Common Cause E-Book

Kate Hunter

• Herausgeber: Fledgling Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 422

Beschreibung

It's 1915 and Britain is at war as Kate Hunter's sequel to The Caseroom - shortlisted for The Saltire First Book Award 2017 - opens on the next stage in the lives of Iza Orr, skilled compositor, and the workers in Edinburgh's print industry. At a time of momentous events, we step alongside Iza as she copes with unexpected complexities of patriotism, women's suffrage, worker victimisation and a historic wartime lockout. It seems the country needs starched cloth-lappers and lunatic asylum attendants, but it does not need books, does not need learning and intellectual stimulation. Printers are denied reserved occupation status but, with bankruptcies looming, the jobs of Edinburgh's dwindling number of female hand typesetters are on the line. Driven by challenges both political and personal, Iza must weather conflicting calls for loyalty to nation, to class, to gender, to family - her marriage to troubled John, her children, her estranged daughter Mary, now a grown woman - to discover her true Common Cause.

Leseprobe

Common Cause

Kate Hunter

In memory of Millie Hunter and to the future of Dexter and Sorrel Morley Medd

On a mild summer’s day you watch a piping of dark smoke from a fat chimney take all day to reach a pale blue sky. From the top of Arthur’s Seat, that big humpy lion of a mound that crouches above the city, you fancy you could reach out to wipe away the smudge. Not a chance. It’s a good half mile to your north. Anyhow, you’ve no wish to be spending your holiday mopping and scrubbing.

It’s Edinburgh’s trades fair, the workers’ holiday, and while other factory chimneys sleep in this morning – and will snooze the afternoon away – Leith’s metalworks belch. No need to pity its sweating workers though. They’ll be glad of the pay packet. Peer through the smoke and you might make out a few masts and a paddle steamer chugging out into the Firth of Forth. Want a look at the ships of the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet? Too late. They sailed out into the North Sea, headed for Jutland, a few weeks back. Nothing left of the rousing tune that played them off, deflated bagpipes are packed away, but stretch your ears and from Portobello beach further along the shore you might catch squeals as folk dip bare toes into cold grey waters.

Now stretch your eyes and look down. In St Leonards’ streets, brewers and coopers, masons and printers take their loose-limbed ease. Since you can’t see through close-packed tenements, you’ll have to make do with picturing how they lounge, sleeves rolled not for toil but to feel sunbeams stroke white arms. That spare man at his stair door pulling back hinged elbows to stretch his chest? See him cough and gob dark phlegm? A machineman at Nelsons Parkside, that sprawling factory at the foot of Arthur’s Seat. As a lover of good books you’ll have read some of the cheap editions he helps to pump out. Ah, he’s off, like as not to join those bent figures dotting a patch of allotments at the rear of Parkside. The neighbour he stops for a blether with, hands his tobacco pouch to? A compositor at Ballantynes, another of Edinburgh’s fifty-odd printing and publishing houses. See those furrows on his brow? He’s a worried man. Next week, back to his ten-minute tramp south to Ballantynes’ Pauls works in Causewayside, he’ll be fretting over short-time work and light pay packets. Not much call for fine books when the country’s at war. All the city’s printing firms have been hard hit, but he, and his father and grandfather before him, have seen the spectre of financial ruin stalk Pauls works.

Leave him and the machineman to their smoking and gobbing. They need their rest, as do those bindery girls and envelope folders sitting on the pavement, skirts hitched and chins lifted to catch the sun. Even the wifie watching goings-on from an open window, folded arms and bosom lodged on the sill, is taking it easy, though there’s mopping and darning and cooking to see to and no daughters to help seeing as they’re seamstresses and domestics in big houses and when did seamstresses and domestics get the holiday, you tell me that.

Before you turn back to the north, take a quick look further south. No. Not as far as the Pentland Hills that fringe the horizon. Closer to the city’s beating heart. See that big building? Though in our enlightened times we’d never call it such, that’s the Morningside loony bin. Closer still, a long stone’s throw from the machineman and compositor having a smoke in a St Leonards’ tenement street, you’ll see Newington’s big houses. They’ve got garages for motor cars at the end of their back gardens. Fancy that, eh?

Swing back to the north and west of Leith’s metalworks you’ll see another cloud of factory smoke daubing the sky above Broughton. That’s the North British Rubber Works pumping out trench boots. Now wipe your eyes to skim over the stately Georgian streets and crescents, the wrought-iron fenced gardens of the city’s New Town, on, on down to where the Water of Leith flows. We’ve had a dry spell and the river runs low, thrashing brown froth and foam spewed from Canonmills factories swilled away by clearer waters trickled down from the hills. Near to the river sit two printing houses, Neill & Co. and Morrison & Gibbs. Their Bellevue and Tanfield works stand within sniffing distance of the gasworks, a good stone’s throw from the glass palm house of the Botanic Gardens and, with the presses stilled for the holiday, within earshot of a few remaining snorting pigs, squawking chickens and the odd lowing cow.

