Confessions of an enumerator
Wilfred De'Ath
High anxiety engulfs me once again as I press the first five bell-pushes more or less simultaneously and wait for the jangle of voices, mostly foreign. But one of them, at least, is fool enough to press his buzzer and I am through the door and into the purposebuilt block: the knack is to get into the building somehow or other and sort out the confusion and embarrassment afterwards. After all, who wants a Census Enumerator in his flat at Sunday lunch-time.
At the door of Flat 3 a coloured gentleman with a name like Navaratnam, only more difficult than that, is standing in his pyjamas, smoking a cigarette. One thing I have learned in my three days as an Enumerator is that the population of Earls Court never gets dressed — either that, or they never go to bed but sit around all day wearing night-clothes. (I have also learned never to press the bell marked `Caretaker' because no one ever answers it.) Mr Navaratnam, or whatever, accepts the massive census form gingerly, pointing out that he is not a native of this country, as if I couldn'ts:ethat for myself. I respond — gently — that he is nonetheless obliged to fill it in or risk stumping up a £50 fine. (Four hundred people were prosecuted for `refusal' to accept or fill in a form at the last census in 1971.) Mr Navaratnam finally agrees to accept the form — but with bad grace. (The fact that the Registrar-General is called Thatcher usually seems to tip the balance in my favour.) His parting shot is that he may well be in Kenya on Census Day, 6 April, in which case, of course, he need not bother to fill in the form at all. I do not actually tell him this but leave him cursing quietly in, I think, Swahili, though not, alas, in Bengali, Cantonese, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Punjabi, Turkish or Urdu — the nine languages in which the census form is available. (Why no Arabic?) The next few flats are unoccupied either that, or the tenants have gone round the corner for a Sunday lunch-time drink at The Boltons, carefully avoiding the 'gay' bar, of course. The landlord, when I called there, kindly offered me a drink but I thought it unwise to accept more than a tomato juice since I am not quite sure what becomes of an Enumerator drunk in charge of an Authority Card, a map of Earls Court, a Field Manual, a Background to the Census booklet, Census forms H, I and L (household, individual, and communal), Definition of Usual Address form, Enumeration Record, envelopes for Individual and Sealed Return and a ballpoint which invariably dries up at the crucial moment: most recently at the third `a' of Navaratnam. . .
I move on. I find several empty flats which will all require a return visit; then a very old lady of 92 who is blind as well as partially bedridden. It takes her ten minutes I to answer the door and very nearly as long ' to draw back various bars and bolts. I go .through the 15 questions with her as patiently as I can, but the whole process takes another half-hour and at this rate of progress my Census Delivery Round (250 households) will take about ten days.
The old lady says in a pitiful, quavering voice which has just a trace of The Bo!tons (the street, not the pub) that she has not been out of her flat for 25 years. I believe her. She adds that the last census seems like only yesterday to her. It seems like that to me, too, though I am less than half her age. Where shall we all be in 1991?
I move on again past several more vacant flats and come to one populated by six students — an Enumerator's nightmare, since they always manage to defy Mr Thatcher's definition of a household, which is a group of people regularly taking meals, or a meal, in common. To add to the complication, this lot are from South Africa and seem to travel between London and Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg rather more often than the less transient residents of Earls Court visit Gloucester Road and South Kensington. It takes me another half-hour to sort all of them out.
A Census Enumerator from Mars, set down in Earls Court and told to get on with it, might be forgiven for thinking that the population of Britain now consists entirely of people from other continents, homosexuals, and nubile young women dressed as for disco or night club at three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. (Yes, two hours have passed and I am still at large in this rather up-market 75-flat block.) Very few trueborn Englishmen live here at all, it seems, and those that do all smell strongly of drink — understandably perhaps.
At the end of the three hours' Delivery, am weary and extremely footsore. My voice has cracked from too much pseudoauthorative speaking and translating. (But! have only had one formal refusal.) My biro has not so much run out as leaked into the lining of my only decent jacket. I have changed into a racialist of fanatical proportions and it will be at least a week before I revert to my normal decent liberal self.
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