Edna Bishop

Spouse of James Proctor Thorne, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Edna Bishop taught fourth grade for thirty-five years in the schools of San Francisco and its southern suburbs, and for most of those years her roll book was the best early-warning list that the White Ledger's western chapter ever had. She was born in 1922 in Los Angeles, California, and died in 2010 of a stroke, aged eighty-eight. She was a schoolteacher by trade, a red-headed, grave and exacting woman who belonged to no house of the Ledger and was not a vampire slayer, though she was drawn by marriage into the Proctor bloodline that keeps the White Ledger. In 1944 she married the telegraph operator James Proctor Thorne, the elder brother of the slayer Norma Proctor Thorne, and they had two children, Doris Thorne, born in 1947, and Clifford Thorne, born in 1950, both of whom are living and neither of whom was called. The Proctors remember her as the teacher who noticed which children had stopped coming, and who told the right person, in plain words, on the same day. She was born in Los Angeles because her father taught there. Her parents were both schoolteachers, he of history at a Los Angeles high school, she of the lower grades in the Boyle Heights district, and in the spring of 1922 they were living in a rented bungalow off Pico Boulevard, in the new streets that were going up on the old bean fields. The baby arrived in the middle of the night, in a hurry, in a house in which two adults had been marking papers, and the doctor, who had been sent for from three blocks away, found that the father was still holding a red pencil. She had her mother's hair. The family moved north to Berkeley in 1929, when her father was offered a post in the high school there, and although Edna was a Los Angeles girl by birth she was a Berkeley girl by every other measure, and she said that the Pacific, with its fog, had formed her character and the Southern California sun had merely been her first impression. She grew up in a brown-shingled house near the university, in a street of professors, librarians and schoolteachers, in the long, quiet Depression years when the family ate a great many beans, kept a vegetable garden in the front yard and read aloud after supper. Her father put the question of the Depression to the class every autumn, and was pleased with the answers. Her mother taught her to read at four, to write a fair hand at six, and to correct, at eight, every letter in the house. She was a tall, thin, freckled child, extraordinarily quiet, who sat at the front of every class, read the newspaper on the way home and came to the conclusion, at ten, that she would be a teacher, because teachers were the only adults who were obliged to know where everybody was at a given moment. She had no ambitions beyond that. She wanted a roll book. She trained at the state teachers' college, in the years when the Depression was giving way to the war, and took her credential in the spring of 1942. She taught her first class, a fourth grade of thirty-eight children, in a school in the Mission district of San Francisco, a neighbourhood of Irish, Italian and Latin families and of the old frame houses with their bay windows, in which the children came to school with a slice of bread in a paper bag. She took the ferry across the bay each morning from Berkeley, and it was on that ferry, on a grey morning of the fall of 1942, that she met James Proctor Thorne, who was going to the Western Union office in San Francisco with a thermos and a copy of the Chronicle folded to the sports page. She was reading a set of spelling papers. He asked her what an eight-year-old meant by the word receive, since it had been spelled in four different ways in the same sentence. She told him that he was in her light. They were still writing, two years later, when he came home on leave from the Pacific. She said that she had liked his handwriting. It was an even, upright, careful script, and she judged a man by it. They were married in 1944, in the autumn, in a hurry, in a small chapel on Nob Hill, in the week before his transport sailed. It was a wartime wedding in a city that had filled with soldiers and sailors, in which every church had its cots and every landlady her list. Edna wore a grey suit and carried a library book, and his sister Norma, who had come from Phoenix on the train, sat in the front pew with her coat on and her hat down and looked at the door throughout the service. It was a thing that Edna remembered afterwards. She remembered thinking that the girl must have been very tired. Later she remembered it differently. She went back to her classroom on the Monday and told the children that she was now Mrs Thorne, and that this would not change the multiplication tables. Doris Thorne was born in 1947, after James was home and demobilised, and Clifford Thorne in 1950, in a small stucco house in the new suburbs south of the city, near the airport, among the streets of the post-war boom, where the young couples came in from the Army and the Navy and put their names down for a lot. Edna taught at a school in the district, a long, low, glass-fronted place with a flag, and the children of the new houses, who came from every state and half the countries of Europe, were put before her in rows. It was the Korean War, and a good many of the fathers were in uniform. She read their letters aloud to children who could not yet manage them, and wrote for the others, in her upright hand, and was said by the principal to have written more letters to Korea than any other person in the county. She had her opinions about the war, and kept them to herself. She learned what the Ledger was in the autumn of 1949, on the evening after the funeral of her sister-in-law. James, who was a patient man and who had been given his instructions by his father, sat down with her at the kitchen table and told her, in the plain way in which a telegraph operator reads a message, about the Red Ledger and the White, about the feud and about Norma, who had died in the spring on a lonely road in Arizona with a pistol in her hand. She heard it through. She asked one question, which was whether the girl in the front pew had been carrying a gun at the wedding, and James said that he thought that she had. Edna said that this explained a great deal about the wedding. Then she asked what she could do. He said that he did not know that she could do anything. She said that she was a schoolteacher, and that she knew where the children were. It was a more useful remark than either of them supposed. A school, Edna found, is the most thorough census that a city takes. Every child in a district is on a roll, and every absence is noted, and a teacher who has watched the same thirty children for a year knows before the doctor does when a family has begun to go wrong. She took to keeping, in the back of her roll book, a second list in a small private shorthand, of the children who stopped coming, the children whose mothers had taken them out of school and moved on without a forwarding word, the children who fell asleep at their desks and would say only that there had been visitors in the night. She did not interfere. She noted the name, the street and the date, and passed it to her husband, who put it on the wire, in his own code, to the Ledger's western chapter. In twenty years, by the chapter's count, it brought it to the doors of six houses before the creature in them had done what it came to do. Edna said that she had only ever done what any good teacher did, which was to count the heads. She was a famous teacher in her way. She was strict, and she was fair, and she was entirely without sentiment about the children, whom she loved. The district retired her in 1977, at fifty-five, with a clock, a bouquet and a testimonial dinner at which three generations of her pupils, some of them with children of their own in her old classroom, stood up to describe her. A police sergeant said that she had taught him to read. A bank manager said that she had taught him to tell the truth. A nurse said that Mrs Thorne had once looked at her across a room for a full minute and had said, quite gently, that she would do much better if she were to eat her lunch. Edna said that this was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. James, who had retired five years later, died in the spring of 2000, on a Sunday afternoon, with the tea beside him and Edna reading to him from the paper. She had a long widowhood of ten years, in the house near the airport, in which she did the crossword each morning in ink, taught her grandchildren to play chess and kept up a correspondence with seventeen former pupils. Her son and daughter, who are living, came every Sunday. She had a stroke in the autumn of 2010, in her chair, with a pencil in her hand and a half-finished puzzle on her knee. The last word she had written, in a firm upright hand, in the margin, was a ten-letter one for a thing that is kept by a teacher and is never lost, and the answer, as the family agreed, was attendance. Edna Bishop is remembered in the Proctor family as the schoolteacher who kept a second list at the back of her roll book, the in-law who noticed which children had stopped coming. In the Slayerverse she stands for the teachers and counters of the White Ledger, the ones who never raised a pistol, who knew every child on the street by name, and who proved that a roll call taken faithfully each morning is as good a line of defence as any wall.