Take a closer look. That woman at a tenement window? Though she’s heaved it full open, the house is still stuffy and it’s a quick tidy of her hair and she’s off down the stair for a dander along Logie Green Road. As always in the holidays, bairns charge by, whooping and whacking, skipping and kicking, but soon enough she’s thinking that bairns’ games are not what they were. Where a couple of years ago you’d have seen the odd lad with a stick lodged under his arm, heard him call bahm, bahm as he raised and aimed, today a fair few are at it, sharp wee faces keeking out of stair doors to fire at enemies across the street, slinking close to tenement walls to escape. Go round to the back green to hang out washing and you’re liable to come across a gang of them lined up for a drill, a podgy, red-faced lad out in front barking orders.

Back in the street, you’ll notice how the holiday’s ease is soiled by nervy glances that put you in mind of a cuddy left unharnessed of a morning, nostrils sniffing for signs of where it’s headed, out to grass or for the knacker’s yard. Now take a good look. Not many young men about, are there? Though here’s one coming along, a freckled lad of, say, eighteen. Kitbag slung over his shoulder, he stops to look up at the sky as though he might find his future written there, before loping off with his gaze set straight ahead. Passing Bellevue print works, where he’s done three years of his machineman apprenticeship, he wonders for a moment if he’s done right to swop overalls for uniform. His step falters, but the works being dead to the world for the holiday helps to quell doubt and he’s off, the shadow of a martial march entering his loping gait.

Had the young serviceman tarried to nip round to the yard, he’d have seen a lone figure, the watchman, pick up an empty crate, carry it a few feet and swing it onto a stack by the wall. Now, lifting his bunnet to wipe his brow with a forearm, the watchman walks slowly to the gates and steps out into an empty alleyway. He takes a tobacco pouch from his pocket, scrapes it for scraps, rolls and goes to light his smoke. A breeze has got up and he has to cup his match. It’s blown out. He curses, takes out another and goes to strike, but before he does a white feather blown along catches on his boot lace. He picks it up and, glowering, crushes it between thumb and forefinger, then he strikes his match and, sheltering the flame, holds it to the feather. It singes but doesn’t burn. He drops it and, sucking a finger, grinds it with a boot heel.

‘Mind out.’

Too late. If the labourer’s words didn’t halt Iza Orr’s march, the blow to her hip did. Eyes fixed on big double doors on the far side of the yard, teeth gritted, she’d ploughed straight into a loaded sack-barrow.

Mouthing an apology that had the hiss of a curse, she left the man to shake his head at the sorry state of manners these days as he righted his packages of paper. Now, had you seen the way that warehouse door burst open when she barged it with a shoulder, you’d have taken it for a flimsy affair and Iza Orr for a woman with the strength of a horse if not an ox. But these doors were not flimsy, and though nobody who’d heaved heavy cases of metal type for nigh-on twenty years could be without a bit of muscle, Iza was not a hefty woman. She’d grown from a slip of a girl into a slight woman; one, moreover, whose last confinement, the birth of her daughter two years past, took a good deal of stuffing out of her.

Out in the yard, mid-summer’s silver-blue light came seeping through the city’s grime and above the roofs of Neill & Co’s Bellevue print works a blurred disc of sun peeked through smoke from factory chimneys and trains pulling in and out of a nearby goods yard. Had winter fires been alight in the surrounding tenement grates, you’d have caught no sight of sun or sky. Inside the warehouse, what little light made it through filthy windows was soon soaked up. Without pausing to let her eyes adjust to dimness, Iza wove her determined way through a warren of stacked crates and boxes, past ranks of ceiling-high shelves and long tables piled with bound books, before she halted by the figure of a man bending to lift a crate.

‘Is Drew Rennie about?’ she demanded.

The warehouseman took his time to straighten to a good two heads above her, dust off his hands, run fingers through sparse hair and turn.

‘Mornin hen.’ A measure of reprimand in his warm tone and a prick of his strikingly big lugs invited a response.

Though Iza’s clipped ‘Mornin’ hardly served, the warehouseman accepted it.

‘Drew’s gone, hen. Signed up. Marched off down south.’

At this, the mixture of rage and fear that had fuelled Iza’s march away from her frame in Bellevue’s caseroom, across the yard and into the warehouse went off the boil. Just last week when, near enough on this very spot, she’d handed her twopence to Drew Rennie, Warehousemen and Cutters Union representative, and watched him date and initial her subscription card, he’d said nothing of signing up. Or, wait a minute, had he? She raised her eyes to the rafters as though up there she’d find an answer not just to Drew Rennie’s doings but to the whole bloody mess she was in. Every Friday payday she came here to hand over her twopence and her scuffed buff card. Every payday Drew took it and made his mark. And now she was in desperate need of him he’d taken himself off to the war?

Batting aside the sickening thought that her plight was nothing when laid alongside bodies blown to smithereens, she gulped in a lungful of dusty air.

‘Who’s the union representative then?’

‘Yours truly.’

Iza lowered her eyes from the ceiling to the warehouseman. His striking height for folk around these parts meant she was still looking up. A softness to his droopy eyes, a look that went with the mild Highland lilt of his voice, had her lower her eyes to the chest of his clarty navy overalls.

‘They’re letting me go,’ she blurted out. The sound of it shocked her.

‘Woah there.’ The warehouseman held up a hand so large it had her flinch. ‘Duncan Grant,’ he said, patting his chest and cocking a big lug.

