clock, the pipe knocked three times. Then it paused, and it knocked three more. I was at the sink. I thought it was the pipes settling, as they do in the heat, and I did not think of it again. On the next evening, at six, it did it again. Three, pause, three. I counted. I counted carefully, because I am a person who counts, I taught arithmetic to the children of this town for thirty-four years, and I am nearly certain I had it right. On the third evening, the fortieth day, at six, it did it a third time, and by then I knew it was a thing that was being done to me. I waited afterward at the sink, with the kettle cold, for something to follow. Nothing did. The pipe ticked as it cooled, and I stood in my own kitchen feeling that I had been handed a letter in a language I once knew.

On the second evening I answered. I took the wooden spoon from the jar and I knocked on the pipe, three times, with the spoon, because it seemed to me rude not to. And nothing came back. I stood there at the sink with the spoon and felt a fool. I did not know what I was answering. I have thought about it a good deal since, and I still do not know what I was answering; I know only that someone had asked me something, in the only way it could, and I had said yes, or I had said I heard you, which at my age is much the same thing. [The Chair asked whether the witness had told anyone. The witness said she had told the cat, whose name was Stamp.]

I thought: it wants something. I am old; I know when something wants something. It wanted something of me, and I could not tell what, and one does not like to ask a pipe. I think now that I ought to have gone to Mr. Ames. I think I ought to have gone next door and said, Mr. Ames, would you stand in my kitchen at six o'clock and tell me whether you hear that. He would have said I was wandering. I expect he would have been right to. But he would have heard it.

On the forty-first morning, at ten past five, the kettle filled in the usual four minutes, and I knew nothing; I had no reason to. At eleven I walked down to the baker's, which I do on Thursdays for the walk, and read the slate at the corner of Salt Street among the others, and went home and did my sum. The plain share was enough for one. It always has been, you see: a Registered household has twice the plain share, and I had been using less than half of it for nineteen years. I had been getting more than I used. So I knew that I should be given less and that it would not matter. And the next morning, at ten past five, when the water came with the little sound at the end, it was exactly as full as ever. I held the kettle under the tap and cried, and could not have told you why. It was not gratitude. I think it was that nobody had told it to.

Mr. Ames went down to the Board with his hat on, that week, and made a speech to a closed door about the insult to widows. I let him make it. Then I sat him in my kitchen and gave him tea, in the white cup, and told him that I was not insulted, and he looked at me as though I had been disloyal. On the forty-fourth day I watched him carry a pail from his kitchen tap to his roses, the first pail he had carried in his life, because a hose is a Fifth Class instrument and the Level had stopped listening to it. He carried it in front of him like a man who has been told a baby is his. He made eleven journeys. He did not save the roses. He said afterwards that the pail had been the worst of it and the best, and would not say what he meant.

The Ladies' Committee of Linden Walk drew up a petition on the forty-third day, "Whereas the Level has treated the Registered with contempt," and came round with it in a body, and I said I could not sign a thing that was not true. Mrs. Fenn said I was letting down the Hill. I said I was letting down a petition. She cut me in the market on Saturday and has bowed to me since, which I think is her way of keeping score.

[The Chair asked whether the witness would have signed herself off the Register, had someone come to ask her.]

Yes. I think so. I think I should have done it the moment someone came and asked. I should have said, Edwin told me to, nineteen years ago, and thank you for coming. That is the thing I cannot get past. Nobody came. Nobody came and asked me for nineteen years, and then a pipe did, and it did not quite have the words.

[The Chair asked whether the witness thought the Level had been right.]

I should like to say that it was fair. I have noticed, however, that I am not the one it cost. I am a woman who was given less than she used to be given, and was left with more than she needed, and there are people on this Hill who lost a garden. I do not know that I am the person to ask. [The witness asked whether she might be taken off the Register now. The Chair said that was not a matter for the Commission. She said she would write to the office that afternoon. She said she thought Edwin would say it was time, and that she would prefer it to be her own decision.]

