Parish of No One

Editor’s Note

The following entries are transcribed from the Parish Register of St. Barnabas, Iffley, Oxfordshire, maintained by Noel Poole, Parish Clerk, 1986–2026. The register was recovered from the vestry in September 2026 by a survey team from the Provisional Council, South Midlands District. Marginal notes are reproduced in italics. Struck-through entries are preserved as written. The transcription is complete and unedited.

BURIALS — 2019

14 January. Gerald Arthur Whitcomb, aged 81 years. St. Barnabas churchyard, plot 14-C. Officiated by lay reader T. Faraday (no ordained clergy available since 2017). Witnesses: D. Poole (wife of clerk), R. Mowbray.

3 March. Edith Grace Mowbray, aged 76 years. Churchyard, plot 15-A. Officiated T. Faraday. Witnesses: R. Mowbray (husband), N. Poole (clerk).

The snowdrops came early this year. A full fortnight before the usual. I note this because no one else will.

27 April. David Arthur Poole (no relation to clerk), aged 63 years. Churchyard, plot 15-B. Cause noted as cardiac failure. No officiant — T. Faraday ill. Words read by clerk from the Book of Common Prayer, 1662 edition. I am not ordained. I read the words because someone must.

MARRIAGES — 2019

8 June. Thomas Faraday, aged 59, bachelor, lay reader, of this parish, to Margaret Wells, aged 54, spinster, formerly of Kennington. Witnesses: N. Poole, D. Poole. Rings exchanged. No flowers in the chancel — the Flower Guild disbanded in 2016 — but Mrs. Wells, I should say Mrs. Faraday, carried dog roses from the hedgerow along Iffley Lock. White and pale pink. The petals fell during the vows.

I have looked at the Baptisms column. Blank since 1995. Twenty-four years of ruled lines with nothing between them. The paper has yellowed differently where it has never been touched by ink — paler, almost luminous, as if the absence of writing has preserved it.

BURIALS — 2019 (continued)

19 August. Dorothy May Poole, aged 64 years. Wife of clerk. Churchyard, plot 16-A. Officiated T. Faraday. Witnesses: M. Faraday, R. Mowbray.

I have ruled the columns for 2020.

BURIALS — 2020

2 February. Robert Mowbray, aged 79 years. Churchyard, plot 15-A (beside wife). No officiant — T. Faraday unable. Clerk read the words. Five persons present, being the entire resident population of the parish excepting Mrs. Kempf, who cannot walk. The ground was frozen to a depth of nine inches and the digging took two days. I mention this because the register does not customarily record the condition of the earth but it seems to me now that the earth is the thing that matters most. The earth receives them. The earth is the column that never goes blank.

14 May. Thomas Faraday, aged 60 years. Lay reader. The last person in this parish who could officiate by any recognised authority. Churchyard, plot 16-B. Clerk read the words. Three persons present. Afterwards Mrs. Faraday and I stood at the lychgate and she asked if I would continue to keep the register. I said I would. She asked why and I said because the columns are ruled and the ink is not yet dry and I could not think of a better reason and she could not either.

I am now the only person in Iffley who knows where the register is kept. The vestry key is on a nail behind the credence table. I check the register every Thursday. I do not know why Thursday. My father checked on Thursdays. His father before him. The habit has outlived its reason, as most habits will.

29 September. Anja Kempf, aged 88 years. Churchyard, new row, plot 17-A. Clerk read the words. One person present (clerk). Mrs. Kempf had not spoken English well — she came from Freiburg in 1972 — and I read the words in English because they are the words I know. It occurred to me, lowering her into the ground, that the register has always been an English document recording English lives and that the nation it recorded no longer exists in any meaningful sense, and that I am maintaining the records of a dissolved institution in a dissolved country, and that this is either absurd or holy.

MARRIAGES — 2020

None.

BAPTISMS — 2020

None.

The column is very white. I have measured it. Four inches of ruled space for each quarter-year, and the space has been empty since September 1995. That is one hundred inches of emptiness. Eight feet and four inches. Taller than any person who will ever stand in this church.

BURIALS — 2021

11 March. Patrick Simms, aged 47 years, formerly of Headington, found in the boathouse at Iffley Lock. Cause: exposure. Not a parishioner, strictly, but he died here. Clerk dug the grave. Churchyard, plot 17-B.

In the morning before I dug I walked to the river and the light on the water was the colour of the inside of a mussel shell. Iridescent. I stood looking at it until my hands were numb and the spade handle was too cold to hold. What I wanted to record was the light but the register has no column for light.