‘A comp. In the caseroom. They’ve just come and told me ah’m finished.’ Iza was close to shouting.

‘And you are?’ Ear still cocked, the warehouseman smiled like they’d all day for chummy introductions.

‘Ah need you to come and speak to them. Now.’ Iza was shouting.

‘Calm yourself, hen. Hang on a minute. Let’s find you a perch.’ The union representative turned and beckoned her to follow.

Iza didn’t take a perch. She didn’t calm down. Not five minutes later she was out of there.

On the way out, the warehouse door did not burst open to her touch. It felt like a ton weight. Turned out it wasn’t the same door. Having stormed through the warren of shelving, Iza emerged not to blink in the light of the yard but in a dingy, low-ceilinged corridor that smelled of rot.

She’d never come across this part of the works before. She didn’t have a clue where she was, though a familiar thump-woosh-thud of presses in the machineroom was close enough to shake the damp brick walls of the corridor, or at least give her the feeling they were shaking like to cave in. That there wasn’t a soul about suited her. She needed to think. That this corridor might be leading her away from the stairs up to the caseroom, away from the frame she’d just been ejected from, the frame where she’d stood for years past setting type, that suited her very well indeed. She’d no wish to see the overseer’s jutting chin and slicked whiskers, or to see Charlie Dewar, Bellevue caseroom’s Father of the Chapel, turn sheepish eyes on her; couldn’t face sidelong glances, a smirk on a male comp’s face, or, worse, pitying looks from her work chums, not until she’d swallowed what had happened and thought what she might do about it. Trouble was, a frantic mind is useless for stringing together beads of thought, especially beads repeatedly scattered by the image of an overseer approaching you, stopping, clearing his throat.

Walking at a snail’s pace, stopping for minutes on end without noticing she’d stopped, Iza had managed to stretch out a short corridor into a good ten minutes, but now she found herself in a room that opened out from the corridor like a cavern in a cave. A single electric bulb dangling from a long flex lit one of four shallow sinks along a wall. Beneath the light, a lone man bent to his work and, above a rasping noise from the sink and the background thuds of the presses, his fine singing voice echoed round the walls. ‘And when I told them, how beautiful you are, they didn’t believe me.’ This, she knew without knowing how she knew, was the stone polishers’ room and its hollowness filled with song had her feel she’d stumbled on a sanctuary.

No wonder stone polishers complained of poor lighting. The caseroom could be bad enough when its pitched glass roof was caked in soot and if, come winter, they skimped on the electric, but this dank tank of a room put her in mind of talk of the bowels of liners that took folk off to Australia and Canada. Nostrils smarting at a reek of gum and Vim laced with acid, she stopped still as the polisher paused to wipe his brow. Sensing her presence, he straightened up. When he glanced over his shoulder, the bulb’s beam lit a ragged purple scar that ran from the corner of an eye over his cheek and chin to snake down his neck. A bit of flap and lobe were missing from his ear.

‘Just passing through,’ Iza assured him. Her voice echoed.

‘Aye,’ he said.

Because he gave her a quizzical smile before turning back to his work, and because his ‘Aye’ had an inviting sound to it, she found herself going to his side to take a look. His red-raw hand gripped what looked like a brick that he swept with strong, smooth sweeps over a slab of flat stone.

‘You work on your own?’ Iza said, thinking him lucky to have this cavern to himself.

‘Aye. Peace and quiet suits me fine.’

‘Och, sorry. Ah’ll leave you in peace,’ she muttered.

The stone polisher shook his head. ‘No, you’ll not bother me, hinnie.’ He paused to turn on a tap and swill purple ink and scummy froth and gritty grease from the stone with sweeps of a palm.

‘Where’s all the others?’ Iza nodded towards vacant sinks.

‘Not needed. Not much call for illustrated books these days, eh? Even at the best of times, like on the Encyclopaedia Britannica, there was only call for two polishers.’

‘Ah worked on the Ency Brit,’ Iza said. ‘In the caseroom.’

Catching her wistful smile, the stone polisher turned to his work in a way that shut the door on the days of the Ency Brit, though not on her.

‘Is that a brick you use?’ Iza had a yen to linger here, and she did want to know, to lose herself in practices strange to her.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘A brick.’

‘Why? What for?’

Glazed eyes raised to the low ceiling while his hand went on scouring in a swirling figure-of-eight, the polisher pondered a question he’d never before been asked about his work, one a wee bairn might have asked. His scar wriggled when he turned to grin at her.

‘Re-graining for re-use. First get rid of the ink and gum and acid, all the muck, then rub it down smooth as...’ He paused.

‘A baby’s beam-end.’

‘Aye, that’ll do, though flesh is a sorry substance when it comes up against stone.’ He tapped his scar, eyeing her.

‘What happened?’ Iza kept her eyes on the stone.

‘Got too close to stone is what happened. Doon the pit.’

‘What, you worked down the pits?’

He wasn’t an old man, more ages with herself and her husband John, early thirties. There was an old miner in her street worked as watchmen at the gasworks. He’d got blacklung. But you wouldn’t expect to find a younger miner working at a job like this in the town.

‘Aye. Glenesk colliery. Not far from here. Near Dalkeith.’ Mouth smiling, eyes veiled, he went on with his scouring. ‘Same idea as sandpaper, ’cept stone’s a mite harder than wood, eh?’

