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THE WORDS BEFORE THE PRICE
A whole eulogy, written for a person who does not exist. Dot is invented; nobody's real grief. The yard, the ledger and the dog are mine.
Dorothy Kettle ran the office of a coal yard that, by the end, didn't sell much coal.
That is not a sad fact. She would want it said flatly, because Dot dealt in flat. The yard on Wherstead Road had three men, two lorries, one telephone and a set of ledgers with grey thumbprints on every page, and Dot could tell you what a man owed from 1974 before she had found his name. She was never wrong about money and never once made anybody feel small about it.
She said "it'll do" the way other people say I love you. It meant the same thing. It meant she had looked at your work with her whole attention and found nothing to fix, which for Dot was the highest compliment available, and she gave it out maybe twice a year.
She kept a dog called Squire who was ugly and knew it, and she fed him at four o'clock whether or not she was speaking to you. When the lorries came back, she was the one who wrote the weights down, in pencil, in a hand you could read from across the room.
Here is the part that is harder to say. Dot was not kind in the way the word is usually used. She was exact. It looked like kindness because when she asked what you needed, she actually waited for the answer. When a young lad came in with his mother's final bill and no money, she did not waive it and she did not chase it. She wrote down a smaller number, said "that's the figure," and looked at him until he believed her. He believed her.
People brought her things that were not coal-yard things: a letter from a solicitor, a son's school report, once a diagnosis. She read all of it standing up, because sitting was for people with time. And then she said the useful sentence, which was almost never the kind one, and was almost always the sentence that let you go and do the next thing.
The telephone rang and she answered it "coal yard," long after it was funny and long after there was coal.
She kept the yard open eleven years after it stopped making money. Not for the coal. For the three men who would have been at nothing without it, and for the customers who came in to argue about a bill and stayed an hour, and because a town with a yard in it is a different thing to a town without one. Nobody asked her to do that. It was the only thing in the office she never wrote down.
Her husband Ron died in 1998 and she was back at the desk on the Monday, and nobody in this town thought that was strange, which is the strangest part of the whole story. She filed him like she filed everything: properly, and where she could find it when she needed it.
If you are in this room, she wrote down your birthday somewhere. She wrote all of them down. She remembered the names of people she had met once at a counter, and she used them, and you would have thought you were the only person she had spoken to all day. You might have been.
Dot would have hated this many words about her. She would have said get on with it, and she would have said it while doing something with her hands. So: get on with it. Be exact with somebody. Count what they are owed. And do not send them a bill for the thing you were always going to give them anyway.
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