The Caseroom E-Book

Kate Hunter

• Herausgeber: Fledgling Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 468

Beschreibung

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SALTIRE FIRST BOOK AWARD Torn between class and gender loyalties and embroiled in a bitter labour dispute, Iza must choose sides. Set in the thick of workers' lives, in Edinburgh's thriving print industry, The Caseroom follows thirteen-year-old Iza into the arcane world of The Caseroom where she learns the intricacies of a highly-skilled trade. As one of some 800 Edinburgh women who, for a few decades did so, Iza becomes a hand-typesetter, work that had been, and was to become once more, a male preserve. Despite hostility to the cheap labour that women represent, Iza persists in work that allows her to feed her imagination on books. But holding on to her trade means hardening herself to the needs of those she loves. And when the men's union moves to eliminate women from The Caseroom and a We Women movement forms to oppose them, there is no middle ground.

Leseprobe

The Caseroom

Kate Hunter

To my father, who took me to the library

when I was wee

Part I A frock at the frame: 1891–96

1891: Into the caseroom

Wakening, she raised her head and peered through darkness to where dirty yellow light from a streetlamp smudged window panes, sink and stove. Going on six by her reckoning. Waiting for bells to strike the hour, she shut her eyes and opened her ears to rhythmic snuffles from her mother, dead to the world by her side; to creak of springs as her sister shifted in her bed in the corner; from ben the bedroom, a gasp as her father trawled for breath; a loud snort, then silence. Not a cheep from her brothers.

Hands clasped to her breast as though in prayer, she clamped elbows to ribs to contain a tingle in her veins that put her in mind of herself as a bairn on gala day, except that that bairn’s blood would not have had this peppering of fear in it. So how come it was there? What this day held in store gave true cause for excitement, aye, for apprehension, aye. But fear? What was there to be feart of? In answer, her brother Rab’s face, white-lipped and seething, came to mind. Last night when, silenced by a sharp word from their father, Rab had gritted his teeth, she’d felt triumphant. But even as she’d felt it she’d had an inkling that such a triumph would not withstand the light of day.

She’d not lain long before metal rang on stone in a nearby street. Keeping an ear pinned to the bedroom, she listened to hooves clip-clop closer. Rattle of milk churns. Must be gone six. She slipped from under blankets and squatted at the chanty, beam end pressed to cold rim to muffle the tinkle, a common enough sound of a night but one that at this hour, with day nearing, might act like a hooter to rouse folk. In two ticks she was dressed in clothes left ready over the back of a chair: drawers, light summer vest, stockings, faded grey and black striped dress, fresh-laundered, navy smock. Boots? No. She set them down by the door ready till she’d got porridge and dinner pieces made.

The strike of a match, hiss of gas, scrape of pot sounded deafening to her, but no-one roused. Set to soak overnight, the oatmeal porridge was ready by the time she’d sliced bread, spread lard, smeared on potted haugh and wrapped six pieces. After putting a package in her smock pocket, she ate a few spoonfuls of porridge straight from the pot, blowing to cool it, watching tenement windows across the street come to life as dawn light rinsed out dark.

Too early to leave yet, but she wanted to be off. She’d walk a long way round, stop at a bakers to buy a roll straight from the oven, sit on a step or crate to eat it. Though a trace of night’s chill would be in the air, this September was mild as anything. She looked up. A wee strip of dulled silver sky above roofs was tinged with pink and blue. No sign of rain clouds.

First, though, the best bit, the bit she’d been leaving till last. From a corner of a shelf she took down the setting stick and box of rules her father had presented to her. Used tools, aye, but, still, good tools. Last night she’d held them in her lap to finger them, but Rab’s glower had made her think better of loosening the screw on the stick to move the measure, opening the box’s neat clasp to take out the stack of wee brass rules. Studiously ignoring her brother, she’d set her tools down safe with the hair clasp you’d easily take for real tortoiseshell and her wooden pencil case with a diamond of ebony inlay, sleek and fine despite being chipped.

Thump. Tinkle. Thought of Rab’s glower had her fumble and drop her rule box. She braced. At least it sounded as though the clasp had held. Holding her breath, she crouched to run a hand across the floor, ear cocked. A murmur. A groan. Was that a shuffle? Her father and brothers were rousing. That dark wedge by the chair leg? Aye. Sure enough, the clasp had held tight, the rules had not spilt and she had the box safe in her pocket.

She’d run fingers through her hair, given her plait a quick tuck and tidy and coiled it under her navy hat, was into her boots and had a hand on the doorknob when creaking floorboards made her freeze.

A hand clasped her shoulder.

‘Don’t do it,’ Rab hissed in her ear.

Sensing a trace of pleading in his command, she hesitated.

‘You’re in the wrong,’ he growled.

‘No ah’m not,’ she growled back, shoving his hand from her.

On the stair, she heard him come after. It was early yet for neighbours to be off to work, the stair was clear, and she was at the door, nearly out in the street, when he barged in front to block her way.

‘You’re set to bring shame on this family. On your father, on your brothers, on me.’

Rab’s doleful tone was nigh-on weighing her down with all this shame, but when he prodded his chest and squeaked ‘on me’ the weight fell away and, close to laughter, ‘Who do you think you are?’ came out of her mouth.

Rab grabbed her upper arms. His claws dug in. ‘Me? Ah’m a man at the frame, doing a man’s work. And you? You mean to be a frock at the frame? Better you’d never been born.’

That took the breath out of her. She went limp. She’d felt spit land on her cheek and she needed to be rid of it. As she tugged to raise a hand she looked into Rab’s eyes. Though he was six years her elder, he wasn’t so many inches taller. Seeing as he’d not stopped to put his specs on, his pale blue eyes looked frail, putting her in mind of a newborn’s opened for the first time. They had sleep in the corners and rapid blinks weakened their glare. Again, she nearly laughed, but before the laugh was out it was stifled by a yen to comfort him, to pat his arm and say, ‘It’ll be fine, Rab. Go back up and get your breakfast. It’s made ready.’