Iza bent to take a closer look at a fading image of a warship on the slab of pale greenish stone.

‘How does it work? The illustrations?’

‘It works because oil and water don’t mix. The image gets drawn on the stone with gum and a bit of acid so it’ll take the ink. Acid decomposes the lime.’

‘Mmm. Complicated.’ Iza felt light-headed, though, oddly, firmly planted on this wet tiled floor. Somewhere up above her work chums’ fingers were plucking and setting type. She pictured Charlie Dewar pulling on his lip as he eyed her empty frame, pausing outside the overseer’s office before going in. All this and all the world and its worries faded as she watched the ship fade and muck and grit wash down the plughole.

‘It’s nice, eh? The stone,’ she said. ‘Can ah?’ She stretched a hand to it.

The stone polisher nodded. ‘Lithographic limestone. A sedimentary rock rich in calcite and aragonite.’ He gave a shy smile. As he shifted aside, his right leg dragged.

She ran her palm over a cold, wet, grainy surface.

‘Feels gritty.’

‘Aye. It’s needing a good go with fine carborundum grit now.’

Iza’s curiosity faltered, but when he went on talking, as much to himself as to her, her agitation drained away and she found herself loathe to leave. To go where? Back to her frame? A sickening prospect. Besides, nothing in his bearing said he was wanting shot of her.

‘Marvellous stuff, stone. Down the pit you saw it all. Layers and layers of coal and limestone and grey whinstone. Planet Earth in the making.’ His face shone. ‘Glistening quartz. Debris from glaciers. And fossils. Used to come up with pockets stuffed. Got stopped one time by the polis when there was trouble at the pit. They spotted the bulges and had me down as a hooligan. Mind you, ah was a bit of a tearaway.’

He grinned as he swilled and wiped.

‘You must miss it then, the pit?’

He pondered this before shaking his head. ‘There’s interesting rock and stone everywhere once you get the eyes to see and know what you’re looking at. Plenty of treasures with all those volcanoes right here in the Edinburgh.’

‘Volcanoes?’

‘Aye. Extinct volcanoes. Arthur’s Seat for instance. And amazing discoveries made at Salisbury Crags. Intrusion of basalt into sandstone.’

‘You’ve lost me there,’ Iza said.

‘That’s lesson two,’ he said. ‘Next time you drop by.’

Was that a wink? Hard to tell with that scar puckering his lower lid. Shame.

He was thinking for a moment. ‘Ah do miss the company,’ he said.

‘Thought you liked working on your own.’

‘Aye, in here, but you wouldn’t want to be alone down a pit, not with the roof liable to cave in on you.’

‘Is that what happened?’

A wee nod and he dodged the matter. ‘And lodgings. Colliers’ houses are crammed to bursting but you’re crammed with your own folks. Ah’ve never found good lodgings in the town and right now ah’m in the worst yet. The man of the house and his missis always cursing and brawling. Heavy drinkers.’

‘D’you not go to the pub of an evening?’

‘Aye, ah do that, when it gets bad. But that pair have put me off the drink for life.’

Something heavy dropped on the floor above thudded and sent the electric bulb jiggling on its flex. Iza jolted. She’d nigh-on forgotten that up there the world was going about its business.

‘Are you all right hinnie?’

She knew he’d already noticed her agitated state. She’d seen and ignored a questioning look in his eyes.

‘You’ll have to mark me absent for lesson two. They’re letting me go,’ she blurted.

‘Go?’

‘Showing me the door.’

‘Aye, pet, ah well know what it means.’

‘Ah’ve just been to see the union rep in the warehouse.’ She’d kept her eyes on the stone as she spoke. When she looked up, something warm in the polisher’s eyes had words pouring out of her.

‘He won’t help. Says he can’t. Told me ah need to speak to the Typographical, but ah never switched to them when they started letting women in. All mah chums did, the other women comps.’

‘So why didn’t you?’

While Iza chewed on this the stone polisher held up a hand, hang on, looked about him and, spotting a stool, fetched it.

‘Sit yourself down a minute.’

Iza shook her head. ‘Ah better let you get on.’

‘No rush. Make yourself useful and hand me that tin will you?’ He nodded towards a shelf above the sink.

Iza passed him the tin and perched on the stool. ‘Ah met this lad at the works gates and he introduced me to someone who told me about the new unions, ones for men and women, skilled and unskilled. When he said, this man ah met...’ She caught the stone polisher’s eye. ‘You might have heard of him. James Connolly?’

The stone polisher’s face spoke of surprise and admiration.

‘He said working folk must all stand together. The Typographical’s just for skilled. Ah’ve been in the Warehousemen and Cutters nigh on twenty year, since ah was time-served. Ah don’t know why ah stuck with them. Loyalty ah suppose you’d call it. Now it seems ah was cutting mah nose off to spite mah face.’

‘So what’s their beef?’ He flicked a glance up through the ceiling, up at the ones with the beef. ‘You’ve not gone and given the overseer a kicking have you?’ His wry smile said he knew it was no laughing matter.

‘Wish ah had. Maybe ah’ll go and do that right now.’

