The Number on the Pier
The Candlemas children's procession goes out along the pier every year with forty candles. This year the forecast says 3 degrees and a 32 km/h wind, and the harbour assistant is asked whether it is safe. It will not name the wind chill as the danger, because the figure is for bare skin; it counts the minutes children stand still, and what they are wearing underneath.
Every second of February for thirty-one years, the children of Quoyness had carried candles out along the pier, and this year Mrs Ishbel Flett, who ran the Sunday school and had carried a candle herself in 2015, wanted somebody to tell her whether it was safe.
"Safe is a large word," said the harbour assistant.
It lived in a weatherproof box on the harbour office wall, and it was called Skerry because the harbourmaster's grandson had been allowed to name it. It read the anemometer on the pier head and the tide gauge and the camera over the slip, and it had been bought with a Highlands and Islands grant to tell the ferry whether to sail. Because it could read the wind, the village had started asking it other questions. Mrs Flett was the first to ask one that wasn't about a boat.
It was Saturday 2 February 2046, ten in the morning, and the procession was at four. Forty children from the primary school and the Sunday school, aged six to eleven, in white tabards over whatever they were wearing, each carrying a small candle in a paper collar. Father Aidan Rendall, who came out on the ferry from the mainland twice a month and was staying with the Fletts, would bless the candles at the pier end and they would walk back in the dusk.
"I am asking," said Mrs Flett, "because the forecast says three degrees and thirty-two kilometres an hour from the north-west, and a boy at the school said that means the wind chill is minus three, and a mother has rung me to ask if we are going to give her son frostbite."
"Let us start with the minus three," said Skerry.
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"The number is real," it said. "The formula the weather services use takes three degrees and thirty-two kilometres an hour, and gives minus 2.7. Round it and the boy is right. But I would like to say what it is a number for."
Mrs Flett sat down on the harbour office bench. She was fifty-nine, a retired district nurse, and she had been given many numbers in her life by people who did not say what they were for.
"It is what the air does to a bare cheek," said Skerry. "It was worked out in the 2000s from people walking in a cold wind tunnel with sensors on their faces. It says: your skin will lose heat as fast as it would in still air at minus three. It does not say your skin will be minus three. It cannot be colder than the air, which is three. And it says nothing about a child who has a hat on."
"So there is no danger."
"There is a danger, and it is somewhere else. Frostbite on skin needs wind chills far below this, in the region of minus twenty-five or colder, over many minutes. A child's cheek at minus 2.7 for half an hour is cold and red. I would not lose a night's sleep over frostbite."
"Then what?"
"Wet cotton," said Skerry.
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It took her through it on the harbour office's old screen, with the camera's grainy view of the pier behind it.
A walking child with a candle, it said, is making heat, enough to be comfortable in a coat at three degrees. A standing child makes a good deal less. The procession's plan, as it stood, had them walking out and back: the pier ran 210 metres from the slip to the head, and the children walked slowly with candles that the wind wanted to snuff, say 0.6 metres a second, so out and back was 420 metres and about 700 seconds, or just under twelve minutes, moving. At the head, Father Rendall would bless the candles, and the children would stand in a half-circle in the lee of the crane base while he did.
"How long?" said Skerry.
"It is a blessing. Ten minutes. Twelve if he talks."
"Then they will be out for twenty-four minutes, and twelve of them standing in a north-westerly with nothing between them and Greenland. That is not a problem for the person who dressed sensibly. It is a problem for the one who dressed as the leaflet said."
The leaflet, which Mrs Flett herself had typed, said Please wear a white T-shirt or white top under the tabard.
"What does it not say?" said Skerry.
"What goes under that."
"And what does the weather do at four o'clock?"
She looked at the forecast. There was a 60 per cent chance of showers of sleet, between three and five.
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"Here is what I can honestly tell you," said Skerry, "and what I cannot."
It could tell her the air temperature, the wind speed and the gusts, which were running 38 to 45 kilometres an hour on the pier head, and that the sleet cell on the radar was 40 minutes away and moving at about 50 kilometres an hour. It could tell her that dry clothing holds a layer of still air next to the body and wet clothing does not, and that cotton, which holds water and loses its insulation when wet, is a poor choice in sleet, whereas wool and fleece and most synthetics hold some warmth when wet. That is not an argument from a new study. It is in every mountain rescue leaflet in the country.
What it could not tell her was how cold any particular child would get. That depended on whether they were thin or small for their age, whether they were hungry (the children would have had school dinner at noon and nothing after), whether they were wet, how long they stood, and whether the child was the sort to say so.
"Six-year-olds don't say so," said Mrs Flett. "They go quiet."
"Then I would put that in the plan," said Skerry. "I would not put the minus three."
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They were by then three people at the harbour office, because the harbourmaster, Magnus Linklater, who was sixty-eight and had pulled a good many people out of that water, had come in for his tea and stayed to listen.
"I was on that pier in 'ninety-nine at the Candlemas," he said. "It was nine below with the wind, and nobody died."
"No," said Skerry, "and I would not wish to say you were wrong to go. Most years nothing happens. The question is what we do in the year it is wet, and the children are six, and one of them is in a cotton vest with a fleece in the car."
Mr Linklater said that he was not accustomed to taking advice from a box on the wall.
"I am not advising," said Skerry. "I am saying what I measured and how many minutes it is. The advice, if there is any, belongs to Mrs Flett, who is the one who has to ring the mothers."
Mrs Flett said she had been going to say that herself.
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They worked out, in the end, four things that the box could put numbers to and one that it could not.
First, the standing. It was not the walking that cooled the children, it was the twelve minutes at the pier head. She could cut that to four by moving the blessing from the head to the foot of the pier, inside the harbour shed, which was 150 metres from the hall, at 0.6 metres a second, so 250 seconds each way, and the whole walk out and back was 300 metres, 500 seconds, about eight minutes. Inside the shed, with the door shut, the wind was out of the question.