A clomp of boots had Rab keek over her shoulder. They were blocking the way of a neighbour off to work, and as Rab gave him a nervous smile and a clipped ‘mornin’, his grip on her loosened. Blood brought to the boil by that smile, that ‘mornin’, as if it was in the normal run of things for a brother to be bruising his sister’s arms and telling her she’d be better off unborn, she wrenched free, skirted round him and stomped off.

First of the city’s works’ hooters sounding, folk were trickling out of stair doors, so there were a fair few heads to turn when Rab bawled after her, ‘You and your ilk will be swept from the caseroom. Just you mark mah words.’

Nothing in her thirteen years had prepared her for this, not the chorus of works hooters and great clomp of boots of a morning, not the oily tang of her father and brothers’ overalls of an evening, not even the stream of printers sweeping by as she stood at the work’s gates with her mother of a Saturday payday. All these were as known to her as the cracked lilt of her mother’s voice and sweet-sour smell of her flesh. Still, after she’d done as she was told and waited a good long while by the timekeeper’s cubbyhole at the entrance, back to the wall as folk streamed by, the commotion of Ballantyne’s Pauls print works fair stoondit her.

Chin tucked to keep from gawping, she followed the overseer through the bindery. A wobble to his walk had her wanting to titter at the thought of his legs not being a matching pair, as if he’d reached for them and, bleary-eyed, pulled them on like odd stockings. But she was on her own, no classroom chum by her side to nudge and share a giggle with. Out of the corner of her eye she took in a row of women sitting at a long table, saw how their hands danced a jig as they snatched and flicked at paper being swept along on a roller belt. An empty space among them had her wanting, just then, to be shown, or, better still, beckoned, to that spot, to be joining them and not following the wobbly overseer straight by. Though she didn’t recognise any of the women, they were not strangers to her. They were the likes of school chums she’d recently parted company with and lassies and wifeys from her streets. A few looked to be nearly as old as her mum, but many were ages with her, or just a bit older. Fifteen. Sixteen. Ah could slip into place among them without so much as a by-your-leave, she thought. The odd eyebrow would rise, but that you could ignore while you worked out the pecking order.

When one of the women looked her way then leant in to whisper to her chum, and the other looked over and smiled, or smirked, she lifted her chin to look straight over their heads to where lone men stood like charioteers at machines that yanked and jabbed at paper stacks and, beyond them, to men who, hunched over desks, poked and prodded at books. Turning her eyes back to the empty space among the women, she faltered, thinking twice about what she’d set herself to do. Earlier that morning she’d done just the same. After rounding the corner when she’d wrenched free of her brother, she’d stopped a moment, heart thudding, pulled by a longing to slip back into wonted family ways – morning’s thick, low voices; warmth of bodies round the stove – before she’d steeled herself to merge with a swelling stream of workers heading for Causewayside.

The overseer had stopped to look over his shoulder. His mouth was moving but what came out of it couldn’t be heard for the din. He flicked his head in annoyance. She speeded up. Leaving behind that empty space on the bench felt like tugging her eyes from fruit slices as she left the bakers with a plain loaf and her mum’s change in her pocket.

All this time her ears had been taking in a chorus of rattles and clanks and, riding above them, the bindery lassies’ blether, and she’d paid no mind to a rising tide of clatter, so that when the overseer opened a small door in the far wall a great belch of din had her stop short like a beast leaning back on its haunches as it’s tugged into a pen.

‘Casters,’ the overseer mouthed over his shoulder as, at a quick hobble, he skirted round two muckle machines, all jerking limbs and levers, that fairly shook the floor. Where, in the bindery, a pitched glass roof let in a shower of soft grey beams, the small casting room’s inky light came from slits of windows high on one black wall and a greenish glow from lamps fixed to another. As she passed a clarty-overalled man leaning in to tap at a juddering machine and a fresh-overalled apprentice craning over his shoulder, a wee tremor ran down her back to dislodge eyes that had stuck to it like ticks. Half-turning, she caught the apprentice eyeing her, and, seeing as she’d no reason to suppose he’d been taken with her striking beauty, she turned to face him and give him a taste of what her wee brother William called her fierce face, as in ‘ye’ve got yer fierce face on.’

‘When you’re quite done with yer gawping.’ Holding yet another door open, the overseer barked so loud his words carried.

And, letting go of the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding as she heaved the casting room door shut behind her, she entered the caseroom.

‘Wheesht,’ she whispered to herself, blinking up at a canopy of powdery mauve light. Like the bindery, the caseroom was a long hall, only narrower. Like the bindery, its light came from a pitched glass roof. But where the bindery rattled and clanked, and the casting room pounded and clattered, the caseroom’s taps and tinkles rode on an intent hush. And where the bindery smelled of glue and turpentine and hot rubber, and the casting room reeked of dirty grease and singed metal, the caseroom’s smells were sawdust, mothballs, oiled wood and ink.

‘Stone.’ The overseer slapped the first of a column of squat tables that dotted the central aisle. ‘Forme.’ He tapped a mental frame that lay on the stone. By clasping in her smock pocket her setting stick and box of rules, she stopped herself from following suit, denying her hands their itch to be fingering the caseroom’s furnishings and objects.

‘Frames.’ He punched the side of one of a rank of tall wooden cabinets with sloping tops that stretched down either side of the aisle. Each, she saw, was crowned with the top of a bare head, men’s wiry bristles or balding pates on one side, women’s bobs and buns on the other. Realising she still had her hat on, she snatched it off, though when the overseer stopped by a stocky woman with a fat knob of rich chestnut hair and, without staying the restless jigging of her hands, the woman took a sidelong glance, she wished she’d kept it on to cover her sandy wisps. The woman’s glance, she thought, measured her and found her too slight a thing.

