At the age of seventeen

At the age of seventeen, three years later than her sisters, my mother  was sent as an apprentice to work in this large draper's shop. At Daniels mother was put into the millinery and there father saw her. He saw her fair hair. She looked - he told me - like a goddess in her mutton-chop sleeves and so desireble with her tiny waist. ('Eighteen inches', she would put in). She was so quick with the costumers, he said, so clever with trimmings! She could put an ugly hat on a grumbling woman, give a twist, snatch a feather or a bunch of cherries and so dazzle the customer with chatter and her smiles.
 As for my father, Mother was astonished by him.
 'He was so clean, dear. You never saw anything so clean.' The poorly paid assistant fed in the basement, slept in the attics and went out to get drunk when the shop closed.
'Eight to eight, weekdays, eleven o'clock Saturday nights'
Mother would say. 'Old Daniels was a beast'
They worked in the cold draughts  and the poisonous headaching smell of the gaslight.
'So clean' my mother would go on 'and so particular about his clothes - you know your father. Always the silk hat and the spats. He might have got some bad girl if he hadn't had me.'
 She was in awe of him; he kept his nails perfect and there was a pleasant smell of Pear's soap about him and his teeth were white. He cleaned them - as his mother did- with soot or salt.
 At this period my father - who was eventually to become very fat indeed, going up to eighteen stone in his time - was a slender young man. He looked grave, his fine brown eyes seemed to burn, and he could change from the effusive to the canny hard look of the brisk young Yorkshireman out for the 'brass' there was sometimes a hollow-eyed and haunted look on his face. The fact is what he told me my dumbstruck mother when they talked together - he had had a wretched childhood. My grandfather, so benevolent to me , had been a harsh, indeed a savage, father.
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

It was easy to become a preacher in those days

It was easy to become a preacher in those days; gospel halls and missions were everywhere; the greater the number of sects, the greater the opportunities for argument, Soon he was at it in the evenings, after he had put down the hod. Yet to have got religion would not have been enough. I think that what impelled and gave him a rough distinction was his commanding manner and the knowledge that he had a fine voice. He was a good singer, he loved the precise utterance of words. He loved language. All we ever knew was that a pious spinster lady in Kirbymoorside, heard of him and was impressed by his militant looks,his strenght and his voice. She got him off the builder's ladder and arranged hor him to be sent to a theological college in Nottingham.
But the flesh - and ambition- were as strong as the spirit in grandfather. He was courting the tailor's daughter and perhaps as a commomn workman he would not have get her. So at nineteen or twenty, on his prospects, he married her and went off with her to Nottingham as a student, and in a year was a father. He had only a small grant to live on. He got odd jobs. He told me he learned his Latin , Greek and Hebrew travelling on the Nottingham trams. He saved pennies, for it was part of the arrangement that he should pay back the cost of his education at so much a year in five years. My father had unhappy memories of a hungry chilhood, and one of great severity. But once his training was over grandfather triumphed. At twenty-two - the family legend is - he 'filled the Free Trade Hall i Manchester' with his harsh, denouncing sermons.
 Why was it , then, that after his success he was to be found in Bradford and then - getting smaller and smaller - in the little towns of the moos and the fells? It may have been that all his energy had been spent in getting out the working class and becoming a middle-class man.

Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

My grandmother has always lived in small Yorkshire towns or villages

My grandmother  has always lived in small Yorkshire towns or villages. Her maiden name was Sawdon and she came from a place of that name near the moors inland from Whitby; it is a purely Scandinavian part of England - and she was the youngest, prettiest and most exacting of three daughters of a tailor in Kirbymoorside, in the godly Pickering valley near by. My fatherwas born there and spoke of seeing the old man sitting crosslegged and sewing on the table on the window of his shop. Grandma was vain of her clothes and her figure. She usually wore a dark blue-and-white spotted dress. She had pale blue eyes deeply insent, a babyish and avid look,  and the drooping little mouth of a spoiled child. Her passion for her husband and her two sons was absolute; she thought of nothing else and me she pampered. With outsiders she was permanent 'right vexed' or 'disgusted'
Her 'Willyum', my grandfather, was let out of her sight as little as possible. The minister had the hard northern vanity also, but differed from hers. He was a shortish, stout, hard-bellied, and muscular man with a strong frightening face, iron-grey hair and looked like a sergeant major who did not drink. He was a man of authority with a deep, sarcastic voice used to command. When I was a child I had the impression that e was God and the Ten Commandments bound together by his dog-collar. He was proud of his life story..
 Gradually I learned that he was the youngest son of a fishing family in Hull _ his father was a trawler seaman - and that all his brothers had been drowned between Hul and Dogger Bank. His mother had picked him up and taken him inland to Bradford , away from ships, and had brought him up there in great poverty. He had known what it was to 'clem'. He grew up and worked  on the roads for a time; the ran off and joined the army, (this would had been in the sixties) and since only the hungry or the riff raff did this, he must been in a poor way. he chose the artillery. This lead to an event of which he boasted.
One day when his battery was stationed outside some seaside place, I believe on the Mersey. They were at artillery target practice, firing out to sea, and the safety of passing vessels was regulated by a flag signal. It is quite in my grandfather's character that he fired his gun when the flag was up and contrary to orders and sent what he used to tell me was a 'cannon ball' through the mainsail of a passng pleasure yacht. The yacht, of course, belonged to a rich man who made a fuss and my grandfather was arrested and court-martialled. He was dismissed from the Army
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

In these sudden crisis of our lives

In these sudden crisis of our lives when I went off with my father to Yorkshire, my mother sometimes took mu brother Cyril to her sister's at Ipswich ans left him there. When the two of us met again we would be astonished to see how long our legs had got and scarcely recognized each other's voices. Nine had the hard Yorkshire strain, he had the softer, politer voice of the south. Unlike myself ha was an affectionate boy and he observed more of the true situation in our home than I did. He was an easy victim and he early became a very bad stammerer. this vanished at our Aunt's house where he was the little gentleman, used to the drawing room, to servants and Edwardian niceties. When he came back to our rough and tumble, the sight of a table no properly laid and of rooms ill-furnished and knocked about by our life, made him nervous and upset. He taked in careful and elderly way at the time
 But now we were both leaving York for Ipswich in our own. The train ran through the empty landscape of the Fens lying under the wide skies that had moved the Norwich painters.We saw powerful Ely cathedral on its hill in that flat land and were in sweetly rolling East Anglia, the country of large village churches, monastic building and pretty white pargeted and timbered houses, some of the loveliest things in England. This region had once been rich when England's great wealth was in wool and before the water power and steam engine of the north had captured the trade a century before. Strange names like Eye and March excited me. I had read Hereward the Wake and knew of fanes and that 'silly Sufolk?meant holy Suffolk.
 I saw the reason for my brother's distinction when we got out at Ipswich station. We were met by a tall man of fifty who had a domed head like a large pink egg, fluffy white hair and a short white beard. He looked like a pious ram. Perhaps those mild blue eyes and red wet lips were rougish - as my mother often blurted out in cheery way -burt he had a slow considerate manner and the voice had the straying educated bleat.
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

Our journey to the Manse at Repton is miserable

Our journey to the Manse at Repton is miserable. Love in a little shop have been - and remained for life - my mother's ideal. Now, though a cheeky Cokney girl, she was wretched, frightened and ashamed. (' We never owed a penny; up the girls were brought up straight') Sha was a slight and tiny fair-haierd young woman with a sulky seductive look. In the train a salior pi
ulled oof ajack knife and tossed it about: she called the guard. The sailor said he was only doing it to stop the baby crying. The arrival at the Manse was awful. My grandmother was confirmed on her opinion- she had given it bluntly and within earshot, when my father had first taken my mother there, wearing her London clothes -that her favourite son had been trapped and ruined by a common shop-girl of whom she said:
'I lay she's nowt but a London harlot'
She said she'd take the baby.
'She tried to snatch you away from me, Vic dear, and said, she'd bring you up herself,' my mother often told me.
Mary Helen, my father's mother, was a great one for coveting a dress, a brooch, a ring, a bag even a baby from any woman.
As for choice of words - this bonnie little white-haired woman with a smile that glistered sweetly like the icing of one of her fancy cakes, fed her mind on love stories in the religious weeklies and the language of fornication, adultery, harlotry and concubinage taken from the Bible, sharpened by the blunt talk of the Yorkshire villages. Harlots was her general name for the women of her husband's congregations who bought new hats. The old lady assumed that my mother, like any other country girl, had come to leave me and would return next day to London to take up her profession again.
In the early years of my boyhood I spent long periods at the Manse. I have little memory of Repton,beyond the large stone pantry smelling of my grandmother's bread and the pans of milk; and of the grating over the cellarwhere my grand father used to growl up at me from the damp, saying in his enormous and enjoyable voice:
'I'm the grisly bear'
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

