The Register

Nobody notices the registrar. She has written them all down anyway.

For forty years Hilary Furniss has recorded the official story of Harrowlow, a limestone town in the Derbyshire hills: every birth, every marriage, every death, in the prescribed form, in ink that is not allowed to fade. She has never once written down what she thought. It was not a question on the form.

In twelve weeks the office closes. So when Joan Needham, eighty-five, comes down off the dale in the snow to ask how a birt...