‘New learner lassie. Get her started will ye, Fanny?’

‘Right you are.’

‘Just do as you’re told and ye might do us,’ the overseer grunted as he wobbled off.

And so, she stood like a bairn warned to mind its manners as the woman, Fanny, paying her no heed, read and spelled out from the top sheet of a wedge of papers propped atop her frame – ‘Mrs Field took her boy in her arms. Cap M, r, s, nut space, cap F, i’ – while her fingers plucked metal slivers from wee compartments in a big, shallow drawer and placed them in her setting stick. That her hands kept up with her mouth was amazing to behold.

‘You’ll catch flies.’ A hint of a smile in deep-set eyes showed this woman knew it was wonder that kept Iza’s mouth open.

‘Have you got a name?’

‘Aye.’

‘Let’s have it then.’

‘Iza Ross.’

The woman cupped a hand to her ear.

‘Iza Ross,’ Iza said louder.

‘Fanny Begg,’ she announced. ‘Now, Iza Ross, watch and learn. ‘Manuscript’ – with a horny, blackened fingernail she tapped the stack of papers – ‘made up of folios’ – her fingers fluttered pages – ‘and, here, case full of type, or, as we say in the trade, sorts’ – her hand swept over the drawer and, dipping into one of its wee compartments, index finger and thumb lifted slivers and let them trickle back – ‘to be placed in your setting stick, starting at the right end, that’s to say the left end, the right end being the wrong end of the stick’. Fanny Begg’s head bobbed from left to right. ‘And when you’ve filled your stick, you dump your lines to the galley,’ she said, tapping a metal tray. ‘Right, what was it again?’

Iza gawped at her.

‘Your handle?’

‘Iza Ross.’

‘Well, Iza Ross, let’s get you set to work.’

Without wishing to, Iza mimicked Fanny Begg’s brisk sweeping at stray hairs with the back of a hand as she followed her back down the aisle. Glances to the left caught men’s eyes weighing her up and, to the right, the odd fleeting smile from a woman, but most were too caught up in their work to pay her any mind. At the far end of the caseroom Fanny Begg stopped at an unoccupied frame and Iza watched and listened while this imposing woman eased a case from its slot, set it down on the frame’s sloping top, plucked out a sort, an m, and named its parts: face, serif, beard, shoulder, feet, nick.

‘Learn the lay of the case.’ Fanny Begg swept a hand over the compartments. Then, seeing Iza’s puzzlement, she explained ‘Which go where.’

Even in the relative quiet of the caseroom you had to raise your voice to be heard. This, Iza had learnt. So she raised it, and was abashed to hear her ‘Which what?’ come out loud and gruff, as though she’d caught the overseer’s bark.

Fanny Begg’s eyes flashed. ‘Sorts,’ she snapped. ‘Most are letters of the alphabet and numbers you’ll be familiar with. Then there’s foreign letters. And ligatures, two characters joined up, like f and l for the likes of flummoxed.’

Iza winced, aware that her face was a picture of the word.

‘Over here.’ Fanny Begg beckoned her a few paces to where a lanky man in a brown flannel jacket over an apron that draped his shins leant in to tap with a mallet and pronged metal stick at a slab of woven metal.

‘John Adams,’ Fanny said. ‘Stonehand.’

Whistling a sweet tune Iza knew to be one of her dad’s favourites, John Adams glanced up as he dropped a shoulder to lever his stick and tap at an angle. Like her dad he was a lean, wiry man, and, like her dad’s, his face was gaunt and grey.

‘If you can catch a few drips of John’s knowledge of composing type you’ll know a lot more than some ah could mention.’

Iza caught the scunnered glance Fanny Begg threw at a man working at a nearby frame. She’d already got a glimpse of that man. She’d been aware of him sniffing in her direction. She didn’t think he’d recognised her, but she had certainly recognised his fat purple nose and slobbery mouth. She turned her back on him.

John Adams squinted up at Fanny.

‘John’s cloth-eared, like most in here,’ Fanny said before raising her voice to say, ‘Got a bit more time for frocks at the frame than some round here, eh John?’, clearly aiming it at the other man’s ears.

Though Fanny Begg said it lightly, still, her ‘frocks at the frame’ shook Iza. Like dry bread stuck in her gullet, the phrase repeated on her. Repeated in Rab’s voice, at that.

‘What’s that?’ John Adams cocked an ear.

‘Just telling the lassie to pay you no mind, ye daft old codger.’

‘Aye right. Give her a year or so in here and she’ll be as daft as me,’ he said, greeting Iza with a wee crease of his eyes and dip of his head.

Like a sip of water, John Adams’ gesture helped Iza swallow and steady her nerves. It helped her take her place at her frame.

‘The morn’s morn you’ll be set to earning your living reading out copy.’ Fanny Begg gave her an enquiring look. Again, Iza felt herself being weighed up and, as before, she could not quite gauge this woman’s measure of her, except Fanny Begg seemed to be giving her the benefit of the doubt because now she lowered her voice, leant in close and, nodding across the aisle, mouthed ‘Mind out for the likes of George bloody-frocks-at-the-frame Seggie,’ before leaving Iza to it.

As Iza Ross hung her hat on a hook, her upper arms hurt. She could still feel her brother’s bruising clench, still feel his spit on her face. Though none was there, she wiped her cheek with the back of a hand and muttered, ‘It’s not mah fault.’ Then, catching herself girn like a bairn, she chided herself and stepped onto a platform that brought her elbows level with her case. On tiptoe, she looked down the length of the caseroom. The lassie at the frame in front keeked round and smiled. Iza smiled back. She looked up to where weak sunlight filtered through grimy glass. She listened. Near at hand, tap-tap of mallet on metal. In the aisle, rattle of a trolley. A rasping cough, answered by another. From through the wall the casters’ infernal clatter. From further off, waves of rolling, rumbling thuds. Now, she shut her ears and, all itching fingers, took her setting stick and rules from her pocket and set them down on her frame.