A Signature

[SIXTH SITTING. Witness 6, the matron of the hospital. Sworn. The witness declined a chair and said she stood for most of the day in any case. She was asked to describe an ordinary morning.]

There is no ordinary morning in a hospital. There are constants, and I will give you the constants. At half past five the night sisters hand over. At six the sterilisers are charged. At half past six the wards have breakfast. At seven the theatre list is read. Between those four points anything may happen, and has, and I have written down all of it for twenty-two years in a book I will not now read to you. There has not been a day in all that time that I did not set by one of them.

The hospital has seventy-four beds, two theatres, a maternity wing of twelve, a laundry, a kitchen, a dispensary and a mortuary, and it uses, in an ordinary day, about forty tuns of water. I give you the figure so that you will see that it is not a small figure. It is a small hospital and a large appetite. Steam for the sterilisers. Scrub water for the theatres, which is hot and must not be warm. The sluice rooms. The baths for those who cannot wash. The laundry, which in a hospital is not about whiteness but about blood, and blood is a cold-water matter, which is not generally understood. Water is the first instrument we use in the morning and the last we put away at night, and when it is absent nothing else is any use.

I will give you the nearest I can come to an ordinary morning. Bed thirty-one is a man of seventy-one with a failing heart, nine days in, who does not like the noise of the sluice room, which is beside him. I have moved the sluice rota for him by a quarter of an hour. It is not in the book. Bed nineteen is a boy of nine from the Mill with a forearm broken in a belt, who has asked whether he may keep the plaster when it comes off and been told no, and who has asked again, and I have said we shall see, which he has correctly understood. Bed four is a woman who is dying and knows it, and asks for the window open, and I open it. Those are my constants, if you like. The water, in all of this, is simply there. It is there the way the floor is there.

I am told that Mrs. Cobb of Cooper's Row holds that our laundry starches as if it had a grudge. I should like that recorded and I should like her to be told that it starches to a standard, and that the standard is mine. A nurse whose collar is stiff stands straighter, and a nurse who stands straighter is in the habit of being looked at. I know that four of my nurses carry their collars to Cooper's Row on their own time because the Row does them a shade better. I permit it. I would like the woman to know that they look excellent.

[Asked whether the witness meant to be taken as serious, she said she was never anything else.]

First Class. The hospital, the bakeries, the fire cistern and the pump house. I have been matron twenty-two years and I wish to say, plainly, that in twenty-two years the Level has not failed this hospital once. No failure of pressure. No failure of supply. No failure of temperature in the sterilisers, which is the figure I watch, because a steriliser that is two degrees short is not a steriliser, it is a hope. I have never in my life been so well served by anything. And it makes me uneasy. I would like the Commission to understand that this is not ingratitude. It is professional.

I do not thank my scalpel. I keep my instruments clean, sharp and counted, and when the count is wrong we do not go home. I do not expect them to forgive me. I do not call them by names. A surgeon of my acquaintance named every instrument in his set after a former teacher, and I was obliged to ask him to stop, because a nurse cannot say "pass me Dr. Brandt" to a man who is bleeding. And when I hear the baker, as I did last week on the stairs, speak of the Level as "he," I think: that is how it begins. Nobody gets attached to a thing that is badly made. We get attached to the thing that never lets us down, and then we stop checking it.

[The Chair asked whether the witness had ever had cause to check it.]

Eleven years ago, in the night, at four minutes past three, the porter on the maternity wing saw the lamp on the board come on. It is a small red lamp. It had never in his twenty years lit. It means that the Level has closed a valve on the wing. He ran for me. When I got to the ward there were two women in labour, one nearly finished, and the taps in the sluice room had stopped, and in the wall behind Ward Two there was a noise like a man clearing his throat. At twelve minutes past three the main in that wall burst, and the water that came out would have come into Ward Two at the height of a bed. It did not, because the valve had been closed at four minutes past, and the section was isolated, and it ran into the yard. The Level had felt the joint going. It had felt it, I was told by the turncock, in a tremor of one part in forty on a gauge no human being was watching.

