At the dinner party Neville handed Carter the first piece of bread and cheese and poured his own unfinished martini into Carter's glass ('Here, Frank, take this'), then after dinner suddenly stood and said 'We're going' — Carter reads it as an enacte
At the dinner party Neville handed Carter the first piece of bread and cheese and poured his own unfinished martini into Carter's glass ('Here, Frank, take this'), then after dinner suddenly stood and said 'We're going' — Carter reads it as an enacted Last Supper. [Date evidence: evening of Neville's last day (died that night, Oct 1972)] [Place: a dinner party at a hostess's home]
Date (happened)
30 September 1972
unresolved
30 September 1972
relative · preferred
Why
Derived by subtracting one day from the corpus's own certain death date, matching Carter's own overnight-death account exactly; not a date Carter states directly himself.
Reasoning
Carter's testimony places this dinner party on the evening of Neville's last day alive, and per his own further account (hist_event:1535, sharing this same witness) the daughter phoned the next morning saying 'I think Daddy went during the night'. The corpus's own established, independently corroborated death date (hist_event:991) is 1972-10-01, certain. The dinner party evening therefore falls the calendar day before: 1972-09-30.
30 September 1972
relative · probable
Why
Confidence held at probable rather than certain: relies on Carter's testimonial memory that this was literally the final evening, not an independently dated document.
Reasoning
Carter's own narrative places this dinner on Neville's last evening (corroborated internally by sibling testimonies 1530 'Neville's last day', 1534 'the last time he saw Neville alive', and 1535 'Daddy went during the night' the following morning). Two independent corpus documents agree Neville died 1972-10-01 (Wikipedia bio, passage 98011; genealogy research notes, passage 141197), so the evening described here is 1972-09-30. Relative rather than stated because no calendar date appears in Carter's own account — it is derived from the corroborated death date.
Verbatim (witness's words)
he gave me the first piece of bread and cheese. He said, Here, Frank, take this. So I took it, and just before we ate, my hostess asked me if I would like to have another martini. I said, Certainly. And Neville said, Wait. Here, Frank, take this. And he took his unfinished martini and poured it into my glass. So I finished his drink. ... Then after dinner, he suddenly stood up and said, We're going, and with that we left.
Neville (as quoted): "Here, Frank, take this... Wait. Here, Frank, take this... We're going."
Told
6 June 1976
stated · preferred
Source
NGR ep.27, Carter lecture 1, 1976-06-06