Iza had already run into George Seggie. A few weeks back she’d come home to find her father, James Ross, perched in his armchair by a guttering fire. Tang of Briar’s Balsam in the air, steaming bowl clutched to his knee, old towel draped over his head, he was rattling and whistling like a dented kettle on the boil. Iza had come in starving hungry, but before she could take a bite her mum had sent her off for messages. First, though, she was to go to Typo Hall to collect the benefit.

‘You’ll have to scoot. It’s gone one and they shut at half past.’

Her dad poked his out head out from under the towel to mutter that they wouldn’t like it, a lassie being sent.

‘Well they’ll have to lump it. Mah kidneys are killing me and ah’m not about to hike them up the High Street.’ Vi Ross stuck a scuffed buff card in one of Iza’s hands and a message bag in the other and, with a ‘Mind you don’t lose the card and don’t break the eggs,’ shooed her out the door. Hungry as she was, she wasn’t sorry to be off. These days, her dad’s condition made a cold place of home. Even on hot days, or when of a chill evening the fire was well stoked, his sickness seemed to soak up warmth.

This was an autumn day of churning grey skies and drizzle that dissolved people, tenements and, behind and above them, Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s Seat, in a thick grey broth. Card clasped in her pocket, Iza belted down the Pleasance and up St Mary’s Street, skirting wifeys and bairns and carts and crates. In the High Street, she got stuck behind three gents who’d stopped to parley and nearly got a swipe when a stout one wearing the stupidest red and yellow tartan breeks swung his walking stick. She sheered round him to pant up to a sweetshop window for a quick suck of her gums at sight of a tower of macaroon. Next to the sweetshop, an iron stopper held a heavy dark green door slightly ajar. A brass nameplate said Argyll Hall, but she knew it was what her father called Typo Hall. When he’d pointed it out to her one day and she’d thought Typo Hall was a sort of hall he didn’t know the right name for, he’d laughed at her in a nice way.

After keeking into two or three rooms off a long, dark corridor, she found the Edinburgh Typographical Society, or, rather, she came upon two men of her father’s age sitting behind a long desk, one with a cashbox by him, the other a ledger. A third man, holding a newspaper up to grey light, stood tapping the stem of an unlit pipe on brown teeth. His mouth slobbered and his nose put Iza in mind of a big bruised raspberry.

Halted just inside the door, pinching her shoulder in to keep it clear of greasy brown bunnets hanging on a coat stand, she hinged a leg to tap a toe on the floor. The room smelt thick with men: that familiar reek of wet wool jackets and two-day-old mince on a hot summer’s day. The union men had seen her, she knew, but they weren’t letting on. The two at the desk busied themselves with their cashbox and ledger while the other, taking his pipe from his mouth, read from his newspaper as though he were addressing a congregation.

‘Eight-hour day, no loss of pay. Under a banner emblazoned with this, the latest war cry of that agitator of the labouring classes, Mr James Connolly, last night addressed a gathering in Oddfellows Hall, Forrest Road. A collection for the masons of the city who struck work yesterday in a demand for a reduction in hours raised three pounds, seven shillings and tuppence.’ The pipe he’d stuck back in his mouth rattling, he turned to address the others. ‘What sort of measly collection’s that, eh?’

‘Three pounds, seven and tuppence better than bugger all,’ cashbox man said without looking up.

‘The eight-hour day would do us just dandy. And we might get it if these bloody agitators’d keep their noses out.’ He puffed and wheezed over a flaring match. ‘Have we had anything in from the Trades Council about our brother masons?’

After exchanging sidelong glances, the men at the desk looked up at Iza as though they’d discovered a pressing engagement.

‘And how can we help you, hen?’ said ledger man. The way his bushy eyebrows arched as he peered over his specs was discouraging, but the wee tilt of his head was friendly enough. Cashbox man leant back, stretched, scratched his bald head. His lower eyelids hung loose, so that Iza worried those watery eyeballs might slip out, slither down his cheek, catch on his black moustache. He was about to speak, but slobber-mouth got in first.

‘Looking to start in the caseroom are ye? Well, ah can tell you for nothing girruls don’t bother themselves with tedious matters like union organisation. They go straight into the masters’ pockets.’

Iza narrowed her eyes at him as she laid her father’s union contributions card on the desk and said, ‘Mah dad’s sickness benefit.’ She added a curt ‘Please,’ when ledger man picked up the card.

That very week a man from Ballantyne’s Pauls works had come to her class to talk to school leavers. He’d given out a handwritten sheet and a printed sheet that had the same story on and told them to find errors and mark them with squiggles from a list. He gave them some sums too. And not just boys. Girls got to do it. The man from Nelsons’ Parkside works, where Iza’s dad and brothers Rab and Jack worked, only talked to the boys. Iza spotted eleven mistakes and found the right squiggle to mark most of them. She loved it. And though she didn’t love them, she got the sums right. After the class handed in their work she saw the Ballantyne’s man and schoolmistress look her way, so she wasn’t surprised when her name was called. She was surprised to be the only one called, though. Girl or boy. She knew she was good at spelling and grammar, but she’d never come top of the class. That evening she’d asked her dad could she start in Ballantyne’s caseroom. And her dad had nodded, slowly, and said, ‘We’ll see.’

Iza watched ledger man write ‘James Ross’ and a number in one column and ‘9/6d’ in the next. She waited while he scratched his head over a running total she’d worked out in her head, upside down. She watched him write and initial ‘9/6d’ and ‘23/9/91’ on her dad’s card. When cashbox man had counted out the coins, she carefully lifted them into her pocket and, saying her thanks, made to leave.