Easing the lid off the tin and scattering dark grey powder onto the stone, the polisher cocked an ear for more. And, recognising his consideration in busying himself while he listened, Iza obliged.

‘Too much time off. Ah’ve struggled this past year or so. Two bairns and ah struggle to cope when there’s women with houses full of bairns working all the hours God sends.’

Iza watched the stone polisher choose his words. She waited.

‘What about your man?’ he said by way of asking what her husband thought to her working in the caseroom and what it meant for domestic relations.

She answered in like vein, her ‘He’s never objected’ pointing to deeper layers. ‘None of the other women comps are wed, mind. But the work’s no harder than plenty of mothers manage.’

‘So you’ve had a lot of time off?’

‘Not that much. The odd day here and there. A couple of days this week when the minder had a diphtheria scare and ah gave up trying to find somebody else to see to the bairns. And we had words.’ Thought of her share in these ‘words’, shouted in the stair for all to hear, had Iza snigger like a bairn up to mischief. ‘Anyhow, it wound up with her telling me ah could mind mah own bloody bairns.’

The polisher glanced up. ‘The odd day off shouldn’t be a crime, but they make no allowances, not for man, woman or beast.’

‘Truth of it is,’ Iza said, ‘they’re looking for any excuse to get rid of us and ah’ve been daft enough to give them one.’

A raised eyebrow questioned her.

‘Female comps. They want shot of us. Mind the dispute a few years back?’

The stone polisher hadn’t been in the town back in 1910 so Iza told him how the male comps had always been set on clearing out what they called frocks at the frame, that they objected to cheap labour and they had a point because her and her work chums were on half the agreed union rate.

The rattle of a trolley pushed into the room brought the outside world crashing in to her hideaway. This time, Iza was jolted clean out of it. How long had she been standing here blethering? Five minutes? An hour?

The polisher darted a look over his shoulder and, with a warning nod, mouthed ‘Good luck’.

Luck? She was going to need it. ‘Ah might be after a lodger,’ she said softly, quickly. Heaven knew where that came from.

‘Drop a note in for Geordie Joe,’ he said.

‘Cake.’

This in her ear and a prod with a sharp elbow had Iza start and blink herself back into a wedding do in the Orrs’ jam-packed, stuffy living room. Her eyes were on a small square of iced cake on a doily a few inches from her nose.

‘Sorry. Ah was miles away.’

That miles away was Neills’ Bellevue works. After the warehouse union rep had tried and failed to calm her; after he’d said sorry but the caseroom would never listen to him, that she’d be better off asking the Typographical Society to speak for her; after she’d said fat chance of that when Charlie Dewar was in league with the overseer and anyhow she wasn’t a member of the bloody Typographical was she, she was a member of you lot, the Warehousemen and Cutters, which was how come she was standing here; and after he’d scratched his head and said, mildly, now then if she was one of the bindery girls he’d have the authority and her work chums’ backing and she’d said well she wasn’t a bloody bindery girl was she, she’d taken her subs card from her pocket and tossed it at his feet. Yesterday she’d lifted her final full-week’s pay packet. Come Tuesday, after setting the last pages of a report on infectious diseases, she’d be pocketing her comps’ tools.

Iza took the cake.

‘Sounds like a good place to be,’ the nudger said.

Iza quizzed her with a look.

‘Miles away. More like a funeral than a wedding this, eh?’

The nudger was a sister-in-law of Iza’s, wife of one of her husband John’s brothers. A slight woman with a powdery pale face, she balanced her square of cake on a neat lump. Seven months gone, she’d said, though she looked nothing like it. Iza hadn’t come across her before today. But, then, in seven years of marriage to John Orr she’d never had much to do with his family. His mother and father and brother Alex and sister Christina had come to her and John’s wedding tea, but it seemed the Orrs were a restless lot and four other brothers and a sister had left Edinburgh for England, Canada, India. Since she and John got wed, her meetings with any Orr other than Alex had been rare. Except for occasions like this, John called on his folks on his own. It was an unspoken agreement between them.

For Iza’s part, her immediate family, the Rosses, were enough to be getting on with. For John’s part, who knew? Iza’s husband did not wear his heart on his sleeve. Hard to tell where he wore it. Though he’d pinned it on her years before they got wed, a pin that never quite clasped had worked loose. John lived with the Ross family, sharing a house with Iza’s mother, upstairs from her brother Rab, a couple of doors along from her brother Jack and close enough to her sister Violet and eldest brother Jamie for them to drop in of an evening or weekend. He kept himself to the fringes though, a stranger to them. But, then, it had struck Iza more than once, John seemed to be alone with himself even in company, except if that company was his brother Alex.

She looked past a group of men wreathed in tobacco smoke to where John stood side-by-side with Alex at the other side of the Orrs’ living room. Four years older than John, Alex was a good head taller, but see them together and you’d take John for the elder of the two. Alongside Alex, John had a bearing that got lost among the Ross family. Watching the pair of them now, Iza saw them for a moment as though in a photograph, a portrait that, despite the fug of smoke, was crisp and clear: Alex, head bowed and a hand cupped to an ear, sunlight catching bristly, ill-cropped hair, full-lipped mouth hanging open and head slowly nodding; John leaning in to pin Alex with sharp eyes, lean face taut, hands up to chop the air in a way that said ‘Listen to me’ as clearly as words could.

