Alaric Nkemdi-Foss, Who Answered In Nine Days, Dies At 79

WOODBRIDGE, England — Alaric Nkemdi-Foss, a retired records officer, died on 26 July at Ipswich Hospital. He was 79. The cause, according to his daughter and the death certificate, was heart failure following pneumonia.

In February this newspaper wrote to a forestry office in Suffolk asking for a stand map of a plantation as it had stood in December 1980.

He sent it in nine days.

Why that sentence is an obituary

Because it should not be remarkable and it is.

Our correspondent's letter was one of the vaguer ones this desk has sent: a request for canopy density and felling records for a specific compartment in a specific year, with no explanation of why, from a newspaper the office had no reason to have heard of.

There was no legal obligation to hurry. There was no obligation to search beyond the obvious. A perfectly defensible reply would have been that the material was not readily available, and nobody would ever have known otherwise.

Instead a man went and looked, found a 1958 planting thinned in 1974 with a felled ride running almost exactly east, photocopied four sheets, wrote three sentences, and put it in the post.

What was on the sheet

A ride pointing at a lighthouse.

Our aerial phenomena correspondent has written that this is the strongest single thing he found for the conventional explanation of an event that has been argued about since 1980, and that he found it by asking a forestry office a boring question.

As far as the office can establish, nobody had ever requested that sheet before. It had sat in a plan chest for forty-five years, catalogued, in good order, one drawer down, waiting.

Thirty-four years of that

Vashti Okonjo-Pemberton was his line manager for nineteen of them and made the same point three times in an hour without noticing.

"He read the request as a question rather than as a form," she said. "That is the whole difference and it is not teachable. Most people answer what you asked. He answered what you were trying to find out."

His colleagues describe a man who kept the plan chest in his head, who was mildly irritated by the digitisation programme and thoroughly co-operative with it anyway, and who once drove forty miles on a Saturday to open a building for a PhD student.

He did not tell anybody about the Saturday. The student wrote to the office ten years later to say so, and that letter is how his colleagues found out.

What he thought about it

Very little, apparently.

His daughter, Perpetua Nkemdi-Foss, was asked whether he had followed the story his map appeared in.

"He read it," she said. "He said the reporter had been fair about the lighthouse. Then he asked me whether I wanted his tomatoes."

She was asked whether he had understood that people had been arguing about that plantation for forty-six years.

"He knew. He thought it was funny that nobody had asked the Forestry Commission. He said that about a lot of things — that people go to the interesting place first and the boring place never."

The desk's rule, applied

This desk records the manner of death and declines to infer from it, and there is nothing to infer here: a man of seventy-nine got pneumonia and his heart gave out, in an ordinary hospital, with his daughter there.

What there is to record is smaller and harder.

Almost every story this newspaper has run this year has, somewhere in it, a person who was not obliged to help and did. A librarian who brought out a box on a trolley. An archivist who left two reporters alone with a register for six hours. A harbourmaster who handed over fourteen years of records without being asked twice.

They do not appear in the bylines and they are the reason any of it is checkable.

He is survived by his daughter, two grandsons, and four sheets in a plan chest that anybody may now order.