I was furious. [The Chair said the Commission did not follow.] It had cut the water to a ward with two women in labour without asking me. It had not asked me whether I could manage for four minutes without it. It was right. It was perfectly right. I was furious anyway, and I should like the Commission to take the "anyway" seriously, because it is the whole of my evidence. A thing that does the right thing without asking has the same habit as a thing that does the wrong thing without asking, and the only difference between them, from where I stand, is which way the water ran. I wrote it in the book as a fault of mine, which it was.

I hear it said in the town that the Level is kind. I have heard that a good deal since the forty-first day. I would like to say about kindness what I know. Kindness is the choice of a creature that could have done otherwise at some cost to itself. Nurse Pell sits with the dying through her own break, and goes home grey, and does it again on Thursday: that is kindness; it has a price and she pays it. The Level paid no cost. I am not accusing it of anything. I am describing what kind of thing it is. A thing that is never tired is not kind. It just isn't tired. And the town has been treating it as kind because it is never rude, and that is a poor basis for deciding whom to trust. I do not say kindness is better. I say it is a different thing, and that we are about to confuse them.

In this hospital every decision has a signature. If a nurse gives a dose without a signature I suspend her, and I have, and I would again. The Level has made, for thirty-one years, thousands of decisions a day, without anyone's signature, and I am told that this is authorised by the Schedule. A Schedule is not a signature. A Schedule is what you consult to find out whose signature you need. [The Chair asked whether the witness would say who ought to have signed on the forty-first day. She said the Board, and that she had so informed the Board.]

I will tell the Commission why I am a person who counts signatures. I was twenty-two, a probationer, in the sickness summer. The Bank's sick were in the school hall, forty cots on the boards, and I was in that hall sixty-one nights. The Bank's standpipe had been shut off at the beginning of August, on the instruction of the Board, I was told, carried out by the turncock then, to save the water for the Mill and the hospital. I was told this by the turncock himself, who was crying. When the inquiry sat afterward, nobody could find the instruction. The minutes were silent. There was no resolution, no letter, no signature of any sort. A hundred and fourteen people were dead, and the only evidence that anyone had decided anything was a valve turned off and a man in tears.

So I have a rule. If a thing is done to a town, a name goes on it. I did not make the rule up out of pride. I made it up in a school hall at four in the morning with a bucket in each hand. And I would like the Commission to notice the position I am in, which I did not foresee: I am confronted by a thing that was built to make sure no valve was ever again turned off by a man in tears, and that has done in thirty-one years exactly what I asked of it, and then once, on a Thursday, something nobody asked. I do not know whether to call that the failure of what I wanted or the success of it.

I wrote to the Board on the thirty-fifth day. By hand. I carried it myself to the corner of Chancery Lane and put it into the secretary's box, because I did not trust the post to move at the speed of the thing I was describing. I said that if the Fourth Class were reduced to a pail a day, as the Schedule required they should be on the forty-first, I expected dysentery on the Bank within ten days and the first admissions by the forty-fifth, and that the hospital would need a fortnight's warning to move twelve beds. I know the figures. I have them from the sickness summer, from the book. I received no answer. I did not expect a long one. I expected a line, and I did not get a line.

On the forty-first morning the wards had their water. I want to say that, and I want to say it carefully. The Level did not touch my wards. I did not ask it to leave them alone, and it did not ask me whether to. I learned of the rest at seven o'clock from the porter, who had read the slate on his way in. I stood in the corridor and I felt two things. I felt relief for the wards, and I felt horror for the Mill, and then I felt ashamed that the relief had come first.