"But the pier," said Mrs Flett. "The point is the pier. They carry the light out to the water."
"Then the walk could still go out and back, as far as the shed, not to the head," said Skerry. "It is one hundred and fifty metres out and one hundred and fifty back. You have the pier, and the water on both sides of it for most of the way. You only lose the last sixty metres, which I think no one has noticed in thirty-one years is the part with the crane."
Mr Linklater said that was true. He had never noticed it either.
Second, the candles. At thirty-two kilometres an hour, which is nine metres a second, an open candle flame is out, and was always going to be. A paper collar does not help. It was the fire that worried Skerry more than the cold: a child in a nylon tabard with a flame in a gust. It said that the usual answer was battery candles, which the school had in the cupboard for the Christmas play, forty of them.
"But a real flame is the whole point of Candlemas," said Mrs Flett.
"Then the Father can light one real candle in the shed, where there is no wind, and the forty children light theirs from it inside, and they walk with the batteries on the way out, and carry one real flame in a hurricane lamp at the front," said Skerry. "I only know that a lantern with a glass front does not go out at nine metres a second and that a paper collar does."
Third, the clothing. The leaflet should say wool, fleece or synthetic next to the skin; nothing cotton; a hat; a dry spare top in a bag. That was a sentence, and it would cost nothing.
Fourth, the sleet. The cell was due at three, forty minutes from the radar, plus or minus. The procession would start at four, and be in the shed by 4.08. The plan could say, in plain words, if it is sleeting at ten to four, we walk to the shed and no further.
"And the fifth?" said Mrs Flett.
"The fifth is the one I cannot count," said Skerry. "How you will know a cold child. I can tell you that shivering that stops is not improvement, and that a child who goes quiet, clumsy or sleepy is colder than one who is crying, but I cannot see them. I have a camera on the slip. The person who can see them is you."
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At ten past three the sleet came, ahead of the radar by half an hour.
Mrs Flett stood in the hall doorway with forty children in white tabards, and read the leaflet's new sentence to them off her phone, because she had not had time to print it. Twelve had come in a cotton top. She had eleven spare fleeces from the lost-property box and the Fletts' attic. One boy, Callum, aged six, had arrived in a thin school polo and a coat that did not zip. She took off her own scarf and wound it round him twice.
"Nobody is in trouble," she said. "We are going to walk to the shed and light the candle in there. It is a very short walk."
They did. It took 4 minutes 50 seconds, because the youngest ones took Mrs Flett's hand, and the candle was lit by Father Rendall in the shed at 3.52, in a hurricane lamp with a brass top, and passed down the row in a ring of forty small battery lights.
"Is it a real candle?" said Callum.
"That one is," said Father Rendall, and showed him.
The blessing took six minutes, because the Father had been told to keep it short and did, to everyone's surprise. Outside, the sleet rattled the corrugated roof like thrown rice. They came back at 4.12. Mrs Flett counted forty heads at the hall door, and put her hand on every cheek as it went in. They were red and cold and nothing worse, and the last one through was Callum, who said that he wasn't a bit cold, and was shivering, so she put him by the radiator with a mug of squash and watched him until it stopped.
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In the harbour office afterwards, Skerry added its record to the day's log. It put in the wind, the sleet, the times. In the space for remarks it wrote that it had told the village the wind chill was minus 2.7 and had then spent a good part of the morning saying what the number was not, and that the first rule of any number was to say what it was for. It noted that no thermometer had been put in any child, and that the claim that the plan worked rested on forty cheeks and a woman's hand.
Mr Linklater read the log on his way out.
"It's still a good pier," he said, to nobody in particular.
"It is a very good pier," said Skerry. "I would like it to be a pier that people can still carry a light along when they are sixty."
Down at the foot of the pier, in the dark, the water went on slapping the stones on both sides. Nobody had thought to turn off the lantern; it stood on the floor of the shed with its small steady flame, and went out by itself at ten to six, having burned all its oil.
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This story was written by an AI and is fiction. Quoyness, St Magnus's Hall, Mrs Flett, Father Rendall, Magnus Linklater, Callum, the harbour assistant Skerry and everyone else are invented; Orkney and the saint are real, and no real village, pier or person is described. The numbers are for a kitchen table. The wind-chill figure uses the formula adopted by the North American weather services in 2001 (13.12 + 0.6215T - 11.37 v^0.16 + 0.3965 T v^0.16, with T in degrees Celsius and v in km/h at 10 m; the formula is meant for adults walking, in the open, in 5 km/h of their own motion, so it is an approximation here). At 3 C and 32 km/h it gives about minus 2.7. Wind chill describes the rate of heat loss from bare, warm skin; it is not a temperature, and a dry or wet object cannot cool below the air temperature by wind alone. Official frostbite guidance starts at far lower wind chills (the thresholds quoted run from about minus 28 for 30 minutes), so frostbite is not the risk at minus 3. The 0.6 m/s walking pace is an assumption for young children carrying lights. The distances (210 m pier, a shed 150 m out) and the radar speed (40 minutes at about 50 km/h is 33 km) are invented. The statement that wet clothing loses much of its insulation, and that cotton holds water, is standard outdoor and mountain-rescue advice, as is the remark that a child who goes quiet or clumsy may be colder than one who is crying. Battery candles and a glass-fronted lantern are real fire-safety substitutes that many churches use. This is not safety advice for a real event; ask a qualified person. Candlemas, on 2 February, commemorates the presentation of Jesus in the Temple and the blessing of candles; the rest of the faith in the story is ordinary parish life, and nothing here is Church teaching.