On my birth certificate my father's trade is written 'Stationary (master)'

On my birth certificate my father's trade is written 'Stationary (master)'. An ambitious young man, he had given up his job as a shop assistant in Kentish town and had opened a small newsagents and stationery in the Rushmere district of Ipswich. He did not know the city and had gone there because he thought he had a superb 'opening'. He did not know the trade but he had found 'premises'- a word that was sacramental to him all his life. He spoke of 'premises' as others speak of the New Jerusalem. He had no capital. He was only twenty-two; the venture was modest, almost pastoral; but he had smelled the Edwardian boom ant it enlarged a flaw that had - I've been told- even then become noticeable  in this character. one of nature's salesmen, he was more one of nature's buyer. He looked at the measly little shop, stripped it and put in counters, cabinets and shelves('You know your father, dear'). The suspicious Suffolk folk hated this modern splash and saw he had spent so much on fittings that he had nothing left to stock. the bright little shop stood out as a warning to all in a crafty neighbourhood. Few customers came. The new painting smelled of sin to them. At the age of twenty-two my young father was affronted and flabbergasted to find after a few months that he was bankrupt, or if not legally bankrupt, penniless and pursued.
 There a picture of him a year or two before this time. he is thin, jaunty, with thick oily black hair, a waxed moustache and eyes caught between a harsh, brash stare and a twinkle. He would be quick to take apencil out and snap down your order. He wears a watch and chain. not for long: he will soon pawn them - as he had done before -and my mother's engagement ring too, escape from the premises, put her into those rooms over the toy shop. once I was born, the young Micawber pack us to his father's Manse in Yorkshire, while he goes indignantlyback to London to get a 'berth'. The fact that he has gonebust means nothing to him at all. He goes to the nearest Wesleyian Church - for he had already left the Congrecionalist - and sings his debts away in a few stentorian hymns. And so I, dressed in silk finery and wrapped in a white shawl, go screaming up to Yorkshire to meet my forbears.
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

In our family, as far as are concerned

In our family, as far as are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth. Go back two generations and the names and lives of our forbears vanish into the common grass. All we could get out of mother was that her grandfather vanish into the common grass. All we could get out of mother was that her grandfather had once taken a horse to Dublin; and sometimes in my father's expansive stories, his grandfather had owned trawlers in Hull, but when an abashed regard for fact, uncommon in my father, touched him in the eighties, he told us that his ancestor, a decayed seaman, was last seen gutting herrings at a bench in the fishmarket of that city. The only certainty is that I come from a set of storytellers and moralists and that neither party cared much for the precise. The story tellers were for ever changing the tale and the moralist tampering with it in order to put it in an edifying light. On my mother's side they were all pagans, and she a rootless London pagan, a fog worshipper, brought up on the folk-lore of the North London streets; on my father's side they were harsh, lonely, God-ridden sea or country men, who had been settled along the Yorkshire coasts or among its moors and fells for hundreds of years. There is enough in the differences between North and South to explain the battles and uncertainties of a lifetime. 'How I got into you lot, I don't know,' my mother used to say on and off all her life, looking at us with fear, as if my father and not herself has given birth yo us, She was there , she conveyed, because she had been captured. It made her unbelieving and sly.

A good many shots must have been fired during the courtship of my parents and many more when I was born in lodgings over a toy shop in the middle of Ipswich at the end of 1900. Why Ipswich? My parents had no connexion with the town. The moment could not have been worse. Queen Victoria was dying and my mother, young and cheerful though she was, identified herself, as the decent London poor do, with all the females of the Royal Family, especially with their pregnancies and funerals. She was a natural Victorian; the past with all its sadness meant more to her than the hopes of the new century.

Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

Lloyd and Werner looked back into the auditorium.

Seeing the women safe, Lloyd and Werner looked back into the auditorium.

Volodya was fighting the big man bravely, but he was in trouble. He kept punching the man face and body, but his blows had little effect, and the man shook his head as if pestered by an insect. The Brownshirt was heavy-footed and slowmoving but he hit Volodya in the chest and then the head, and Volodya staggered . The big man drew back his fist for a massive punch. Lloyd was afraid it could kill Volodya.

Then Walter took a flying leap off the stage and landed on the big man's back. Llyod wanted to cheer. They fell to the floor in a blur of arms and legs, and Volodya was saved for the moment.

The spotty youth who had shoved Werner was now harassing the people trying to leave, hitting their backs and heads with his truncheon. 'You fucking coward!' Lloyd yelled, stepping forward. But Werner was ahead of him. He shoved past Lloyd and grabbed the truncheon, trying to wrestle it away from the youth.

The older man in the steel helmet joined in and hit Werner with a pickaxe handle. Lloid stepped forward and hit the older man with a straight right.The blow landed ,perfectly, next to the man's left eye.

But he was a war veteran and not easily discouraged. He swung around and lashed out at Lloyd with his club. Lloyd dodged the blow easily and hit him twice more. He connected in the same area, around the man eye's, breaking the skin. But the helmet protected the man's head and Lloyd could not land a left hook, his knockout punch. He ducked a swing of the pickaxe handle and hit the man's face again, and the man backed away, blood pouring from cuts around his eyes.
Lloyd looked around. He saw that the Social Democrats were fighting back now, and he got a jolt of savage pleasure. Most of the audience had passed through the doors, leaving mainly young men in the auditorium, and they were coming forward, clambering over the theatre seats to get at the Brownshirts; and there were dozens of them.

Something hard struck his head from behind. It was so painful that he roared . He turned to see a boy of his own age holding a length of timber, raising it to strike again. Lloyd closed with him and hit him hard in the stomach twice, first with his right fist then with his left. The boy gasped for breath and dropped the wood. Lloyd hit him wit an uppercut to the chin and the boy passed out.

Llyod rubbed the back of his head. It hurt like hell but there was no blood.

The skin on his knuckles was raw and bleeding, he saw. He bent down and picked up the length of timber dropped by the boy.

The big man who had started it all was on the floor, groaning and holding his knee as if he had dislocated something. Wilhem Frunze stood over him, hitting him with a wooden shovel again and again, repeating at the top of his voice the words the man ha used to start the riot . 'N ot! Wanted ! In!Germany! Helpless, the big man tried to roll away from the blows, but Frunze went after him, until two more Brownshirts grabbed the man's arms and dragged him away-

Frunze let them go.

Did we beat them? Lloyd thought with growing exultation.
Maybe we did!

Several of the younger men chased their opponents up on to the stage, but they stopped there and contented themselves with shooting insults as the Brownshirts disappeared.

Lloid looked at the others. Volodya had a swollen face and one closed eye. Werner`s jacket was ripped, a big square of cloth dangling. Walter was sitting on a front-rowseat, breathing hard and rubbing his elbow, but he was smiling, sailing it across the rows of empty seats to the back.

Werner, who was only fourteen, was exultant. 'We gave them hell,didn't we?'

Lloyd grinned.'Yes. We certainly did-'

Pg 42 From the book “Winter of the world” by Ken Follet

Robert resembled Walter

Robert resembled Walter, but was more fussily dressed, with a gold pin in his tie, seals on his watch chain, and heavily slicked hair. Jörg was younger, a blond man with delicate features and a cheerful smile. The two had been prisoners of war together in Russia, Now they lived in an apartment over the restaurant.

They reminisced about the wedding of Walter and Maud, held in great secrecy on the eve of the war. There had not been guests, but Robert and Ethel had been best man and bridesmaid. Ethel said: “We had champagne at the hotel, then I tactfully said that Robert and I would leave, and Walter - “ She suppressed a fit of giggles - “Walter said: “Oh, I assumed we would all have dinner together.”

Maud chuckled. “You can imagine how pleased I was about that!”