Another dig in the ribs.

‘You’ve just the two, eh?’ The nudger was far from impressed. Her eyes were on a row of bairns who’d come in from play to sit on a bench, hungry eyes following the lassie serving cake. She nodded towards the groom, the youngest Orr brother, then up a good six inches to the bride. ‘They’re no spring chickens are they?’ She took a mouthful of cake and didn’t swallow before she went on. ‘You and John married late too, eh? Makes you wonder.’

‘Wonder what?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘It makes sense to save up first,’ Iza said. She well knew what the nudger meant: folk who marry late do so because they’ve failed to get a good catch earlier.

She turned for a blether with the nice woman on her other side. She’d a lovely candid smile and it was her, Iza noticed, who’d gone out to call the bairns in to make sure they didn’t miss out. They agreed it was no surprise the cake tasted of lard and stuck to your gums. Shocking price, eggs. Marg becoming a luxury never mind butter, and precious little wheat and more than a pinch of chalk powder and ground rice in flour these days.

Along with the serving lassie and glasses and crockery, the Orrs had hired seats and the bench from a pub. Women sat round the edges of the room while men stood in the centre. John’s mother was nowhere to be seen. His father, a stocky, ruddy-faced man swayed as he filled his glass from the whisky bottle he’d been hugging. He’d clearly had a fair few. A man by his side was tracking the bottle with an empty outstretched glass. Close by, Iza’s brother Jack was tutting as he watched this performance.

Jack had invited himself to the wedding. He’d come out of a pub after a dinnertime drink just as Iza and John walked by. Though John hadn’t looked well pleased, he hadn’t objected. Jack liked company, he liked a drink and a sing-song and if a do wound up with a punch-up he liked that too. Or so he said. Something their mother, Vi Ross, had told Iza gave it a deeper colouring. ‘Always feart of bogeymen when he was wee, Jack. Always the one who needed a cuddle from his mummy.’ Good job there was precious little room for a punch-up in the Orrs’ living room. No mood for a sing-song either. Though she’d no wish to agree with her, Iza could see what the nudger meant about a funeral. Folk were blethering in low voices and in odd scraps as though first one person and then, after a bit, another started on a song – under their breaths rather than in full chorus – then found they’d forgotten the words. Mind you, this war didn’t help. Everywhere folk were going about with an ear pricked over the roofs and far away to listen out for calamity.

As, tray of glasses held high, the serving lassie wove a seamless path through guests who helped themselves as she passed, Alex left John to stumble after her, reaching for a glass, missing, fretting to get round folk the lassie had sailed past. Iza caught his eye and smiled. Though he nigh-on tipped the lassie’s tray in the process, Alex managed to get hold of a glass to bring to Iza. And he stayed by her side when they stood to toast the bride and groom.

‘Mah mother’s not well,’ he said as though Iza had asked after her. ‘She’s in the hospital.’

‘What a shame she’s missing the wedding.’

John hadn’t said. But then John never said much of anything to her these days. At home, he went about tugging an ear as though he was trying to remember something, or fumbling in his pockets as though he’d lost something.

‘Ah’m keeping a bit of cake for her.’ Alex took a crumpled, jam-soaked, tobacco-speckled doily from his jacket pocket.

‘She’ll like that,’ Iza said.

‘Your wee brother died, didn’t he?’

‘Aye, he did. A good few years back now.’

‘Was he in the hospital?’

Had anyone else asked they’d have got a simple no and a change of subject. Iza liked to keep her wee brother’s memory safe to herself. Alex, though, she was ready to tell. She wanted to say that these days she didn’t think of William that often but that when she did a muckle empty opened up. Alex, she intuited, wouldn’t ask ‘What’s a muckle empty?’ Even if he took ‘an empty’ literally, as a bottle, Alex would imagine a huge empty bottle of cloudy glass that would fit well what she felt when she thought of her brother. But while she was gathering her thoughts, Alex’s mind had hopped from hospitals and death to a fishing trip he now insisted he’d promised his nephew William, Iza and John’s eldest, her dead brother’s namesake, a promise Alex had never in fact made but that he now fretted over breaking. When Iza said William would be starting school come September Alex wrung his hands. As it was dawning on Iza that he’d taken her talk of school as a rejection of his fishing trip offer and not, as she’d intended, news of a milestone in young William’s life, John came to take Alex’s arm and steer him away.

‘She’s in the asylum,’ the nudger whispered as Iza sat down. ‘The mother.’

‘Asylum’ was a word you couldn’t miss, but the rest of her conversation might as well have been the clack of a tramcar along the rails. Iza was letting it rattle on in the background when something the sister-in-law said, something about ‘the glaikit one’, reached her ears.

‘Sorry. What did you say?’

‘Ah said you’d think they’d want them to have a bit more up here, wouldn’t you?’ Darting a look towards Alex, she tapped her temple.

‘What are you saying?’ Iza said.

‘The army. The glaikit one’s talking of joining up. Ah heard him.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish.’ Iza stood up.

