The Book of the House

by Edward Lear, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

There were four of them, and together they weighed six pounds and eleven ounces on the kitchen scales, because Stanley Loades weighed them for her before she could stop him.

"You'll be carrying them to the car," he said. "You want to know what you're carrying."

"I'm not taking them away," said Joanne. "I do it here. That's the whole point. They don't leave the house."

"Well," said Stanley. "Now you know what they weigh."

He set them out on the oilcloth in order, one, two, three, four, squaring each against the edge of the table with the side of his hand, the way a man squares a pile of letters before he puts the band round them. They were account books, of the old kind that stationers used to sell to small shopkeepers, quarto, with green cloth sides and red leather at the corners and along the spine. The red had worn through to a pale fawn at every place a thumb would go. On the front of the first one somebody had stuck a white label, and on the label, in a sloping brown hand, was written The Book of the House. I.

The oilcloth had a pattern of lemons on it. The kitchen was at the back of a terraced house in Essex Street, in Norwich, and its window looked out on a yard eleven feet wide, with a pond in it the size of a bath, and a water butt, and a cast-iron bench, and two folding chairs of the kind people take to the beach, one with a blue canvas seat and one with a red one. Above the yard, under the eaves of the back bedroom, there were three wooden boxes nailed to the wall in a row, each with a slot at the bottom like the mouth of a letterbox.

Joanne Kerrison was twenty-nine. She worked four days a week on the telephones at an insurance company on Surrey Street, answering people whose houses had flooded or whose cars had been hit, and on the fifth day, and on Saturdays, she was a volunteer for the county phenology project, which is to say that she went into other people's houses and read their handwriting. Phenology is the study of the dates of things. When does the first frogspawn appear in a pond; when does the blackthorn flower; when do the swallows come, and when do the oak leaves turn. One date by itself is worth nothing. Two hundred years of the same date, written down by people who were looking, is worth a great deal, and in Norfolk there is a record of that kind which goes back to 1736, when a gentleman at Stratton Strawless began writing down the first cuckoo and the first leaf on the birch, and his family went on writing them down after him until 1958. Joanne's job was to find the small private versions of that record in back bedrooms and biscuit tins, and copy them into a spreadsheet before somebody's nephew put them in a skip.

She had a laptop and a list of columns. Date. Species. Event. Location. Recorder. Notes.

The letter that had brought her to Essex Street was in her bag. It had come to the project in October, typed, and signed in the sloping brown hand. There is a record of the garden and the immediate neighbourhood kept continuously since May 1986, some four thousand entries. I should like it to go somewhere useful. I am not well, and would prefer it done sooner than later. It had taken the project until March to get round to it, and by then the man who signed it had been dead for seven weeks.

"He'd have liked you to have come in October," said Stanley. "But there it is."

He put a mug of tea beside the first book, well away from it, on the far side of her laptop, and turned the handle to face her. Then he put down a plate, and on the plate a slice of something dark and shining and very heavy, which had been cut with a knife dipped in hot water, so that the cut faces were as clean as slate.

"Lardy cake," said Stanley. "From the shop. I don't make it. He used to make it."

---

She began on the first page, and in an hour she had done two months of 1986.

There were two hands in the book, and it took her no time at all to tell them apart. The sloping brown one, which was Ivor Thurlow's, wrote the date in the naturalist's way, with the month in small Roman numerals, 6.v.1986, and gave every living thing its Latin name, and often its colour, as exactly as if there would be a test. Gonepteryx rhamni, male, first, along the yard wall. Sulphur, not lemon: the green in it shows when he banks. The other hand was in block capitals, upright, in blue biro pressed so hard that it had come through on the back of the page as a kind of Braille, and it wrote the month in letters and the species in English and nothing else at all. 11 APR 86. CUCKOO. HEARD. EARLHAM CEMETERY. 6.40 AM. S.L.

"Six-forty," said Joanne.

"I was on earlies," said Stanley. He was standing at the sink, drying a single teaspoon, which he had been drying for some time. "Forty-one years on the post. You know where you are at six-forty. Up the cemetery path, past the chapel, into the Earlham Road. You hear what's about."

"And he wasn't with you."

"He was in bed," said Stanley. "He was a technician. Biology, up at the high school. They don't start till half past eight." He put the teaspoon in the drawer. "He'd make me write it down when I came in. He said if I didn't put the time it wasn't worth having."

The first entry of all was on the inside of the front cover, above the first page, and it was in both hands, which was the only place she ever found them together on a single line. Begun 6.v.1986, a year to the day. I.T. & S.L.

Under it, on the first page, the first proper entry was Ivor's.

