Doctor Who_ The Hollow Men - Keith Topping [42]
Some school records were donated to us during the 1960s.
They‟re all in here.‟ Baber opened the chest, and the damp smell hit Ace like a punch.
„Phew,‟ she said waving a hand under her nose. „What a pong!‟
The vicar departed with a smile, muttering something about lunch and the shipping forecast.
The chest was, indeed, a treasure trove. Had Ace‟s real purpose been straightforward historical research then she would have been busy. But since she was looking for something unusual, and she had no idea of what that might be, her search became a random trawl through registers, lists of landowners, and miscellaneous school records. She settled down to read a log of school punishments for the year 1907.
It seemed the village lads had been regularly caned for a bewildering range of „crimes‟. „Bad boys‟.‟ she exclaimed, her finger running over „insolence‟, „tampering with the school clock‟ and „kicking a hedgehog‟.
„Serves you right, Wally,‟ she said, noting that Walter Smith got two strokes for booting the defenceless creature. Then she thought of him, knee-deep in the mud of Passchendaele, screaming as shells exploded around him, and she dropped the book back into the chest.
Finally, Ace found something pertinent to her own interest in the village. It was an enormous ledger with rich, cream-coloured paper and thin, almost faded, gold edging. It crackled with imagined importance.
The book was some kind of census of the last few years of the nineteenth century and the first five decades of the twentieth. There was another volume beneath detailing the previous fifty years. As Ace read she found a year-by-year record of all of the people in the village, grouped together into families, with brackets indicating links that became more and more intertwined as the years rolled on. There were columns listing dates of birth, christenings, marriages, and deaths and, at the end of each yearly page, a note, in neat copperplate script, of the total village population. There were 506 people in 1894, 507 in 1895, 506 in 1896. Ace turned another handful of pages: 499 in 1917 (well, Wally and his mates were all away getting themselves shot in Europe, weren‟t they?), 504 in 1918, 507 in 1919 (wasn‟t there a great flu about then that should have made the population decline, not increase?). Ace reached the 1930s: 510 in 1936, 508 in 1937...
Ace heard the sound of footsteps moving quietly in her direction, and turned, startled.
„Oh, I‟m sorry,‟ said Thomas Baber, almost dropping the tray and glasses he was carrying. „I thought all this dusty work might be making you thirsty. Lemonade?‟
Ace chuckled. „Thank you,‟ she said. „That‟s well thoughtful of you, Vicar.‟
Baber came across to the desk and set the tray down, looking over Ace‟s shoulder at the ledger.
„Oh, I see you‟ve found the parish population record.‟ He walked towards a small cupboard by the door and pulled out a similar-sized ledger, but this time the cover was newer, with fewer spots of mildew and damp. „This is the most recent volume, begun by my late grandfather in 1954, continued by my father, and now by me. The record has much less relevance in these days of information superhighways and such technical nonsense, but I carry it on. I‟m mindful of the importance of tradition, aren‟t you?‟
„Sure,‟ said Ace, taking a grateful drink from her lemonade.
„Tell me, Vicar, what‟s the current population of the village?‟
„About five hundred,‟ said Baber casually. Then he set the book down and checked on the most recent page, right towards the back. „It was actually 513 on the thirty-first of December last year, but a couple of people have left the village since then. Why do you ask?‟
„No reason,‟ said Ace quickly. „Just curious. There was one other thing