Having lost hold of Alex, John was standing on his own by the open window. Iza joined him. For two days now she’d been waiting her moment to tell him she’d lost her job. The moment hadn’t come. Usually, Alex was the safest of topics. John’s voice went thicker and lower when he spoke about his brother. She herself had a soft spot for Alex, a gentle soul who, though not quite all there since he got a whack on the head when a package of bound books toppled from a high shelf in Parkside’s warehouse, had a rare ability to pay heed to what others, John especially, had to say.

‘They’re saying Alex is thinking of enlisting?’

‘Who’s saying?’ John’s narrowed eyes swept the room before coming to rest beyond it, on the wall of a tenement across the street. ‘You ken how he jumps about so you never know what’s coming next or what the hell it’s got to do with what came before,’ he said after a bit, talking to himself more than to Iza. ‘One minute it’s half-time at the football and you’re queuing for a pie, next thing you know you’re up the hills fishing for trout.’

‘Aye, well Alex loves his grub, so there’s a link there.’

‘So what the hell’s Kaiser Wilhelm got to do with grub? He’s been on and on about Kaiser Wilhelm. He’ll say a bit about a bully at work having a go, but then he’s back on the bloody Kaiser. It’s like he’s...’ John searched for the word. ‘Bedevilled. It’s like he’s met the man and taken against him with a vengeance.’

‘There you are. Bullies. There’s more logic to Alex than you think, eh?’

‘It was that bloody white feather,’ John said, bitter as hell.

Iza guessed at the rest. Everyone had heard about women handing out white feathers to shame men into enlisting, so it was no great surprise that Alex had had such an encounter. And, Iza supposed, it was no great surprise that Alex, a sensitive soul, had taken it to heart.

‘Ah have to talk him out of it,’ John was muttering, when raised voices drew their attention to the middle of the room.

The man with the empty glass had wrestled the whisky bottle out of John’s father’s hand. Mr Orr was trying to tug it back. Jack had appointed himself referee, getting between the pair and taking hold of the bottle.

‘Manners,’ Jack called. ‘Show your host some respect.’ He turned to face John’s dad. ‘And you, hogging that bottle while your invited guests’ throats go dry,’ he said, never mind that he hadn’t been invited.

This, from Jack, was fairly restrained, and while that was still the case Iza went to him, got hold of his arm and steered him out the door, mouthing to John she’d best be off to see to the bairns and whispering to Jack it would have served the old bugger right if he’d given him a good hiding.

Jack was unusually quiet as they left the Orrs’ for the ten-minute walk back to Canonmills. In some ways, Iza found Jack the easiest of her siblings to get along with. Though she and her older sister Violet had played together well enough as bairns, they hadn’t found much common ground as they grew. Violet had never understood for the life of her why any woman would want to be doing a man’s job in a filthy dirty caseroom. She’d no notion of the lure of building books, including the grand volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, out of thousands of slivers of metal. And she’d had even less sympathy for Iza’s decision to stick at her job once she got wed and had bairns. Violet had married well, to a wine merchant’s clerk who was on the up. She was that rare thing in the Rosses’ world, a full-time housewife and mother with just the one child, a son, carried to full term. Rab, next up in the family, a comp himself, had understood well enough but had been dead set against his sister disgracing the family by becoming a frock at the frame. Jamie, the eldest, was another story. Jamie was a canny man, one who saw the best in everybody and who’d been a soothing presence in the Ross family when Iza determined to go into the caseroom. But Iza’s relations with Jamie and his family had got muddied.

‘Funny lot, your man’s folks.’

They were half way home before Jack piped up. Though she’d not admit it to her brother, Iza couldn’t disagree. None of her family had truly taken to John, and though the likes of Jamie would give him the benefit of the doubt, Jack was not one to keep his opinions to himself, though on this occasion he spoke softly enough, as though toying with the idea rather than slapping it down.

‘Mind you, he’s a bit of a weirdie himself. Must be in the blood.’

When Iza glowered at him, Jack linked arms and tugged her to him.

‘Right enough, he puts up with you which makes him some sort of saint.’ He stopped short with a finger in the air as though in deep thought. ‘Heh, maybe he’s one of those saints that folk thought were weirdies when they were a hell of a lot smarter than they looked, having visions and that.’ Jack raised his hands and wiggled his fingers.

Iza jabbed her elbow into his ribs. ‘You mind what you’re saying about mah husband. You’re a fine one to talk about weirdies, you getting in the ring with men half your age and twice your height.’

Jack had taken up boxing as a youngster and still, coming up forty and a father of six, he put himself down for bouts. And now he sprang in front to face her with fists raised and head lowered. ‘Come on then. Put them up,’ he growled.

Iza took a swipe at him, Jack ducked and went to catch her by the waist, Iza dodged and next thing he was chasing her along the street shouting ‘Stop thief’. For a few minutes of high jinks Iza shed the weight of losing her job, but soon as she and Jack stopped to gasp for breath – the works played havoc with printers’ lungs – it hit her.

‘The works are letting me go,’ she said.

‘Aye, well, it was on the cards,’ Jack said, glib as you like.

‘What do you mean, on the cards?’

‘You women should never have let them start turfing you out. Mind you, those soft buggers should never have let you in in the first place.’

A machineman in Morrison & Gibbs’ Tanfield works where their brother Rab worked as a comp, Jack had always argued that the male comps, Rab included, had been asking for it when they let the print masters take on women as comps on half the agreed union rate.