6 July. Margaret Wells Faraday, aged 56 years. Churchyard, plot 16-B. Clerk read the words, dug the grave, served as sole witness.

Resident population of the parish: one.

I have begun to notice things I did not notice when there were others to notice them for me. The swifts arrived on the 4th of May — three days later than last year. The elder flowered before the hawthorn, which is wrong. I was taught that hawthorn comes first. May blossom, then elder. The order has reversed. Nobody taught the plants about the order. Or they have forgotten it, as I am beginning to forget which day is which.

MARRIAGES — 2021

None.

BAPTISMS — 2021

None.

2022

January. No burials this quarter. The churchyard is filling from the east end. I have calculated that at the current rate of — but there is no current rate. The current rate is whatever the next death decides it is. I am sixty-three years old and in reasonable health, accounting for the diet, which is mostly tinned goods from the Tesco in Cowley that no one has cleared out.

I found a fox in the nave last week. She had come in through the window — the glass in the south aisle has been gone for years — and was lying on the altar step with three cubs. I did not record this in the register because there is no column for it. But I record it here, in the margin, because something was born in this church and I feel it should be written down.

Three cubs. Small. Their eyes still closed.

April. Baptism. A girl. Name: This entry is struck through. I do not know why I wrote it. There was no baptism. There has been no baptism. I was half asleep and the pen was in my hand and the column was so white.

The zodiacal light was visible this morning. Pre-dawn. A wedge of brightness along the eastern horizon that is not the sun and not the moon but the reflection of the sun off dust between the planets. The astronomers called it the false dawn. It has the appearance of hope. It is not hope. It is dust, illuminated.

17 June. Burial. A woman, unknown, approximately 40 years of age, found on the towpath between Iffley and Sandford. No identification. She wore a blue waterproof jacket with a broken zip and walking boots that were good boots, expensive once. In the jacket pocket: a photograph, water-damaged past recognition, and a key to nothing I could find. Clerk dug the grave. Churchyard, plot 18-A. Read the words. The ground was dry and hard and the digging took most of the day. The swifts were overhead while I dug and their screaming sounded like something tearing, like the air itself being pulled apart, and I stopped and leaned on the spade and watched them and they did not watch me.

I said her name was Jane. I do not know her name. I wrote Jane in the register because the column requires a name and I could not leave it blank. Jane is not a lie. Jane is what the column needed.

2023

I have stopped ruling the columns quarterly. I rule them when I need them.

February. No entry. I opened the register to make an entry and realised there was no entry to make. No one has died. No one has married. No one has been born. I am recording the absence of an entry, which is itself an entry of a kind.

The Cherwell flooded in January and the water came up to the lychgate. When it receded it left a line of silt across the churchyard that looked like a ruled column. I am seeing registers everywhere.

A man passed through the village in March. He did not stop. He was walking north on the towpath with a rucksack and a dog and he did not look at the church or at me standing in the porch. I wanted to call out to him. I wanted to say: I am the parish clerk. I can record your passage. Your name, your direction, the date. I can write you into the book and you will have existed here, in this place, on this day. But I said nothing and he walked on and now he is nowhere in the register, which means, for the purposes of this parish, he was never here.

9 October. Burial. Noel Poole will not record his own burial but he records this: a pain in the left arm, a tightness, a sensation of the ground tilting. It passed. I am recording that it passed.

After the pain I walked to the vestry and opened the register and put my hand on the page where the baptisms should be. The paper was cold and smooth. I thought: if I write a name here, if I write a date and parents and godparents, the ink will be the same ink I use for deaths. The handwriting will be the same handwriting. How would anyone, finding this book in fifty years or a hundred, know the difference? How would they know the baptism was a fiction? The deaths are verified by bodies in the ground. But a baptism — a baptism is verified by nothing except the register itself. The register is the proof. If the register says a child was born, then a child was born.

I did not write it. Not yet.

2024

March. Baptism. Eleanor. 7 March 2024. Parents: Struck through.

March. Baptism. William Noel. 14 March. Parents: unknown. Godparents: Struck through.

My hand writes them and my hand crosses them out. I am two people at the same desk. One of them believes there is a child. The other one knows.

18 May. Burial. A dog. Not a person. I will not pretend a dog is a person. But there is nothing else to bury and the dog was here for two years and knew the sound of the vestry door and came when I opened the register, as if the register were food. She was a brown and white thing, neither large nor small, with one ear that stood up and one that lay flat, and she had no name that I knew but I called her Bell, because when she ran across the stone floor of the nave her nails rang like that.