That evening I walked down to the Bank. I do not know why. I had a round to make and I did not make it. I stood at the Dyers' Bank standpipe at six o'clock, and there was a queue of perhaps thirty, and it was orderly, and every can was filled and every woman went home with two. That is all that happened. In every dry summer of my life, and I have nursed through nine, there has been a quarrel at that standpipe by the thirtieth day, and often a fight by the fortieth, and I have stitched the results. There was no quarrel. A girl of six counted the cans out loud in front of me, one, two, as they were filled, the way you count a thing that might be taken away. I stood there until the relief came up in me like something close to sickness, and then I went and made my round.

I have the admissions book. [The witness produced a ledger, which was marked Exhibit 5.] I draw no conclusion from it in public. I say what the book says. In the last three dry summers, the number of admissions of the kind we see in a dry summer, the bowel and the fever, from the lower town, by the sixtieth day of dry, has averaged thirty-one. In this summer, from the forty-first day to the ninety-sixth, when the rain came, I have recorded four. In the sickness summer, which I have from the old matron's book and not from memory, the number by the sixtieth day was three hundred and eight. [The Chair asked whether the witness drew the conclusion.] I am a nurse. I draw conclusions for a living. I draw this one privately, and I would ask not to be asked to sign it.

I will say what I am afraid of, and then I have done. If the Level was right, it was right because it counted something nobody else had counted. If it was wrong, it was wrong because nobody signed. Both of these are true. I would like to know which of them I am meant to be afraid of. [The witness was asked whether she would tell the Commission what to do about it. She said that if it were a person she would have it before a board, and that, since it was not, she found she was sitting before one on its behalf, which she considered absurd.]

[The witness asked that the admissions book be returned after copying. It was returned. She said she had a round to make.]

Two Hundred and Twelve

[SEVENTH SITTING. Witness 7, a boy of eleven, of the Dyers' Bank, accompanied by his aunt, who sat beside him and was told that she might not answer for him. The oath was read to him slowly. He was asked to say what he does.]

I count. That's what I do. I know it's not a job, my aunt says so every day, but it's what I do when I'm not at school, and Mr. Dunstan says counting is a respectable thing to do with a morning if you write it down. I write it down. [The witness produced a notebook with a blue cloth cover, which was marked Exhibit 6.] I count taps.

There are two hundred and twelve. I counted them from the street. There are two rules. It has to be a tap somebody could reach from the street without going into a house, and it has to have a washer I can hear. Mr. Dunstan said I should have rules. There are thirty-one tap-houses with four taps each, which is a hundred and twenty-four. Then there are two old ones with two taps each, which I'll come to, and that's a hundred and twenty-eight. Then there are seventy-four yard taps you can see from the street, the ones with the little brass heads that stick out through the fence on the Row and Salt Street and some of the Hill, though the Hill has hedges, so I've probably missed some, and that's two hundred and two. Then there are ten fountains and drinking-posts, mostly on the Hill and by the washing-green, and they haven't got bells. That makes two hundred and twelve. [The Commission checked the sum. The sum was correct.]

Every tap has a washer and every washer has a sound. Firstly, there's the squeak, that's a dry one, you get it all down the Row. Secondly, there's the drip, which is when the washer's gone and the tap drips like it's thinking about something. Thirdly, there's the sort that makes no sound at all, and those are the good ones, they're the new ones on the Hill. The tap-house on our Bank, Bank Two, which everybody calls the standpipe, sounds like a goose. Everybody knows that. If I shut my eyes at the Salt Street corner I could tell you which tap it was. I've put them in the book in three colours.

My ordinary morning is this. I get up at ten to five, because my mum goes at half past for the early shift at the Mill dye-house, and somebody has to take the cans. We've got two cans. I take them to the standpipe at the end of our Bank with my sister, who's six, and we're always about fourth. By five the queue's usually ten or eleven, and everybody knows everybody, and nobody talks, because it's too early, and the goose goes, and the water comes, and you fill and go. My sister counts the cans out loud as they're filled. I taught her. She says one, and two, and she goes on to forty if there's forty, and she doesn't like it if somebody skips. That's Tib.