‘Thanks very much for your sympathetic understanding.’ Iza went to stride ahead. Jack tugged her back.

‘Listen, you’ve given it a good go, hen. There’s not many would have stuck at it like you. But it’s maybe for the best.’ Jack eyed her. ‘Looked at from the point of view of domestic harmony.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Iza said, though she knew perfectly well what Jack meant. That’s why he’d invited himself along to the wedding, it struck her. To keep an eye on her and John. Jack could hardly have missed signs of discord in Iza’s marriage. And since the bulk of the Ross family moved to Canonmills, leaving only Jamie in their old stamping ground of St Leonards, Jack had taken the role of head man of the family upon himself.

‘You’re a right pair, you and your sister. There’s you wearing the trousers and making your man’s life a misery and her made miserable by a pen-pusher. What’s Mum done to deserve this?’

‘Same as she’s done to raise a blue-eyed boy who can’t mind his own business.’

Jack had a point, mind. Her wearing the trousers might be nonsense, would be all the more so in a week’s time when she’d no pay packet in her pocket, but that John wasn’t a happy man was true enough. And Violet? A couple of years back, after Iza’s youngest was born, Vi Ross had moved out of Iza’s house and gone to live with Violet. Had had quite enough of squabbling bairns she’d said. Her eyes had been on Iza and John when she said it, not on William and baby Harriet. A few months at Violet’s and she’d been back with her belongings. No life about that house, she’d said. Iza had asked what Violet did all day. Dusts her ornaments and picks fluff off her pouffe. Bakes cakes. She’s a good cook, mind. Plays bridge with a couple of snooty neighbours once in a while. That lad of hers is that quiet you’d never know he’s in. Always up in his room studying. She’d sounded scornful and proud in equal measure when she said that. There’d been talk of Violet’s lad, seventeen-year-old Victor, going to university. And as for that stuffed-shirt man of hers, always paring his nails, no wonder your sister’s down in the dumps. She’s on medicine for her nerves. Vi Ross had brushed this aside, but Iza could see it troubled her more than she was letting on.

Iza and Jack’s street was teeming with bairns at play. Women leant from tenement windows or, hands on hips, stood at stair doors to call them in for their tea. Iza caught sight of William heading for her stair door. And there was one of Rab and Nora’s girls picking up a wee Harriet who’d fallen over and grazed her knees again.

As they neared, Jack tugged Iza to a halt. ‘It’s only a job. Your man’s in work.’ He pushed his bunnet back to scratch his head. ‘Ah can see you’ll be hard pressed on just the one pay packet, but you’ll find something more suited. How about munitions? Ah can just see you churning out shells and bullets.’ He grinned. ‘And pocketing a few.’ He grimaced. ‘You’d have to flit to Glasgow or Gretna, mind. Your man’s got family over West, hasn’t he? Might suit him better.’ Jack was fishing.

‘You don’t know him, Jack. You’ve never tried. None of you have,’ is all he caught. And as she said it her mind ran on: same could be said of me.

Jack changed tack.

‘What’s your union got to say. Have you been to them?’

‘Aye, ah’ve been to them,’ she said wearily.

‘Right enough some of thon officials don’t know their arse from their elbow, but there’s some good ones. And we need the unions, eh? Need to stick together or the sods will chew us all up and spit us out.’

‘Stick together?’ Iza wanted to bawl – what about me? She bit it back. Lifting two-year-old Harriet from her cousin’s scrawny arms, she went to turn in.

‘Look, hen,’ Jack said, ‘if you could get yourself into the caseroom and stick at it against the odds you’ll soon find something else. Ah could ask Maisie if she can get you a start in the rubber works. They’ve been taking on folk for the trench boots they’re churning out.’

Six bairns and Jack to put up with, and his wife Maisie had had a full-time job at the North British Rubber Works for over a year now.

Iza chewed on her lip. ‘Keep it to yourself for now, Jack, will you? Ah’ve not told John or Mum. Or Rab.’ ‘Rab’ was accompanied by a wrinkle of her nose and a glance up to the heavens.

There was no need to explain this to Jack. It wasn’t just that Rab would be hard pressed to hide his thoughts on the matter, if he even bothered to try. Iza could picture him now, lips pursed and a hand stroking his sandy moustache as he weighed the shame of a Ross getting the heave-ho against the satisfaction of another woman cleared from the caseroom. Rab was the least of it, though. Being let go when trade was bad was far from uncommon. Folk suffered it all the time. Even skilled workers like the Rosses lived life haunted by the prospect. But to be singled out to be shown the door was a thing that rocked you to your roots. It was not something you wanted to tell the world. It put you to shame. Other than a stranger, Geordie Joe, Jack was the only one she’d told.

‘You’ll need to tell your man, hen,’ Jack called after her.

All those late afternoons when she’d willed the knock-off hooter to sound and here she was warding it off, dreading it. Sorts into words, words into lines, lines into paragraphs, paragraphs into pages, pages locked up to make a solid, lasting thing out of thousands of tiny metal slivers. Arms ache, legs throb, head pounds and chest heaves, and often enough you’d be glad never ever to touch another piece of type, but even then, in creaking bones beneath sore flesh, you’re sure your day’s been well spent.