The Thirty-First Item

5 min read

The deposit form says thirty-one items. I have counted the box four times. There are thirty.

I should explain what I do, because it bears on everything after. I am an archivist at a county record office in west Wales. When somebody dies and leaves papers that touch on public administration — a clerk, a registrar, a churchwarden — those papers sometimes come to us. We call it a deposit. It arrives in a box, with a form, and somebody has to go through it item by item and write a catalogue entry for each one.

That somebody was me. Accession 2021/47. The estate of Emrys Hartwell Pugh, parish clerk of Llanddreiniog, 1961 to 2004, died 2019 aged ninety-one.

The form in the lid is in his handwriting. It is a numbered list, one line per item, and the last line is number thirty-one.

⁂

Item 2 is a page from the 1891 census.

Not a copy. The enumerator's own page, which should not exist outside Kew, listing a farmstead called Pen-y-Rhiw on the ridge above the village. Seven names. A man of forty-four, a woman of forty-one, five children between three and sixteen.

I checked it against the returns that went to London, because that is a thing I can do from my desk in about four minutes.

Pen-y-Rhiw is on the London return. The household is listed. The names are not. There is a line ruled through where seven names should be, and in the margin, in a hand that is not Pugh's and is sixty years older than him, four words.

Agreed. Not to be spoken.

⁂

I want to be careful about how I describe the next six weeks, because the honest version makes me sound like a man building a case, and I was not. I was cataloguing a box. The entries are numbered. You do them in order.

Item 4 is a school attendance book for 1923 in which one child is marked present for an entire term after her family's cottage was recorded as cleared and empty.

Item 9 is a bus timetable from 1968 with one stop annotated, in biro, does not stop. The stop is Pen-y-Rhiw.

Item 10 is a chapel seat rental ledger. Pew eleven has been paid for every year since 1904, by standing order, from an account the chapel treasurer has never been able to identify. Nobody has sat in it in living memory. The chapel burned down in 1981 and the payments continued.

Item 13 is a vaccination register in which a single child is listed as not required, which is not one of the permitted entries on that form and never has been.

Each of these, on its own, is an administrative oddity. Record offices are full of them. People make mistakes, clerks copy badly, forms get filled in by somebody who does not understand them.

What record offices are not full of is the same oddity, in the same parish, in a different hand, every decade, for a hundred and thirty years.

⁂

By item 20 I had stopped pretending I was only cataloguing.

Item 20 is a Christmas card list. Forty-odd names in Pugh's hand, updated in different pens over what must be thirty years, names crossed off as people died. One name has no address beside it and is never crossed off. It appears on every version of the list from 1974 to 2003.

Item 23 is the minutes of a parish council meeting in March 1978 at which a motion was proposed, seconded, and carried unanimously. The subject of the motion has been removed — not redacted, removed, the line cut out of the page with a blade and the page kept.

Item 24 is a receipt. Two bags of lime mortar and a yard of oilcloth, bought in Aberaeron in 1981, the year the chapel burned.

Item 26 is a photograph of the north wall of the parish church, taken before the restoration, with a memorial plaque in it that is not on the wall today.

⁂

Item 28 is a list of parish clerks of Llanddreiniog going back to 1804.

There are eleven of them. Beside each, a date. Pugh's own entry is the last, and the date beside it is 2004, which is the year he retired, so at first I read the column as end-of-service dates and thought nothing of it.

Then I checked three of them against the burial register.

The dates are not when they left office. They are earlier. In two cases they are eleven and nineteen years earlier. Each man went on being clerk, signing minutes, for years after the date written beside his name.

At the top of the column, in a hand from the 1800s: Date at which he declined to continue.

⁂

Item 29 is a tally.

One sheet, ruled into a column, and in that column a list of names in eleven different hands across a hundred and thirty years, each addition in the ink of its decade. The seven from Pen-y-Rhiw are at the top. The child from the attendance book is fourth. The name from the Christmas card list is twenty-second.

There are thirty names on it.

Item 30 is a letter from Pugh to whoever came after him. It is four lines long and I am not going to reproduce it in full, because the part that matters is the last line, which reads:

The list is kept so that the number is known. Do not let the number be wrong.

⁂

So I have thirty items and a form that says thirty-one, and I have spent a long time considering the innocent explanations, and there are several, and I have tested the ones that can be tested.

An item could have been lost in transit. The solicitor's inventory, which I requested, also says thirty-one.

Pugh could have miscounted. He was a parish clerk for forty-three years and the box is numbered in his hand with no corrections anywhere in it.

The thirty-first item could be the box itself, or the form, which archivists do sometimes number. I would accept that, except for what the form actually says on line thirty-one.

Every other line describes a document. Line thirty-one is four words, and the four words are not a description of anything.

Whoever catalogues this deposit.

⁂

I have written thirty catalogue entries. The accession is not closed, because an accession cannot be closed while the contents do not match the form, and so Accession 2021/47 sits open on my desk with one entry outstanding.

I have been here four years. My predecessor catalogued for eleven years after the date written beside her name on the handover sheet in the office safe, which I have now looked at, and which I am sorry I looked at.

There are thirty names on the tally in item 29.

The number is known. I am not going to let it be wrong.

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