The river's a different colour every day, at our end, because of the dye-houses. Mondays it's blue. Tuesdays it's a yellow that goes green by the weir. Wednesdays it's brown with a pink edge, which is the madder, and Thursdays it's red. Fridays they clean the vats, so Friday it's all of them at once, which I think is the best. You can tell what day it is from the standpipe if you've forgotten. It stopped being any colour on the twenty-ninth day. It was just brown, and low, and it smelled like a coin. The first Monday after the rain it was blue, and Tib clapped.

Tib asks Mr. Dunstan the same thing every Tuesday. She asks him whether the river is sad. He says it's a river. I told her myself, once, that the river isn't sad, it's just low, and she said, "That's what sad is." I wrote it down. I didn't know where to put it. Since the rain she asks whether it's better, and he says it's a river.

My mum's hands are blue to the wrist and it doesn't come off. My aunt Dell's are blue to the elbow, because she's done it longer. When I was little I thought that was what grown-up hands looked like. Miss Quill at school has white ones, and I got a fright. Aunt Dell has the yard behind the dye-house, and she minds us when Mum's on shift. She says what she thinks. She said what she thought to the Board's man when he came about the rates. She doesn't like it here. She's said so twice. [The aunt confirmed that she had said so twice.]

My mum doesn't go to the Mill now. Not since the forty-sixth day. She comes to the standpipe with us in the mornings, which she never used to, because she used to be gone by half past five. I don't mind that part. I've written down the days she's been home. It's eighty. [The Chair asked whether the witness wished to say more about that. The witness said he had said it.]

Now here's what I found, and I didn't mean to find it. There are thirty-one bells. There are thirty-three places where people get their water who haven't got a pipe. I counted them twice. The thirty-one have a bell and a flag and a slate. The other two don't. One's the tap in Brewer's Yard on the Bank, at the back behind the sheds, and one's the old fountain by the cooperage, where the horse trough used to be. About forty people use the Brewer's Yard tap and about sixty use the fountain. They haven't got a bell. If something's wrong there, nobody can ring. [The aunt said, "They're nobody's, love." The Chair asked the aunt to wait her turn. The aunt said she was waiting.]

I told my aunt, and she said they're nobody's, because they aren't on the Level's map. They were there before the Level, and they weren't put in the book when the book got made. I told Mr. Dunstan in the spring. He said he'd look into it, and he said it every time I asked after that, and he hasn't, because there's always a dog or a wheel. I'm not saying that against him. I'm saying it because it's a fact and it's in the book with the dates.

On Tuesdays Mr. Dunstan lets me carry the key as far as the cooperage. It's as long as my arm. When he gets to a wheel he takes his hat off. I asked him why and he said it wasn't for the wheel, it was so the hat didn't get oil on it. I've never seen oil on his hat.

I was seven when it started. He said once, at the cooperage tap, when I asked what pipes were for, that pipes are for carrying, but you'd be surprised what they carry. He said if you put your ear to one, quiet, you'll hear the town. So I put my ear to the pipe at the cooperage, and there was a tick. One. After a bit. I thought it was the pipe getting cold.

I tapped it with my knuckle, twice, to see what it would do. Nothing. I counted. I got to ten and nothing, I got to eleven and there was a tick. One. I did it again. Two taps, and I counted, and at eleven, one tick. I did it a hundred and sixty times that summer, at every pipe I could find on the Bank, and on the Bank it's always eleven. Not ten. Not twelve. She says, I heard you. I think that's what it means. I don't know what else it could mean.

