The Man Who Answered the Door

Census enumeration is mostly walking.

Ade Fashola's district is four hundred and eleven addresses across nine streets and a caravan site, and his job is to establish that a return has been made for each, and where one has not, to knock.

By the fourth week he is down to thirty-one.

By the sixth, eleven.

The eleven

Two are empty and he has established this properly, which takes longer than you would think: an empty property is not an absent household, and getting that wrong puts a zero where a family should be, and a zero in a census travels for ten years into funding formulas.

Four are people who will not open the door and who he is not going to make open the door, and there is a procedure for that which ends with an estimate.

Three are people who have said they will do it and have not done it, and who will do it, because they always do.

One is a caravan.

And one is 14 Harefield Terrace.

14 Harefield Terrace

He has knocked six times.

The first four, nothing. The fifth, a light went off upstairs as he came up the path, which is a thing that happens and which he has learned not to take personally.

The sixth, a man opened the door.

Sixty-odd. Cardigan. Entirely pleasant. He said he had not received a form. Ade said he could complete it there and then on the tablet, and the man said not today, and Ade — who has done this three censuses and knows exactly how hard to push — said he would come back Thursday.

On Thursday the man opened the door and said he had thought about it and would rather not.

On rather not

Completing the census is a legal requirement. Ade has never once said this to anybody and has never had to.

What he says is that it is confidential for a hundred years, that it is not shared with any other agency, that it determines how much money comes to this area for schools and buses and everything else, and that it takes eleven minutes.

He said all of that. The man listened to all of it, politely, all the way through.

Then he said: "I understand. I'd still rather not."

The seventh visit

Ade went back on the Saturday because Saturday is when you catch people, and because 14 Harefield Terrace had begun to occupy a slightly larger amount of his week than four hundred and ten other addresses combined.

The man made him a cup of tea, which had not happened before, and they stood in the hall.

Ade asked, not as an enumerator, whether there was a reason.

The man thought about it for a while.

Then he said: "How long have you been doing this?"

"Third one. So — twenty years, on and off."

"Do you get the ones where nobody answers?"

"Every district."

"And what happens?"

Ade explained the estimate: that after a certain number of attempts, the household is imputed from administrative data and neighbourhood characteristics, and a plausible household is entered, and it goes into the count.

The man nodded slowly.

"So somebody gets counted," he said. "Just not me."

"Sort of. Not exactly."

"But roughly."

"Roughly," Ade admitted.

What the man said

He said his name was Roy and that he had lived at 14 Harefield Terrace for nine years.

He said that before that he had been at an address in another county for thirty-one years, with a wife and two daughters, and that in 2016 something had happened that he was not going to explain, and that he had left and had not been in contact since.

He said: "They think I'm dead."

Ade said nothing.

"Not — they haven't been told I'm dead. Nobody's told them anything. It's been nine years and I stopped and they'll have made their own arrangements about what that means." He looked at the tea. "My youngest was twenty-six. She'll be thirty-five."

"Right."

"And if I fill in your form," said Roy, "I'm in it. And in a hundred years somebody's great-grandchild types my name in and there I am, in this house, in this town, alive, in 2021 and in this one, and everything they'd decided gets taken off them."

Ade said: "A hundred years."

"I know what a hundred years is," said Roy. "I'm not worried about a hundred years. I'm saying I know exactly what it is I'd be putting in the box."

What Ade did

He finished the tea.

Then he said: "Can I say the other side of it?"

Roy said he could.

Ade said: if he was imputed, a household would be entered at 14 Harefield Terrace that was not this household. Probably a family; the algorithm works from the street. And the money that follows the census — the school places, the bus route, the GP allocation — would be calculated on that.

He said: "There's a man in this house who's sixty-eight and lives alone. That's the thing the count is for. Not the name. The name goes in a box for a hundred years, but the one person, this address, this age — that goes in next year's numbers, and it's the difference between somebody planning for you and not."

Roy said: "You've said that before."

"I've said it four hundred times."

"Have you ever meant it this much?"

Ade said: "No."

The return

Roy completed it on the eighth visit.

He did it on Ade's tablet, in the hall, standing up, in eleven minutes.

At the name field he stopped for a long time. Then he typed it.

Afterwards

Ade closed his district three days later. Four hundred and eleven returns, two confirmed empty, one imputed caravan.

The census is confidential for a hundred years. Ade will be dead. Roy will be dead. Roy's daughters will be dead.

Somebody in 2121 will type a name into something and find a man in a house in a town, on his own, in a year when his family had already decided what had happened to him.

Ade has thought about it every week since.

He does not know whether he did the right thing.

He knows he did his job, and he knows those are not the same, and he has stopped expecting the difference to resolve.