6.v.1986. Apus apus. 4, over the house, screaming. 8.15 pm. First of the year. (1)

Joanne typed it in. 06/05/1986. Swift. First seen. Essex Street, Norwich. I. Thurlow. Then she put the cursor in the Notes column and looked at the number in brackets for a while.

"What's the one?" she said.

Stanley had gone to the back door and was looking out at the yard, at the boxes under the eaves.

"Leave that," he said. "That's not data."

She left it.

---

She came on Tuesdays, which was her day off, and she came in the morning, at ten, because Stanley said he had nothing to do after ten and was used to having done it all by then. Each time there was a mug of tea on the far side of the laptop with the handle turned towards her, and a plate, and on the plate a slice of lardy cake from the shop on the Unthank Road, cut with a hot knife. On the third Tuesday she said that he really didn't have to, and he said that he knew he didn't, and on the fourth Tuesday the slice was bigger.

She learned the house through the book before she learned it with her feet. She knew that the pond had been dug in the winter of 1987, because the first frogspawn in it was entered on the third of March 1988 with (our pond, first year) after it and an exclamation mark, the only one in four volumes. She knew that the plum tree against the wall of the next-door yard belonged to next door, and that its first flowers were entered every year as Prunus domestica (Mrs Bunn's), until the spring of 2003, when they became (Mr Bunn's), and in 2009 became (Bunns' gone, new people), and after that simply (next door). She knew that there was a fox which came over the back wall at night from about 1994 onwards and that Ivor had called it, in the Latin column, Vulpes vulpes ("the Bishop"), and that it had been seen for the last time on a February night in 2001 with grey at muzzle, slow on wall after it. She knew that in 1998 the house had had its roof done, and that the swifts that year had been entered, in Ivor's hand, with some violence: Apus apus. 3, over. Nowhere to go in. Roofers have blocked every gap under the eaves. Damn the roofers. And that in the autumn of the same year three wooden boxes had gone up in a row under the back bedroom window, 8.x.1998, swift boxes x 3, S.L. on ladder, I.T. holding it, and that it had taken the swifts six summers to find them.

She knew their two kinds of attention. Ivor looked at colour, and at parts; he counted the stamens on the hawthorn and noted in 1990 that the first brimstone of the year was the exact yellow of a cooked yolk, not a raw one. Stanley looked at time. Stanley's entries were full of the minute. 7.52 PM. 8.03 PM. 5.10 AM, STILL DARK. Where Ivor wrote a few, Stanley went back over it in blue biro and wrote the number.

She knew, also, without being told, that the book was not only a book about birds.

There was a page in the June of 1990, between Sambucus nigra, flowers fully out and a note about the first broad beans, where Ivor had written, in the Latin column, in very small letters:

Stanleius postalis. Adult male. First seen this year in shorts. Legs: a pale and unreasonable white, like the underside of a flatfish. Approached closely without alarm. Common.

Joanne put her hand over her mouth. When she took it away Stanley was looking at her from the doorway.

"I don't have a species for that," she said.

"No," said Stanley. "Leave it."

---

On the fifth Tuesday, which was the first in April, she reached the November of 1991, and a page where the brown ink and the blue had both gone faint, as if they had been written with a pen that was running out, or written by people in a hurry.

7.xi.1991. Turdus pilaris. 30+, over, going SW, calling. Also: window again.

And under it, in capitals:

12 NOV 91. GLAZIER. £38.

Joanne looked at that for a moment. Then she typed 07/11/1991. Fieldfare. Flock, passage. Essex Street, Norwich, and the number thirty in the count column, and left the rest. The spreadsheet had no column for a window. It had no column for a glazier, or for thirty-eight pounds, which in 1991 would have been a week's rent for somebody. She went on.

There were other pages like it, not many. In the March of 1992 there was an entry in capitals which said only DOOR, PAINT OFF, 2 HRS. WHITE SPIRIT, and no bird at all. In the September of 1993 Ivor had written Hirundo rustica, last of the year, over the playing field at school, and then, as a separate line, in ink that was darker because it had been gone over twice, Said nothing. Was right to. In 1994 nothing. In 1995 nothing. After that the window and the door did not come into it again, and the book was about birds, and frogs, and the Bishop.

She did not ask about any of it. She ate the lardy cake, which was sweet and salt at once, and so full of lard that it left a gloss on the plate like the inside of a shell, and wiped her fingers on the paper towel he had folded beside it, and went on into 1996.

---

The question of the recorder came up on the sixth Tuesday.