Lloyd looked into his coffee, feeling embarrassed. He was eighteen and a virgin, and honeymoon jokes made him uncomfortable.

More sombrely, Ethel asked Maud : “Do you ever hear from Fritz these days?”

Lloyd knew that the secret wedding had caused a terrible rift between Maud and her brother, Earl Fitzherbert. Fitz had disowned her because she had not gone to him, as head of the family, and asked his permission to marry.

Pg 26 From the book “Winter of the world” by Ken Follet

Lloyd Williams found a boxing club in Berlin

Lloyd Williams found a boxing club in Berlin where he could do an hour's training for a few pennies. It was in a working class district called Wedding, north of the city center. He exercised with the Indian clubs and the medicine ball, skipped rope, hit the punch bag, and then put on a helmet and did five rounds in the ring. The club coach found him a sparring partner, a German his own age and size – Lloyd was a welterweight. The German boy had a nice fast jab that came from nowhere and hurt Lloyd several times, until Lloyd hit him with a left hook and knocked him down.

Lloyd had been raised in a rough neighborhood, the East End of London. At the age of twelve he had been bullied at school. 'Same thing happened to me,' his stepfather, Bernie Leckwith , had said. 'Cleverest boy in school, and you get picked on by the class shlamer.' Dad was Jewish – his mother had spoken only Yiddish. He had taken Lloyd to the Aldgate Boxing Club. Ethel had been against it, but Bernie had overruled her, something that did no t happen often.

Lloyd had learned to move fast and punch hard, and the bullying had stopped. He had also got the broken nose that made him look less of a pretty boy. And he had discovered a talent. He had quick reflexes and a combative streak, and he had won prizes in the ring. The coach was disappointed that he wanted to go to Cambridge University instead of turning professional.

He showered and put his suit back on, then went to a workingmen bar, bought a glass of draft beer, and sat down to write to his half-sister, Millie, about the incident with the Brownshirts. Millie was envious of him taking this trip with their mother, and he had promised to send her frequent bulletins.

Lloyd had been shaken by this morning 's fracas. Politics was part of everyday life for him: his mother had been a Member of Parliament, his father was local councilor in London, and he himself was London Chairman of the Labour League of Youth. But it had always been a matter of debating and voting – until today. He had never before seen an office thrashed by uniformed thugs while the police looked on smiling. It was the politics with the gloves off, and it had shocked him.

'Could this happen in London ? He wrote. His first instinct was to think that it could not. But Hitler had admirers among British industrialists and newspapers proprietors. Only a few months ago the rogue MP Sir Osvald Mosley had started the British Union of Fascists. Like the Nazis, they had to strut up and down in military-style uniforms. What next?

He finished his letter and folded it, then caught the S-train back into the city center. He and his mother were going to meet Walter and Maud von Ulrich for dinner. Lloyd had been hearing about Maud all his life. She and his mother were unlikely friends. Ethel had started her working life as a maid in a grand house owned by Maud's family. Later they had been suffragettes together, campaigning for votes for women. During the war they had produced a feminist newspaper. The sodier's wife. Then they had quarreled over political tactics and become estranged.

Pg 23 From the book “Winter of the world” by Ken Follet

Eleanora Cohen

Eleanora Cohen came into this world on a Thursday, late in the summer of 1877. Those who rose early that morning would recall noticing a flock of purple-and-white hoopoes circling above the harbor, looping and darting about as if in an attempt to mend a tear in the firmament. Whether or nor they were successful, the bird eventually slowed their swoop and settled in around the city, on the steps of the courthouse, the red tile roof of the Constanta Hotel, and the bell tower atop St Basil's Academy. They roosted in the lantern room of the lighthouse, the octagonal stone minaret of the mosque, and the forward deck of a steamer coughing puffs of smoke into an otherwise clear horizon. Hoopoes coated the town like frosting, piped in along the rain gutters of the governor's mansion and slathered on the gilt dome of the Orthodox church. In the trees around Yakob and Leah Cohen's house the flock seemed especially excited, chattering, flapping their wings, and hopping from branch to branch like a crowd of peasants lining the streets of the capital for an imperial parade. The hoopoes would probably have been regarded as an auspicious sign, were it not for the unfortunate events that coincided with Eleanora' birth.