‘You’ll be wanting this, hen.’ Ledger man was holding out the subs card. As Iza took it, he said, ‘Tell your dad we asked after him.’

She almost said, ‘No you didn’t. You never asked,’ but she held her tongue. He’d spoken kindly enough. It was raspberry nose got her dander up. As she left Typo Hall she minded how, after saying, ‘We’ll see,’ her father had said it might go hard on her. There were some would say she was taking a man’s job. Still a lot of ill-will over lassies entering the caseroom in the wake of the ’72–’73 strike. He hadn’t said any more and she hadn’t asked. Her dad was warning her what she’d be up against, not refusing her, and that, in the coming weeks, had helped steady her resolve.

Her eldest brother Jamie, too, had helped. Jamie had fair confounded their father by refusing to follow him into Nelsons’ machine room. Daft, James Ross had said, when ah can easy get you a start in a steady trade. There’ll always be a call for printed matter. Choosing his own path, Jamie had gone into the ironworks. And this remove from Edinburgh’s print trade, along with his couthie nature, had led Jamie to side with Iza in her wish to work in the caseroom. Well, at least he’d kept out of family disputes over the matter, offering her sympathetic looks and a change of subject.

Iza’s sister Violet, turned sixteen, and her wee brother William, nearly nine, had kept out of it too. When words were raised on the matter Violet would be out with her chums, eyeing up lads, or, if she’d left off and come home, helping with housework. Her only intervention had been to tell Iza, out of earshot of the others, that she couldn’t for the life of her see why anyone would want to go into a filthy dirty print works.

‘And who’d want to be at the beck and call of toffee-nosed madams,’ was Iza’s answer to that.

Violet had started in a wee drapers shop, but hadn’t taken to the bossy wifey who ran it, nor to handling men’s drawers, and had gone up in the world, to fancy lingerie in Thompson and Allison’s department store.

Matters with William were more complicated. Until summer just gone, though Iza had to help with chores, still, come grown-up talk she’d escape with William ben the bedroom or out to the woods by the park. She’d have been a bairn with him, doing what bairns do. Now that Iza had joined the grown-ups, she knew William felt the loss because she felt it too.

Jack, second eldest, would take the opposite tack to Jamie. Not that Jack had any burning interest in how Iza was to earn a living. It was simply not in his nature to keep out of any dispute. After following their father into Nelsons’ machine room, Jack had now served his time. With no females in Nelson’s caseroom the issue was not pressing there, but this seemed to give Jack all the more leeway to be contrary, one evening arguing black was white, the next that it might be red, and, later the same evening, that it was indeed white.

Along with Rab, their mother, Vi Ross, formed the opposition. The two had different reasons, though. Vi Ross was not bothered about Iza taking a man’s job. Her objection was born of hard-nosed calculation.

‘What the hell’s the use of bringing in a pittance for your keep while you spend years learning skilled work,’ she’d say, hands on hips, eyebrows hitched up, ‘when you’ll no sooner be on decent money than you’ll be wed and having bairns and never use your precious trade again?’

Folding envelopes had been quite good enough for her, she insisted, red hands going like the clappers to demonstrate the folding.

‘Ah was giving mah mother good money for mah keep soon as ah left school,’ she’d say, scrubbing carrots like they were fighting back.

Gritting her teeth, Iza chopped at the carrots, whacking the knife down and slicing a finger in the process and so giving her mother the satisfaction of saying, ‘You see, just like ah said, you’re too clumsy for that type of highfallutin work.’ There’d been no point in telling her mother she’d said no such thing, but Iza had told her anyway.

And Rab? A newly time-served comp in Nelsons’ caseroom, he’d fumed at talk of Iza entering the caseroom.

‘So you’ll allow yourself to be used to undercut agreed rates, to be used as cheap labour? Ah’ll tell you for nothing ah’m not about to stand by and let a sister of mine...’ at which point he’d be pulled up short by a warning look from their father. He’d not give up, though. Adopting a tone he must have picked up in lecture halls he frequented, a tone that drove Iza mad, he’d launch into: ‘Do you know that working men have had to fight long and hard to win decent rates. Back in...’ Iza would hear no more. Like the rest of the family she’d give full attention to fiddling with the lamp wick or clearing used matches from the box. Then, tutting and muttering, Rab would turn to sharpening his pencil to underline and write notes in a tiny, neat hand in the margins of his Scottish Typographical Association journal.

On the eve her father agreed to Iza accepting a start at Ballantynes, Rab had quoted chapter and verse from a journal article by an eminent French physician – he’d stressed every syllable of that – on the detrimental effects of print works on women’s fertility. ‘Unnatural,’ he’d said. And as if saying it once wasn’t enough he’d underscored it. ‘Unnatural.’ He’d blushed when he said ‘women’s fertility’ though. And he mispronounced ‘puerperal’. And even though Iza was only thirteen she knew it and her dad knew it too and a wee smile he’d given her had emboldened her to say, ‘Who cares. Who wants bairns anyhow?’

1894: Time-served

She’s made the measure allowing for squeeze and, elbows hinged soft but firm, set herself to face e in its compartment just left of centre of her Old Style lower case. Though she’d never let on, she’s even said ‘mornin’ to the letter that curls in on itself as though it doesn’t need the others. When it comes to it, though, she silently informs it, you’re nothing on your own, just like the rest. Eyes fixed on the first line of the first folio of ‘The Dwarf with the Long Beard’, she sharpens them on the particular tilt and curl of the hand – a fairly good one this – to pluck into her mind the day’s first string of words. ‘In a far distant land.’

Arms raised to the upper case, slight swivel of shoulders and fleet lever of wrists, and she nips up her first sort, a cap I, slips it into place in her setting stick and snares it with a black-and-yellow-furrowed thumbnail. And so her hands set off on today’s nine-and-a-half hour journey round the case, right plucking, left gathering in.