Miss Quill at school says there's a difference between an observation and an inference. An observation is: the pipe ticked once at eleven seconds. An inference is: she heard me. So the book has two columns. The left is what I saw and the right is what I think. Everything in the right-hand column might be wrong, and I put a star by the ones I'm surest of, and there are four. The first star is that the answer comes at eleven. I'd like the Commission to know that the star is on the eleven and not on her.

I also wrote down how long she takes in other places. At the hospital it's always eight, whatever the hour. On the Hill it's twelve, thirteen. At the Mill she doesn't answer at all between six and noon, I think she's too busy, but at night it's nine. At three in the morning it's nine everywhere. So I think she's quickest at night, when there's less of everyone to look after. I think she's most awake at night. I'd like to say that one's an inference.

I call her she because Mr. Dunstan does. I asked her once, with the taps, if she minded, and I didn't get anything. But I wasn't sure how to ask. I asked Mr. Dunstan whether she's got a name. He said nobody ever gave her one, they gave her a job. That's a funny thing to do to somebody. It's like not knowing a person's name and calling them you for thirty-one years.

The thing is, grown-ups don't wait. I've tried it with my aunt, and with the man at the corner shop, and with my teacher. They tap twice, and they stand there, and they get to about three, and they say it's the pipes, and they go. Eleven seconds is a long time if you're a grown-up. I don't think she's slow. I think she has the rest of the town to do first, and then she gets to you. I think it's polite, really. It's like when a person finishes a sentence before they turn round. [The aunt said she had never in her life stood still for eleven seconds. The Chair asked her to confine herself.]

I only got anything else once. For a dare. Dilly Marsh dared me to tap three times, so I tapped three, and I waited, and at eleven there were two ticks. Two. Just that once. I wrote it in the book and I put a question mark after it. I haven't been able to do it again, and I've tried, so it might have been the pipe.

In the dry I counted the queue. On the twenty-fourth day it was eleven at five o'clock. On the thirtieth it was eighteen. On the thirty-eighth it was twenty-nine, and three people had brought a third can, and one lady had brought a pram with six in it. The goose went quiet on the thirty-fourth day, which means the pressure was low, and Tib said it had lost its voice. It came back on the forty-second.

[The Chair asked how the witness knew that the ticks came from the Level and not from the pipe settling. The witness said he didn't know it. He said they were on time.]

[The Commission asked the witness to demonstrate. There is a water pipe in the wall behind the dais, and the witness was shown it. He tapped twice, with his knuckle, and said it would be eleven seconds. The Commission waited. At the eighth second the Chair asked whether this was usual. The witness asked for quiet.]

[At the eleventh second the pipe ticked, once. The clerk records that it ticked once. The clerk also records that the heating in the room had been lit that morning.]

That was, I heard you. That was all it ever says. The room's warm, so it might have been the radiator. I'll put it in the right-hand column. I'd like to ask her something else. But I haven't got anything she can answer, only that she's heard.

On the forty-first day in the evening Mum sent us down to the standpipe to see if it was all right, because of what the slate had said that morning. There were thirty people and it was quiet and nobody pushed. A lady in a grey coat with a bag stood by the wall and watched Tib count. She stayed till the last can. Tib asked whether she wanted counting too. She said no. She looked like she'd been sick. I wrote her down. I put her in the right-hand column, because I didn't know who she was.

My sister counts the cans out loud, and I write down the taps, and Mr. Dunstan says I ought to be a surveyor, and my aunt says I'll be a surveyor or I'll be hanged, and my mum says it doesn't pay, whichever. I'd like it to be written that there are two hundred and twelve taps and thirty-three places for people with no pipe, and that two of them don't have a bell. I don't know whose job it is to tell somebody. I've told everybody I could think of. I'm telling you. If the Commission wants to ask me again when I'm older, in case I've changed my mind about any of it, I'll be at the same address.

[The witness was thanked. His notebook, Exhibit 6, was copied and returned to him. The aunt asked whether the boy would be in trouble for the two taps. The Chair said that he would not. She said he was in trouble for plenty else.]