Early this morning, the Third Division of Tsar Alexander II's Royal Cavalry rode in from the north and assembled on a hilltop overlooking the town.

Laid out bellow them like a feast, Constanta had been left almost entirely without defenses

From the book “The Oracle of Stambul” by Michael David Lukas

Do you think journalists should write respectfully about politicians?

Ritter drove on, following the south bank of the Landwehr Canal. Carla looked at the barges, their loads of coal topped with snow like mountains. She felt a sense of disappointment. She had contrived to spend longer with Werner, by hinting that she wanted a lift, then she had wasted the time talking about ice hockey.

What would she have liked to have talked to him about? She did not know.

Herr Franck said to Mother: 'I read your column in The Democrat'.

'I hope you enjoyed it'

'I was sorry to see you writing disrespectfully about our chancellor.'

'Do you think journalists should write respectfully about politicians? Mother replied cheerfully. 'That's radical. The Nazi press would have to be polite about my husband! They wouldn't like that.'

'Not all the politicians, obviously.' Franck said irritably.

They crossed the teeming junction pf Postdammer Platz. Cars and trams vied with horse-drawn carts and pedestrians in a chaotic melee.

 From the book “Winter of the world” by Ken Follet

The meadow was flooded with spring light and dotted with flower-seas

The meadow was flooded with spring light and dotted with flower-seas Alexander ran across it.

Half naked and barefoot, he moved quickly against the wind that blew through his hair and brought with it a slight smell of sea pray.

Peritas was running alongside, checking his pace so as not to overtake his master and lose him. Now and again he barked to attract Alexander's attention and the Prince turned towards the dog and smiled , but without stopping.

It was one of those moments in which Alexander gave free rein to his spirit, in which he flew like a bird, galloped like a steed. It was then that his ambiguous and mysterious centaur- like nature – violent and sensitive, dark and sunny at one at the same time – seemed to find expression in harmonious movement, in a sort of initiatory dance under the shinning light of the sun or in the sudden shade of a cloud.

With which each stride his sculptured body first contracted and then extended in a long movement, his golden hair bounced soft and bright on his back like a mane, and his graceful arms accompanied the rise and fall of his chest in the brisk labour of his running.

Philip watched him in silence, sitting immobile on horseback at the edge of the wood. Then when he realized they were close now and heard the dog's barking suddenly on spotting him, he spurred on his steed and came alongside his son, waving his hand, smiling even, but without stopping him, enchanted as he was by the power of that running and the wonder of those indefatigable limbs.

Alexander stopped on the bank of a small river and dived into the water. Philip dismounted and waited for him. The boy leaped out of the stream together with the dog and they both shook the water from their bodies. Philip embraced his son hard and left Alexander's equally strong grip – tangible proof that his child had become a man.

'I have come to collect you,' he said. 'We're going home.'

Alexander looked at him in disbelief. 'Is that the King's word?'

'The king's word,' assured Philip. 'But the day will come when you will remember this period of your life with regret for its ever having come to and end. I never had such fortune; I had no songs, nor poetry, nor wise lecturers. And this is why I am so tired, son, for this is why my years weigh so heavily on me.'

Alexander said nothing and they walked together through the meadow, towards the house: the young man followed by his dog, the father holding his horse by its bridle.

Suddenly, from behind a hill that hid the view of the Mieza, there came the sound of a horse neighing. It was an acute, penetrating sound, a powerful call like that of a wild beast, or a chemical creature. And then there come the sound of men shouting, calling and powerful hooves all shod with bronze that made the earth tremble.

The neighing came again, more acute and angrier this time. Philip turned towards his son and said, ' I have brought you a present.'

They reached the top of the hill and Alexander stopped in amazement: below, there before him, a black stallion reared up onto his hind legs, shining with sweat like a bronze statue under the rain, held by five men with ropes and bridles in their hands, all trying to keep the animal's formidable power under control.

From the book: Alexander: Child of A Dream. By Valerio Massino Manfredi. Translated by Iain Halliday

There were a dozen piles of the heavy metal bars

There were a dozen piles of the heavy metal bars. They had been stacked too high, or perhaps there was an irregularity in one of the rows, Rob was enjoying the glean of the sun on the wet metal when the driver of a dray, with loud commands and a cracking of his whip and tugging on his reins, backed his dirty horses too far and too fast, so that the rear of the heavy wagon hit the pile with a thud.

