Oral History: Ingrid Bergstrom, Shore House

— I came in 1977 because a woman I worked with asked me once and then never again. I have thought about that a good deal since. No second asking is made, and at the time I thought it was rudeness.

— The evening was the same then as now, near enough. The table is laid before anyone arrives, for the number on the list, and it is laid whether or not the weather is bad.

— The handbook then said a separation was taken freely and ended by returning. That is how it stood. It says something longer now.

— My brother stopped coming in 1984. His place was kept, which nobody made a fuss about, and he never came back. Where he went after Bristol I could not tell you and neither can the book. The account ends here, as the archivist likes to write.

— We had two years in the middle eighties of what a steward of mine used to call difficult weather. Nobody's fault, and no good naming anyone for it. The rotas were kept. That is what got us out.

— When Margaret died her account was closed in the ordinary form and her name stayed in the book, and the Wednesday reading came back to the House. I took it for a while. You carry it; you do not take her place.

— What has it been for? The long attention, I suppose. Forty years of Thursdays, and the whole day around them, and twelve minutes of quiet that they are keeping at Fell at the same hour — the common quiet, though I have never liked people making much of that.

— Two boxes of my letters are held outside the Record because nobody can date them. They are not thrown away. That is the part I would tell a stranger about, if I had to pick one part.