At the back of the second book, tucked inside the endpaper, there was a little bundle of record cards held together with a paperclip that had rusted a brown print on to the top one. They were the cards that the county naturalists' society had once printed for members to send in their sightings, and each one had a printed line at the bottom that said Recorder, and on every one of them, all through the late eighties and the nineties, the name on that line was I. Thurlow. Only that. Under the name there was the address, Essex St., Norwich, and under the address nothing.

Joanne laid them out on the lemons in a row.

"The project'll want one name per record," she said. "Or two. It'll take two. I've been putting I. Thurlow because it's what's on the letter, and on these. But half the entries are yours. More than half, after about 2010."

"After 2010 his eyes went," said Stanley. "He'd tell me what to put."

"So who do I put?"

Stanley sat down at the table opposite her, which he had not done before. He was seventy-nine. He had a long, careful, yellowish face, the colour of a candle that has been lit once and put away, and very large clean hands, with the nails cut square, and he wore a cardigan the green of a bowling green in August, buttoned to the top, with a pen clipped to the band of the breast pocket where another man would have had a handkerchief. He put one finger on the nearest card, on the word Recorder.

"It was his name that went on things," he said. "That's all. That's how it was done. Mine went on the electric."

Joanne waited.

"You'd have to know what it was like," said Stanley. "Him at the school. All that, in them years. You couldn't have two names on a card from one house. Somebody at the society would have looked at it and thought, oh, and then it'd have been all round the society, and then all round the school. People talk at the society, they've got nothing to do but count things." He took the finger away. "It's not like that now. I know it's not."

"So," said Joanne.

"Put what it says in the book," said Stanley. "Every line in the book's got whose it is at the end."

She went back to the beginning, that evening, at home, with the four books in her head and the spreadsheet open on her knee, and changed the recorder on two thousand two hundred and three rows from I. Thurlow to S. Loades, row by row, because there was not a way of doing it all at once that she trusted. It took her until half past one in the morning. When she had finished she sat with the laptop warm on her knees and listened to the house next door, where somebody was running a bath.

---

There was one more thing in the books that she did not understand, and she did not ask about it again, because she had been told the first time.

Every year there was an entry for the first swifts. They were all in Ivor's hand, every one of them, from 1986 to 2025, even in the last ten years when everything else was in capitals; she could see how the brown hand got larger and looser and less sure after 2015 or so, as if it were being written at arm's length, but it was always his. And every year, at the end of the swift entry, and of no other entry in the book, there was the number in brackets.

4.v.1987. Apus apus. 2, high, over the house. 8.40 pm. (2)

11.v.1991. Apus apus. 7, screaming party round the roofs, very low. (6)

2.v.2004. Apus apus. 1, then 5. First pair in box 3, at last. (19)

The dates of the swifts moved about, as the dates of everything in the book moved about: the fourth of May, the eleventh, the second, the eighth. The numbers in the brackets did not move about. They went up by one every year, whatever the swifts did.

She had found them all before she understood them, and then she understood them all at once, on a Tuesday towards the end of April, with the first book open at the inside of the cover. Begun 6.v.1986, a year to the day. She turned to the first swift entry. 6.v.1986. (1) She turned to the last, in the fourth book, in a hand so large and loose that it took up three lines. 5.v.2025. Apus apus. 3. Heard them before I saw them. S. says 8.02. (40)

She did not put anything in the Notes column. She did not say anything. Stanley was out in the yard, kneeling on a folded towel at the edge of the pond, lifting out with his fingers a mat of blanket weed the colour of a split pea and laying it on the flags to drain, so that the creatures in it could crawl back. There were tadpoles in the pond, a great many of them, black, the size of a fingernail clipping, hanging under the surface with their tails going. She had turned ahead, and knew from the book that the frogspawn had been entered that year, by Stanley, in capitals, on the nineteenth of February, which was eighteen days earlier than the average of the first ten years. Ivor had kept the averages on the last page of each book, in pencil, and rubbed them out and done them again every spring. On the last page of the fourth book the last sum was in pencil and in Stanley's square upright figures, and it was wrong in the second decimal place, and she did not correct it.

She looked at the boxes under the eaves. They were empty, and their slots were dark.

---

She finished the fourth book on the last Tuesday of April. There were four thousand one hundred and twelve rows. The last entries in it were these.

14.x.2025. Turdus iliacus. Redwings, heard going over in the night, from bed. Many. I.T.

2 NOV 25. FIELDFARES. 12+. OVER. S.L.

And then a gap of three months, a white space of about two inches on the page, and then, in capitals:

9 FEB 26. SNOWDROPS. ROSARY CEMETERY. FULL OUT.

19 FEB 26. FROGSPAWN. POND.

The Rosary Cemetery is on the hill to the east of the city, above the railway, and was the first cemetery in England to be opened for people of every denomination. Joanne typed 09/02/2026. Snowdrop. First flowering (full). Rosary Cemetery, Norwich. S. Loades, and then the frogspawn, and the row turned blue when she pressed Enter, as all the rows had done, and that was the end of the record.