Rob long had vowed that his boys would not play on the docks. He hated drays. Never did he see one but that he thought of his brother Samuel being crashed to death under the wheels of a freight wagon. Now he watched in horror as another accident occurred.

The iron bar at the top was jarred forward, so that it teetered at the edge and the began to slide over the lip of a pile, followed by two more.

There was a shouted cry of warning and a desperate human scattering, but two of the slaves had others in front of them. They fell as they scrabbled, so that the full weight of one of the pigs of iron came down on one of them, crushing life from him in an instant.

One end of another pig slammed down on the other man's lower right leg, and his screaming incited rob to action.

'Here, get it off them. Quickly and carefully, now! He said and half a dozen slaves lifted the iron bars from the two men.

He had them moved well away from the pile of iron. A single glance was all that was necessary to ascertain that the man who had taken the full brunt was dead. His chest was crushed and he had been throttled by a broken windpipe, so his face already was dark and engorged.

The other slave no longer was screaming, having fainted when he was moved. It was just as well; his foot and ankle were fearsomely mangled and Rob could do nothing to restore them. He dispatched a slave to his house to fetch his surgical kit from Mary, and while the wounded man was unconscious he incised the healthy skin above the injury and began to flay it back to make a flap, and then to slice through meat and muscle.

Form the man arose a personal stink that made Rob nervous and afraid, the stench of a human animal who had sweated in toil again and again until his unwashed rags had absorbed his rotten smell and compounded it and made it almost a tangible part of him like his shaven slave's head or the foot Rob was in the process of removing. It caused Rob to remember the two similarity stinking stevedore slaves who had carried Dad home from his job on the docks, home to die

From the book “The physician” by Noah Gordon.

These were Rob J's last safe and secure moments of blessed innocence,

These were Rob J's last safe and secure moments of blessed innocence, but in his ignorance he considered it hardship to be forced to remain near his father's house with his brothers and his sister. This early in the spring, the sun rode low enough to send warm licks under the eaves of the thatched roof , and he sprawled on the rough stone stoop outside the front door, enjoying the cosiness. A woman was picking her way over the broken surface of Carpenter's Street. The street needed repair, as did most of the small frame working men houses thrown up carelessly by skilled artisans who earned their living erecting solid homes for those richer and more fortunate.

He was shelling a basket of early peas and trying to keep his eyes on the younger children, his responsibility when Mum was away. William Stewart, six, and Anne Mary, four, were grubbing in the dirt at the side of the house and playing secret giggly games. Jonathan Carter, eighteen months old, lay on a lambskin, papped, burped and gurgling with content. Samuel Edward, who was seven, had given Rob J. The slip. Somehow crafty Samuel always managed to melt away instead of sharing work, and Rob was keeping an eye out for him, feeling wrathful. He split the green pods one after another and scraped the peas from the waxy seed-case with his thumb the way Mum did, not pausing as he noted the woman coming directly to him.

Stays in her stained bodice raised her bosom so that sometimes when she moved there was a glimpse of rouged nipple and her fleshy face was garish with cosmetics. Rob J. Was only nine years old, but a child of London knew a trollop.

'Here now. This Nathanael Cole's house?

He studied her resentfully, for it wasn't the first time tarts had come to their door seeking for his father. 'Who wants to learn?' he said roughly, glad his Da was out seeking work and she had missed him, glad his Mam was out delivering embroidery and was spared embarrassment-

'His wife needs him. She sent me.'

'What do you mean, needs him?' The competent young hands stopped shelling peas.

The whore regarded him coolly, having caught his opinion of her in his tone and manner. 'She's your mother?'

He nodded.

'She's taken labor bad. She's in Egglestan's stables close by Puddle Dock. You'd best find your father and tell him,' the woman said, and then went away.

The boy looked around desperately- 'Samuel' he shouted, but bloody Samuel was off who-knows-where, as usual, and Rob fetched William and Anne Mary from their play. 'Take care of the small ones, Willum,' he said. Then he left the house and started to run.

From the book “The physician” by Noah Gordon.