I have given the dog a plot number. 19-A. This is improper. The register is for Christians. But the register is also for the parish, and the dog was of the parish, and the dog is dead, and I am the clerk. If the Archbishop of Canterbury objects he may take it up with me personally, and I will be in the vestry on Thursday, as I always am, as I always will be, until there is an entry with my name in the burials column and nobody left to write it.

July. A woman came. Not walking through. She came in through the Norman door and stood in the nave and looked at the font.

I said, Can I help you.

She said, Is this still a church.

I said, It is still a church. There is no vicar. There has been no vicar for seven years. But there is a clerk.

She said, Is there water in the font.

I said, No. The font has been dry for thirty years.

She sat in a pew and put her hands on her stomach and did not speak. I went to the vestry and opened the register and my hands were shaking. I could not determine whether they were shaking from age, or from the cold — the vestry is always cold, even in July — or from something else.

She is staying in the Mowbray cottage. I do not know her name. I have not asked. If I ask and she tells me, I will have to decide which column to put her in. She has been here three weeks now and in that time I have not opened the register once. I have walked past the vestry door and kept walking. I am afraid that if I open the book my hand will write something I am not ready to write.

2025

The woman is still here. She gardens. She has planted things in the Mowbray garden that I cannot identify — not English, I think. She speaks to me sometimes. Her voice is low and her accent is from somewhere I cannot place. She asks about the register. I showed her. She turned the pages slowly, backwards, from the present blankness to the last baptism in 1995. She put her finger on the entry — Simone Grace Alcott, 3 September 1995, daughter of David and Laura Alcott — and held it there.

I do not record what I think I see because I am a clerk and not a prophet. A clerk records. A prophet interprets. But I will say that the woman walks as if she is carrying something, and that she holds her belly the way I have seen women hold their bellies only in photographs now because I have not seen a pregnant woman in the flesh since 1994, and that when I look at her I cannot tell whether I am seeing what is there or what the register requires me to see.

4 February. The zodiacal light again. I woke at four and walked to the river and the eastern sky was bright with it — a wedge that was not the sun. Twenty minutes. I stood in the frost. When it was gone the sky was darker than before, the way a room is darker after a candle goes out. I went back to the vestry and sat with the register open and did not write anything.

The woman asked me today why I still keep the register. I said because the columns are ruled and the ink is not yet dry. She looked at me as if I had said something either very wise or very stupid and I do not think she knows which.

September. I heard a sound from the Mowbray cottage. I will not describe the sound. I will only say that I have heard it before, once, long ago, in a hospital, when my wife — but that was in the time when such sounds were ordinary.

I went to the vestry. I opened the register. I turned to the baptisms column.

BAPTISMS — 2025

21 September. A Lila. Lila Poole no — not Poole. I am the clerk, not the father. I am writing this with my left hand and the ink is smudging and I cannot

Lila. Born 21 September 2025. In the Parish of St. Barnabas, Iffley. Mother: the woman in the Mowbray cottage. Father: not recorded. I did not see the child. I heard the sound. The sound is in the register now, which is where sounds go to become permanent.

I went to the cottage. The door was open. The room smelled of iron and sweat and something else — milk, possibly, or that smell that rises from the earth after rain, petrichor, a word I had not used in years. She was sitting on the Mowbray bed holding something against her chest. The curtains were drawn. I could not see clearly. I am sixty-six years old and my eyes are not what they were and the light was bad.

She said: write it down.

I said: I have.

She said: write it down properly.

BAPTISMS — 2025 (amended)

21 September. Lila. Daughter of Saro (surname not given), of this parish. Born in the Mowbray cottage, Iffley. No officiant — clerk is not ordained. Water from the Cherwell applied to the forehead, clerk reading the baptismal rite from the Book of Common Prayer. Godparents: none. The entry is made in the proper column, in the proper hand, in ink that I tested on the margin to ensure it would not fade.

The entry sits between 1995 and the end of the book. Thirty years of white space, and then this.

I do not know if anyone will read this register. I do not know if the survey teams from the Provisional Council will reach Iffley, or if there is still a Provisional Council, or if there are still survey teams. I do not know if the child I heard is the child I recorded or if the sound I heard was the river, or the wind, or the part of my mind that has been filling in blank columns for years now and cannot stop.

But the ink is smudged where my left hand dragged across it, and that smudge is as real as anything in this register — the deaths, the marriages, the foxes in the nave, the false dawns, the dog in plot 19-A.

I have not seen the child. Saro keeps the curtains drawn. She says the light is too strong for a newborn’s eyes, which may be true, though it is September and the light has not been strong in weeks.