INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE KEEPING OF THE NIGHT-BOOK, left for Mr E. Prosser by T. Aldred on his going. Asher Hall, 29 September 1931.
You will have the book from Michaelmas. It is not a difficult book to keep and I set down here how I have kept it, not because my way is the only way but because a book kept two ways is worth less than a book kept badly one way.
1. It lives on the pantry desk and nowhere else. Do not carry it up. A book that travels is a book that is read by people who have not been asked to read it.
2. Enter the retiring hours of the family, the locking of the outer doors, your own retiring, and any matter arising in the night. Nothing else. It is not a diary and you are not obliged to be interesting in it.
3. Write at the time, or as near to the time as your feet will allow. A thing set down in the morning is a thing remembered. A thing set down at the hour is a thing heard. They are not the same and the book should only ever contain the second.
4. Write what you heard and not what it was. A tread on the fifth board from the morning-room door, light, going towards the west passage is what you heard. Mrs So-and-so going down for a book is what you have decided, and you have decided it lying in the dark with your eyes shut.
5. Do not put a name in unless you have seen the person with your own eyes in a light sufficient to be sure. This will seem to you an excess of caution and it is not. The book is not yours. It may be asked for, and the asking will not be in a good year.
6. You will find, at the leaf for the night of 7–8 April 1923, an entry in which no name appears. It records a light tread in the west passage at thirty-three minutes past two, and a return within a quarter of an hour, and that the corridor was empty when I rose. Under it I have written that I did not write the name.
I will tell you plainly, because you will hear the story from the kitchen otherwise and hear it wrong: I knew whose tread it was. I had heard it for four days going up and down that passage in the ordinary way. I knew it the way you know a voice through a door.
I did not write it because I had not seen it, and rule five is rule five, and a rule that only holds when it is convenient was never a rule but a preference. But that is the small reason and I will give you the large one. A butler's night-book may be read by anyone who asks for it and there is no one in a house who can refuse. If I had set the name down, the book would have said it, in my hand, over my initials, to whoever opened it — a magistrate, an insurer, a solicitor, a nephew, a newspaper — and I should not have been standing beside them to say the rest of it. The book cannot be asked a second question. That is its whole virtue as a record and its whole danger as a witness.
7. Her ladyship asked me, on the Monday morning, whether I had heard anything in the night. I said that I had heard someone in the west passage and that I had not seen them. She thanked me and she did not ask me a second question.
I have turned that over for eight years. I have thought that she did not ask because she did not wish to be told. I have thought that she did not ask because she had no need to be told. I do not know which and I never shall, and you will notice that I have not written either of them in the book, only here, where it is a man's opinion and marked as one.
8. Keep the book true and keep it dull. When it is asked for — and in thirty-one years it has been asked for twice — you will want it to be a thing you can hand over open, without turning to a page first.
9. The book will be here when neither of us is. That is the whole of why it must be true, and the whole of why you must be careful what you allow it to say.
T.A.