[A composition book, marbled boards, kept by Thomas McCausland. The first forty pages are Pitman drill in a young hand — the exercises of a copy-boy learning his trade. The transcription begins at p. 41 and continues irregularly over four years. Ewan McCausland's watch book itself is not reproduced here; this is only his son's working transcription of it, with the son's bracketed notes. Found in the Clarion morgue, envelope M-114, unfiled, with no accession mark.]
p. 41
Begun 3 February 1919.
My father kept a watch book from 1897 until the week he died. My mother had it from May of 1913 and could not read it. I could not read it either. I have been six years learning a system in order to learn that his was not that system.
What he used is Pitman at the root, off a mate's manual, and then bent for twenty years by a man who never had to be read by anybody but himself. He shortens constantly and lengthens nothing. Weather he does in a mark of his own that I have had to reason out from the log. Men he does not name after the first time — he gives a man a figure and keeps the figure for years.
I will set down what I can carry and mark what I cannot. Where I am guessing I will say I am guessing.
From the 1908 book
11 June. Office posted nothing but the men are saying there is a table now. So much for a mate, so much for a hand, so much for a boy. 22 says he has seen it. I said if it is not posted it is not a table, it is a rumour with figures in it.
[22 appears from 1906 to 1912. I do not know who 22 is. My father liked him — the entries about 22 are the only ones with jokes in them.]
From the 1912 book
9 Sept. Relieved at 8. Wind SW moderate. Coal aft trimmed poorly again. Told 14. He says the gang was short two men and short two men is what the office sends now.
24 Sept. Boy on his birthday. Sixteen. His mother wants him at his letters and I want him at his letters and he wants the water. We have out-voted him but he does not know it yet.
[This is me. I did not know it then and I did not know it in 1913 when I went to the paper, which my mother arranged, and which I believed at the time was my own idea.]
2 Nov. Office letter to the Captain came aboard sealed with the coal invoices. He read it at the table and put it in his coat and did not say what was in it. Course discussion after. I said the northerly is a fool's road in November and I have said so every November. He said it is not my road to choose.
6 Nov. Northerly.
[One word. He wrote nothing else that day. In fifteen years of this book there are four other days with one word on them and three of them are the deaths of men.]
8 Nov. Glass falling since the forenoon. Seas making on the quarter. Told the Captain what I thought of it and he agreed with me, which frightened me worse than if he had not.
9 Nov. — [The last dated entry is 9 November. It is four marks long. I have read it perhaps two hundred times. Three of the marks are his sign for the ship's head. I cannot read the fourth and I have stopped pretending that I will.]
The other pages
The last four pages of the 1912 book are not in the system I have described above.
He used this second set of marks perhaps twenty times in fifteen years. Always in port. Never at sea. And always — as near as I can judge from what stands around them — when he was writing about the Company rather than about the ship.
I can pick out figures in them. I can pick out what I am fairly sure is a date in 1908 and what I am fairly sure is the same date written again further down. I cannot pick out one whole sentence.
I have made a fair copy of those four pages and I mean to put them in front of somebody who reads better than I do. I have not decided who. There is nobody at this paper I can ask without also asking the paper, and I am not ready to ask the paper.
Note at the foot of p. 63, in the same hand, undated but later:
My mother kept it in a tin in the pantry with the flour for six years and told nobody, and I have had it three years and told nobody, and I am beginning to understand that this is how it is done. Not by burning a thing. By everybody who has it deciding, separately and for good reasons, that this is not the week.