What a drainage board minute book actually tells you

A land drainage board minute book is the least promising object in any county archive. Foolscap, half of it in pencil, and page after page of resolutions to defer. I spent eleven years producing them before I wrote a word of fiction, and they are still the first thing I go to when I start a book.

The argument is always in the deferrals

Nobody writes down a fight. What gets written down is that the matter of the Vennall pumping station was deferred to the next meeting, and then deferred again, and then deferred a third time before appearing, six months later, as a decision nobody is recorded as having proposed.

Three deferrals is a novel. Somebody could not carry the cost, somebody else could not be seen to say so, and the minute clerk — me, for a decade — wrote deferred because that was the only word available.

What I actually take notes on

• Names that appear and then stop appearing. A ratepayer listed for fifteen years and then not at all. Died, sold, or gave up.
• Sums that do not round. A levy of £1,143 and 6s is a compromise. A levy of £1,200 is a policy.
• Apologies for absence. Who was not in the room when the vote happened tells you as much as the vote.
• Anything in a different hand. An amendment written in later is somebody who read the draft and objected.

The thing to resist

The temptation is to put the archive in the book. Do not. Nineteen pages of levy history is research, not fiction, and a reader can feel the difference in a paragraph.

What the archive gives you is not material — it is confidence. When Ada argues about the sea wall in The Salt Line, I know what a board meeting sounds like, so I can write four lines of it and let the rest be silence. The three hundred pages of notes exist so that four lines can be right.

Where to start, if you want to try this

County record offices hold drainage, harbour and turnpike records, usually catalogued under the parish. They are free to consult, almost never requested, and the archivists are visibly pleased when somebody asks. Take a pencil — most will not let you in with a pen — and give yourself a whole day for the first visit, because you will spend the first two hours learning to read the hand.