"That's it," she said. "That's all of it. It goes to the project at the end of the month. They'll put it with the rest of the county's. It'll be there for anyone."

"Good," said Stanley.

He was standing in the doorway with the plate. There was no cake on it this time. He had forgotten the cake, or there had not been any at the shop, and he stood with the empty plate in his hand as if he had been sent to fetch something and had arrived at the place without remembering what.

"There's this year," said Joanne.

"What about it?"

"This year's hardly in. The snowdrops and the frogspawn and then nothing. The project likes a record to come up to date. There's been brimstones about for weeks. I saw one this morning, coming in, going along your wall."

"So did I," said Stanley. "I didn't put it in."

"Then the swifts," said Joanne, "when they come."

Stanley put the plate down on the draining board.

"I've not decided about the swifts," he said.

---

She was not asked back. She went back.

She went on the sixth of May, which was a Wednesday, after work, still in her work clothes, with a bag from the shop on the Unthank Road that had a lardy cake in it, the whole cake, square, in a paper case, still a little warm on the bottom. She rang the bell and Stanley came to the door in the green cardigan and looked at her and then at the bag.

"I don't know if it's as good as his," she said. "I've never had his."

"It's not," said Stanley. "It's from the shop." He stood aside.

The yard was in shadow by then, all except the top of the back wall, which had the last of the sun on it and was the warm orange of a flowerpot. The air was very still. Somewhere along the terrace somebody was cooking onions. The pond had a skin of light on it, and the tadpoles had back legs now, and hung at the surface in the corner by the flag where the water was warmest, all facing the same way, as people stand at a bus stop.

Stanley unfolded the chairs. He set them side by side, facing up the yard towards the back of the house, as they must always have been set, because the feet of them went exactly into two pairs of worn places in the moss between the flags. He sat down in the red one. After a moment Joanne sat down in the blue one, which was lower than she expected, so that her knees came up.

He had brought out the fourth book, and a biro, and he held them on his lap, closed, the biro laid along the spine.

They sat. The orange went off the top of the wall. The sky over the roofs of Essex Street, which had been a clean pale blue all afternoon, went through a colour like the inside of a mussel shell, a blue with grey and lilac in it, and the first light came on in a back bedroom three doors down. Stanley looked at his watch, and then did not look at it again.

"They don't land, you know," he said. "Not till they nest. They come all the way up from Africa and they don't land. They sleep up there. They go up at night, very high, a mile, two miles, and they sleep on the wing, a bit at a time. He told me that the first year. I said I didn't believe him. He got a book out."

"I didn't know that."

"Nobody does," said Stanley. "That's why he liked them."

Joanne heard them first.

It came from a long way off over the roofs to the south, towards the Unthank Road, a thin high sound, like a wet finger drawn round the rim of a glass, but harsher, and breaking, and then several of them together, a sound like children let out of a school a long way away. Then nothing. Then, before she had time to look, it was right over them, and three black shapes came over the ridge of the house so low and so fast that she ducked, though there was no need, shaped like the head of an anchor, like a bent bow with a dart through it, screaming. They went down the length of the yard at the height of the bedroom window and up over the back wall and were gone, and the sound went with them, and came back from the other side of the terrace, and came round again.

Stanley did not move until they had come round three times. Then he opened the book on his knee, to the line after the frogspawn, and took the biro off the spine, and looked at his watch.

He wrote it in capitals, upright, pressing hard, so that it would come through on the back of the page.

6 MAY 26. SWIFTS. 3, OVER THE HOUSE, SCREAMING. 8.11 PM. FIRST OF THE YEAR. S.L.

Then he stopped, with the pen still on the paper at the end of his initials, and the swifts went over again, very high now, so high that they were only a thin black scratching against the mussel-coloured sky, and their screaming came down a little behind them, as the sound of a thing does when it is far away.

He lifted the pen, and wrote, a little apart from the rest, in brackets, a small number.

(41)

He held the book out to her, open, across the gap between the two chairs.

"You'll want that," he said, "for the Notes."

"Yes," said Joanne.

"Put it in," said Stanley.

He closed the book and laid the biro along the spine again, and they sat on in the two chairs while the light went, with the cake in its bag on the flags between them, not yet cut, and the swifts went round and round the roofs of Essex Street, screaming, and did not come down.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Novembribus (1 November 2026), ab Eduardō Lear per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Edward Lear, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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