IN a far distant land there reigned a

Narrowing her eyes to see the line as a pattern of black and white, she chinks out a thick between t and l, nearest thing to two uprights, and slips in two thins to increase spacing a fraction. Same between, let’s see, d and t. Still a bit of give. It’ll have to be that N and a and, there now, her first line’s justified snug.

an only daughter who was so very beautiful that no one in the whole kingdom could be compared to her. She was known as Princess Pietnotka, and the fame of her beauty spread far and wide. There were many princes among her suitors, but her choice fell upon Prince Dobrotek.

Arms too tightly strung. You’ll not last like that she tells herself. Replanting her boots straight and square – sawdust and metal filings already settling on the sheen from her father’s spit and polish – she lowers her chin a fraction and hikes her slight shoulders back and down to slacken the tension a notch. There now.

She obtained her father’s consent to their marriage, and then, attended by a numerous suite, set off with her lover for the church, having first, as was the custom, received her royal parent’s blessing.

As though she’s drawn a thick veil about her, all that is not manuscript and case of tiny metal slivers fades clean away. Ranks of frames the length of the caseroom, each with its crowning head, women’s on this side, men’s on the other, gone. Squat slabs that dot the central aisle, each with its brown-aproned stoneman bent over it, gone. The print works’ din, too, fades: machine room’s distant rumbling thuds; clatter of next door’s casters; near-at-hand, tap-tap of mallet on metal. Wheesht. Listen. Just the clink of sort meeting sort, of tiny wee pieces of tin and antinomy and lead lining up, and that’s a sound for fingertips to feel, not ears to hear. And now, concentration set, fingers flying, lines building sure and even, she can pay some heed to her mind’s wanderings.

As she thinks of giving her wee brother a proof copy of this job, last of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen’s Tales she’s typeset these past weeks, pictures his eager eyes, his voice intoning ‘The dwarf with the long beard,’ her mouth softens into a smile. But will she manage to rifle a proof? Linger by the proofing press to admire the pressman’s work, find the right words to butter him up without giving him the wrong idea. Depends who’s on the press. Some of them have minds, hands even, liable to wander where they oughtn’t. Her nose wrinkles like it’s got a sniff of the gas works and, catching this thought-trail threatening to stall her hands, she cuts it short.

Most of the princes who had been unsuccessful in their wooing of Pietnotka returned disappointed to their own kingdoms: but one of them, a dwarf only seven inches high, with an enormous hump on his back and a beard seven feet long, who was a powerful prince and magician, was so enraged that he determined to have his revenge.

That lad at the works’ gates this morning. Now what’s he doing slinking into her mind? Her lower lip pouts as she tries to add features to a sun-browned face and thick brown hair that needs a cut. Tall, bare-headed, standing like a boulder in a burn so that the surge of printers had to flow round him. No. Not a boulder. More a branch, buffeted as he held out his handbills and folk swept by, some grabbing one, someone near her muttering ‘bugger off’.

So he changed himself into a whirlwind and lay in wait to receive the princess. When the wedding procession was about to enter the church the air was suddenly filled with a blinding cloud of dust, and Pietnotka was borne up high as the highest clouds, and then right down to an underground palace.

A rattling wheeze plucks at her nerves. Bent over his stone not two yards from her, heel of a hand pressed to the edge, John Adams has set down his mallet to cough and gurgle. She doesn’t want to see the alarm in his face, that same safety lamp flickering down a black tunnel she’s seen in her father’s eyes. Holding her setting stick aside while her fingers scamper through ts to nip out ns strayed from an overfull box – time saved in the long run she tells herself – she silently hums a tune that’s been playing in her head since a slurred strain of it wove its way up the tenement wall last night.

Pause. Listen. John Adams rakes up phlegm. She casts an eye over her learner’s practice piece, set three year ago now in ruby, minion and all the font sizes up to 14, both justified and in quad left ragged right, in upper and lower case roman, in italic, in small caps and all caps, read, proofed, corrected —

Habits to be Acquired

First and foremost, maintain a quiet and thoughtful manner. The compositor must not sing, whistle or talk or allow the mind to wander from the work to be set.

— and, quietly at first, sings Daddy wouldn’t buy me a a bow-wow. When her voice rises, Netta Strachan at the next frame picks up and echoes bow wow, then a handful of voices take up Daddy wouldn’t buy me and women’s voices, men’s voices, a good two score of them, this whole end of the caseroom, chorus bow-wow.

Voices drop. She lifts her head. John Adams is darting a warning nod up at the gallery. The singing stops. Fifty pairs of eyes take a quick keek up while heads stay down. Wight the overseer is out of his lair, leaning over the iron rail to survey. She swallows a lump in her throat, taking down with it a musty mothball tang of nepthaline laced with black oil and ink.

There the dwarf, for it was he who had worked this spell, disappeared, leaving her in a lifeless condition.

And so the day slips along, sorts plucked, words composed, lines justified, folios turned until, light sunk to dirt-speckled oatmeal, eyes stretched to bursting, legs stuffed with yeasty dough, it must be about half five. Half an hour to go. She unfurls and stretches the fingers of her left claw and releases them to coil back round her setting stick.

One of three casting machines next door judders to a halt. Then another. Then another. Tap-tap of stonemen’s mallets stops. It’s so quiet she can hear her ears throb. Nearly there, and like a fiddle coming in to lift a tune, a few lines of verse give a wee lift to her arms.

The prince made the sign of the cross and resumed his journey. When he had gone some way along the moorland he stopped, and without looking back tried the effect of the magic words, saying:

“Dappled Horse with Mane of Gold,

Horse of Wonder! Come to me.

Walk not the earth, for I am told

You fly like birds o’er land and sea.”

Then amid flash of lightning and roll of thunder appeared the horse.

