On my first day in the case room a fellow apprentice compositor had spilled a case of 9 point Palace Script. The letters lay in a big pile. The foreman called me over. ‘It could happen to a bishop’, he said gleefully. He dismissed the other apprentice and turned to me. ‘Now I want you to pick up the letters one by one and put them in your compositor’s stick. Then I want you to put back in the case each letter in the right place. I’ll check back on you tomorrow or the next day’, he giggled. The small ornate letters were hard to make out. The heavens had given him an opportunity to break me in and take my place with the others who were in for the long haul. He was a diminutive man and we had clashed earlier when he was leading me down the long corridor to the case room. He said ‘you’re too tall for your age’. I replied, ‘maybe you’re too small for your age’.

fallen silent
ensnared in letters –
the forty year pension

‘I won’t be in today, my mother died last night’. There was no grieving. Feelings were buried. We just got on with things. I wore a black badge on my sleeve to show I was in mourning. My eldest sister took over cooking the dinners. One lunch time I went back to the empty house. There was nothing to eat, just an onion. I ate the onion and went back to work. One of the older men came up to me. The smell of onion hit him. He recoiled. I was embarrassed. I said I was eating onion flavoured chewing gum. He called over the other men to get a whiff. They laughed at the idea of onion flavoured chewing gum. I insisted. I didn’t want them to know there was no food at home.

at night I searched
every hidden place-
I could find nothing

Gerry McDonnell