The account I wanted to trust

Text: an original contemporary committee-memoir-style practice extract.

The complaint arrived as two statements clipped together. Before reaching the signature, I recognised Priya’s square handwriting. We had organised events at the community centre for six years, and I had often praised her for recording every detail. Her statement said that a visiting theatre group had forced the loading door and damaged its latch. Tomas, the group’s organiser, wrote that the door had already been sticking when they arrived.

Priya’s account advanced through ordered paragraphs and exact times. Tomas had crossed out one time and replaced it with another. At first, his corrections seemed to weaken his version; then I noticed that I was treating neatness as evidence. An email sent by the caretaker that afternoon mentioned that the latch was ‘sticking again’. A photograph Priya had taken at 8.47 showed the door closed, but not whether it had fastened properly. Each piece of evidence appeared decisive until I considered what it failed to show.

At the committee meeting, I began to summarise Priya’s account and heard myself add that she had tested the latch. She had written no such thing. I stopped, corrected myself and read Tomas’s statement again. In the end, I recommended that we delay any charge until the door had been inspected. Another committee member asked whether knowing Priya had made me too protective of her. ‘Possibly,’ I said, ‘or too determined not to be.’ The papers remained on the table: no longer one reliable account and one doubtful one, but two incomplete versions with my assumptions pencilled between them.

In this extract, the writer tries to convey the difficulty of acting impartially.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.