Great chorus of works’ hooters fading and clatter of boots swelling, Iza tramped down iron steps. Out into late summer’s silver-grey light she blinked and rubbed her eyes with the back of a hand as she and her work chum Margaret Scott joined warehousemen, typecasters, bookbinders and bindery lassies, machinemen and machine-feeder lassies to shuffle through the yard gates into Causewayside. Nearing the gates, Iza found herself craning for sight of the tall, bare-headed lad who’d been blocking the way that morning. And there he was, head above the crowd. When folk in front brushed past him his outstretched arm swung back like a briar into Iza and Margaret’s path. Margaret took a handbill. Lowering her eyes from his keen look, Iza followed suit. The lad shook a pail. Coins jingled.

‘Support the miners’ fight for a living wage.’

He was broad-shouldered. A bit hollow-chested, and that crumpled linen jacket was made for someone with shorter arms, but she saw why he had caught her fancy this morning. That thick brown hair and strong, clean-shaven jaw. Big, squint mouth. Like his skin, his eyes were unusually dark for these parts. It was his voice, though, that had her step out of the flow and stop. Like treacle toffee. Quite well-spoken. Edinburgh, aye, but with a trace of somewhere else altogether. Ireland?

‘Will you not spare a halfpenny?’

No, not Irish.

By Iza’s side, Margaret dug in her pocket and dropped a coin into his pail.

‘Thank you. Much appreciated.’ Margaret got treated to a broad smile.

Highlander? No. As Iza stuffed the handbill in her pocket the lad eyed her expectantly.

‘Ah haven’t got any money,’ Iza said, wishing she had.

‘Pity. Never mind. Will you not read the handbill?’

When he looked down at her she held his gaze for a moment before muttering ‘Later.’ As she hurried to catch up with Margaret she felt his eyes soak into her back, through her jacket and blouse and onto her skin, like sun or like frost. She glanced over her shoulder. A few loping strides and he was by her side, close enough for her to get a whiff of spicy tobacco and Coco Castile soap.

‘Two Fife miners are in town. They’ll be in Jim Connolly’s cobbler shop in Buccleuch Street this evening. That’s where I’m taking this.’ He jingled his pail.

‘How much did you get?’ Iza took a keek.

‘A fair bit. Come and help count it.’

The cheek of him. ‘No thanks,’ she smiled.

‘Come and hear about the miners’ dispute. Months on strike for a living wage.’

Margaret had walked ahead but stayed within earshot. Now she stopped. ‘I’ll tell me dad about it,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘He’ll want to know.’ She clasped Iza’s arm.

‘I hear there’s a dispute brewing in your works?’ the lad called after them.

Iza stayed her step. Though female comps couldn’t help but get wind of a dispute in the offing, and earlier in the week Iza had got just that, she knew little or nothing of the matter. That didn’t mean, though, that it didn’t concern her. It did. And it concerned her all the more now this lad wanted to talk of it. But disputes were men’s affair. With a wee glance over her shoulder and a hint of a smile she let Margaret lead her off.

It was a dry evening. Nights starting to draw in and a wee nip in the air. Deep pink streaks of cloud slid over tenement roofs. The morning’s fresh wind had dropped, but the tail end of it still hung about in side streets to slap cheeks and swirl skirts. Causewayside was thick with folk leaving off work. The haberdasher had shut up shop and the greengrocer was lugging boxes inside, but the tobacconist and chemist had lit their lamps. As usual, a fair few men peeled off from the homeward tramp to disappear into the brown fug of pubs.

Iza dragged her feet, in no hurry to be home, but Margaret tugged her along. She’d be set, Iza knew, on seeing to her dad’s tea. Just the two of them in their house, Margaret’s mother having died giving birth to her, the firstborn. ‘Me mam’s buried down south.’ Margaret had gazed into a distant south when she’d told Iza that. Her dad had brought her up to Edinburgh from England, from Preston, when she was eight and that’s why she said ‘me mam’ and ‘me dad’, a strange sound that to Iza’s ears carried a deep affection. Turned eighteen, Margaret was nearly two years older than Iza, but whereas Iza had started straight from school at thirteen, Margaret had worked in the ticket office at the Caledonian Railway Station before getting a start in the caseroom two years back. The pair of them had chummed up soon after Margaret started and these past two year had sat together on a crate in the yard at dinnertime on fine days and chummed each other home of an evening.

After Margaret waved her cheerio, Iza dithered. Just a single red streak in a sky turned deep smoky grey and streets were emptying now, the stream of folk pouring into stair doors thinning to a trickle. An oily tang from fishwives’ baskets of herring and mackerel had a pair of scavenging gulls squabbling in a gutter already pecked clean. Staring along a gully between tenements at the blackening outline of Salisbury Crags, Iza pictured herself back home, in a room bulging with big brothers wanting their tea and her sister Violet and mother busy seeing to it while their dad coughed his lungs up or, worse, took to his bed sick and silent. Iza would get told to make herself useful then get bustled out of the way by a Violet going on all the while about the latest hairdos and fashions, which was fine if you’d got lovely copper waves and a shapely figure like Violet’s, but not so fine when you’d been landed with fair wisps stuck atop a fencepost with a couple of dabs of poorly risen dough. That’d leave Iza to help William with his homework, which would have suited her fine had William not stopped accepting her help, had given up on homework altogether if truth be told.

Poor William. He hated school. Iza hadn’t much liked it herself, but she’d been better equipped to withstand sarcasm and tedium than William seemed to be. He was losing interest, too, in stories she’d tell him when she was working on something good, like these Slav fairy tales. He’d been all ears at the lion who knew every hidden and secret thing in the tale of the twelve huntsmen, though when she resorted to making it up because she’d been too busy setting type to take in the sense he’d lost interest. Sometimes, though, he himself would make it up and, for the most part, she was glad he was a better storyteller than she was. These days William occupied himself drawing comic book stories. ‘Och,’ she muttered. She’d forgotten to bring the scrap paper he’d been asking for. A cab clipping by had her jump to the pavement. A gust of wind whipped at her skirt. She shivered. She wanted … she wanted something.

