The lamplighter of Cranmere

Every evening at dusk, before the street had quite made up its mind to be dark, a woman named Ise walked the length of Cranmere Row with a brass pole over her shoulder. There were forty-one lamps on the row. She knew each one by the sound its little door made.

The ninth lamp stuck. The twenty-second leaked a thin blue flame that hissed at her like a cat. The last one, outside the baker’s, had been broken for a year, and she stopped at it anyway, out of habit, and looked up at the dark glass for as long as it took to count to ten.

What the light was for

People think a lamplighter lights lamps. She lights the space between them. A street with one lamp is a street with one bright coin in it and a great deal of night. A street with forty-one is a road you can read, end to end, the way you read a line of type: one mark leading to the next, and none of them alone.

That is the whole of the trade, and it takes about an hour.

A short list of things she carried

• The brass pole, with the wick at one end and the snuffer at the other.
• A tin of matches, wrapped twice, because the row runs downhill into the weather.
• A stub of chalk, for marking a lamp that needed the glazier.
• Bread, usually.

In the spring the council sent a man to ask whether the work might be done in half the time. Ise said it might, and that the second half of the row would then be lit by someone walking faster than they could see. The man wrote something down and went away, and the row stayed as it was for another eleven years.

A road you can read, end to end, is not a luxury. It is the difference between going somewhere and being out in the dark.

When she finally stopped, they gave her the brass pole, which was hers already, and a printed card with her name spelled wrong. She kept both. The lamps on Cranmere Row are electric now and come on all at once, which is faster, and which nobody walks the length of to check.