Drake Halford filed a fifth census submission on Friday morning. He brought it in person, with a comparison drawn in his own hand, and the Clerk of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee received it the way he receives everything Halford brings, which is to say without comment. It went into the pigeonholes beside the third filing, the operative one, and the fourth, held in reserve, and the first, the one the records review turned up at the start of the month. The second filing is still missing. Nobody expects it back.
The fifth was prepared, Halford says, in light of the cross-referencing he took up after the first surfaced. He announced that exercise in his letter to this paper on the eighth. He has, by his own account, conducted it thoroughly. The result he calls “instructive.” The Clerk, who was not asked, called it “a complexity,” and said so freely.
Here is the complexity, stripped to the bone. The first filing, dated the fifteenth of April, puts the Halford household at four. The third, dated the thirtieth, puts it at five. The fourth agrees: five. So does the fifth. The fifth adds a section Halford has headed “Reconciliation.” That note explains the count of four held only for the morning of the fifteenth, before a development of the late afternoon that the first filing, submitted earlier in the day, had not yet caught.
This paper has read the note in full. It does not say what the development was. Asked directly, Halford allowed that it was “of a domestic character.” More would follow, he said, if and when the Subcommittee judged it material to the census. The Clerk has processed a great many filings this season and expects to process a great many more. Whether a household’s size in the morning is the same fact as its size in the afternoon was, he observed, not a question the census had ever been built to answer. He did not seem troubled by this. The census has never been built to answer much.
The household next door to the Halfords has not appeared in these pages before, and appears now only because Halford raised it himself. It filed once, on the fifteenth of April, recording two. The filing has not been amended, disputed, deferred, lost, or recovered. It simply says two, and has gone on saying two, without difficulty, for a month. There is a kind of bird that files like that. There is, apparently, another kind.
Halford holds that the fifth filing is “comprehensive and final (ish).” The Clerk holds that it will be reviewed at the next session. The comparison, in Halford’s own hand, is available to anyone who wishes to inspect it, and one day someone may.
The census continues. It does that.