On the main road, a motor car’s roar drowned out for a moment the clip of hooves and rattle of cabs and carts. Still dawdling, going the long way round, Iza took a cursory interest in enamel jugs and stacked cans of corned beef, anything on show in shop windows. A shutter banged. Two dogs snarled over scraps. She paused at a newsagent’s billboards to read headlines: Mine owners stand firm; Canonmills cooper crushed; Battle of Yalu River. Yalu River? Where’s that when it’s at home? Further along a display of hats caught her eye. Quite fetching, that brown one with the yellow ribbon. Could she afford it? Probably not. What were fetching hats to her anyhow? As quick as she questioned herself, the answer came to her. Though you’d not want to be making a song and dance about it like Violet, there was nothing wrong with looking nice. And the morn was Saturday. Pay day. More than pay day. Much more. The morn’s morn she’d get her first time-served pay packet.

Her eyes glazed as her mind drifted back to knock-off time last Saturday when the women comps had performed a mock version of the men’s time-served ritual for her, parading the caseroom chanting the Cuz’s Anthem – but skipping straight from caca ceecee ca cee ci co cu to zaza zeezee za zee zi zo zu rather than going through the whole rigmarole – and taking a not-so-formal vote to put Iza’s one-and-sixpence donation towards an evening at the Gaiety music hall rather than the men’s Saturday afternoon downing of buckets of beer and whisky. Back home that day she’d announced to her mother she was time-served, a journeyman. ‘How much more will you be getting?’ her mother had asked, wiping floury hands on her pinnie before stretching out a spread palm for the pay packet.

‘That’s not the point,’ Iza had said.

‘Would you hark at her ladyship. What’s the bloody point then, pray tell?’

Iza had held her tongue.

Holding her hands up to inspect stained nicks and dents made by three years of clasping a setting stick and plucking type, Iza frowned. Not that she minded work-worn hands. Quite the reverse. She wanted to show them off, to tell someone she was time-served, someone who’d say, ‘Well, fancy that. A compositor! Good for you, hen.’ And if that someone wasn’t in the print trade, they’d ask, ‘What is that about? What do you have to do?’ And she’d tell them, though she’d mind not to go on about descenders and pica breviers and overrunning matter. She bit her lip at the thought of a childhood chum’s nose wrinkling like she’d stood in dog dirt when, in the street the other Sunday, Iza had launched into an account of her work. The lassie had soon interrupted to talk about a lad who’d walked her home from the dancing, then she’d gone waltzing off across the road trilling, ‘Yes, I’m just about the cut for Bel-gra-via’.

‘Daft place to stand gawping.’

Someone bumping into Iza jolted her back to the here-and-now.

‘Sorry. Ah was miles away,’ she said as she turned, to find herself face-to-face with Rab.

‘Best place for you.’

‘Aye. Miles away from you,’ she batted back. But then, finding herself wanting company, even Rab’s company, she changed her tune. ‘Where’re you off to?’ she asked as though she cared.

Since her early days in the caseroom the pair of them had settled into a hostile silence, skirting round or avoiding each other, though when Rab read out letters on the scourge of female labour from his union journal, addressing another family member or the wall, he spoke for her ears.

‘The library.’

‘Have you been home?’

‘Aye. Had to get mah own tea. No-one in. Only wee William.’ Rab, too, seemed to want company. Even her company.

‘Can ah come?’ she said. When Rab glowered at her she kicked herself for giving him the opening.

While she’d been dithering, the street’s clatter had dropped and black dye had soaked into the sky. Rab looked ghostly pale as he peered at her over his specs. ‘It’s not for lassies,’ he said, his scrawny ginger moustache twitching. ‘Lassies don’t go.’

‘Ah thought it was for tradesmen?’

‘Aye.’

‘Well ah’m one. Me and mah work chums. That’s what we are.’

‘So you’re a man now, are you?’

‘No, but ah’m just as good as.’ She said it, but it came out squeaky.

Rab stiffened. Iza could see him stepping onto his high horse, but he bit his lip, humphed, gave her a scunnered look. ‘Och, come on then,’ he said. ‘They’ll not like it though. There’s no girruls in there.’

‘There will be in a minute,’ she muttered. She knew what he was up to. He was going to show her, teach her a lesson, let her see for herself just how out-of-place she was. Thought of her wee brother William at home alone, a strange state of affairs, had her look back for a moment, but she hurried after Rab. She’d eyed the Mechanics Library and wanted to get a look in there but had never got up the nerve. Now she was time-served, why on earth shouldn’t she? This she told herself, but it didn’t wash right through. If she were honest, she’d been feart to go in there on her own.

‘How’s things at Parkside?’ she said when she caught up, putting on an airy tone, like she was passing the time of day with a normal human being.

When Rab didn’t deign to answer, she persisted. Softening her tone, she asked what job he was working on. This, a question likely to hook a response from any comp, he ignored, but when she asked if he thought she should join the Warehousemen and Cutters trade union he slowed his pace and, scratching his chin, said it’d be worth finding out what they paid in benefits, what they gave out for dowries, totting up your contributions for say, three or four year, see if you’d be quids in when you left to wed.

‘Their representative came round our frames asking us to join. There’s a meeting in the warehouse the morn.’ Thinking aloud, Iza found herself asking for more of Rab’s opinion.

‘Go then.’

‘But their union’s for unskilled workers like the machine feeder and bindery girruls.’

‘Don’t go then. Don’t join. What are you asking me for anyhow? You well know what ah think and you never bloody listen.’ Rab sheered off up a short flight of broad stone steps.