Dhan had constructed a smelting furnace

Over a shallow hole in the ground Dhan had constructed a smelting furnace, a clay wall surrounded by a thicker outer wall of rock and mud, the whole girdled with bands of sapling. It stood the height of a man's shoulders and a pace wide, tapering to a slightly narrower diameter at he top to concentrate the heat and reinforce the walls against collapse.

In this oven Dhan made wrought iron by burning alternating layers of charcoal and Persian ore, pea and nut size. Around the oven a shallow trench had been dug. Sitting on the outer lip with his feet in the trench, he operated bellows made from the hide of a whole goat, forcing precisely controlled amounts of air into the glowing mass. Above the hottest part of the fire, ore was reduced to bits of iron like drops of metal rain. They settled through the furnace and collected at the bottom in a blob-like mixture of charcoal, slag and iron, called the bloom.

Dhan had sealed a removal hole with clay that he now broke away so he could drag out the bloom, which was refined by strong hammering requiring many reheating in his forge. Most of the iron in the ore went into slag and waste, but that which was reduced made a very good grade of wrought iron. But it was soft, he explained to Rob through Harsh. The bars of Indian steel, carried from Kausambi by the elephants, were very hard. He melted several of these in a crucible and then quenched in fire. After cooling, the steel was extremely brittle and he shattered it and stacked it on pieces of the wrought iron.

Now, sweating among his anvils, tongs, chisels, punches, and hammers, the skinny Indian displayed biceps like serpents as he wedded the soft and hard metals. He forge-welded multiple layers of iron and steel, hammering as if possessed, twisting and cutting, overlapping, fording the sheet and hammering again and again , mixing his metals like a potter wedging clay or a woman kneading bread.

Watching him, Rob knew he could never learn the complexities, the variables needing subtle skills passed down long generations of Indian smiths, but he gained an understanding of the process through asking innumerable questions.

From the book “The physician” by Noah Gordon.

He went numbly out to the spring

He went numbly out to the spring with the cheese and the cider, not daring to think. When he came back into the house she was in the process of removing her gown. Best peel the wet things off,' she said, and got calmly into bed in her shift.

He removed the damp trousers and tunic and spread them on one side of the round hearth. Naked, he hastened to the bed and lay down next to her between the pelts, shivering. 'Cold'

She turned to him.'You've been colder. When I took your place in Barber's bed.'

'And I was sent to sleep on the floor, on a bitter night. Yes, that was cold.'

She turned to him. “Poor motherless child,” I kept thinking. I so wished to let you into the bed.'

'You reached down and touched my head.'

She touched his head now, smoothing his hair and pressing his face into her softness.'I have held my own sons in this bed.'She closed her eyes. Presently she eased the loose top of her shift and gave him a pendulous breast.

The living flesh in his mouth made him seem to remember a long forgotten infant warmth. He felt a prickling behind his eyelids.

Her hand took his on exploration. 'This is what you must do,'She kept her eyes closed.

A stick snapped in the hearth but went unheard. The damp fire was smoking badly.

Lightly and with patience. In circles as you¡re doing,'she said dreamily.

He threw back the cover and her shift, despite the cold.

He saw with surprise that she had thick legs. His eyes studied what his fingers had learned; her femaleness was like his dream, but now the firelight allowed him the details.

'Faster,'She would have said more but he found her lips. It was not a mother's mouth, and he noted she did something interesting with her hungry tongue.

A series of whispers guided him over her and between heavy thighs. There was no need for further instruction; instinctively he buckled and thrust.

God was a qualified carpenter, he realized, for she was a warm and slippery moving mortice and he was a fitted tenon.

Her eyes snapped open and looked straight at him. Her lips curled back from her teeth, in a strange grin and she uttered a harsh rattling from the back of her throat that would have made him think she lay dying if he hadn't heard such sounds before.

For years he had watched and heard other people making love – his father and his mother in their small and crowed house, and Barber with a long parade of doxies. He had become convinced that there had to be magic with a cunt for men to want it so. In the dark mystery of her bed, sneezing like a horse from the imperfect fire, he felt all anguish and heaviness pumping from him. Transported by the most frightening kind of joy, he discovered the vast difference between observation and participation.

From the book “The physician” by Noah Gordon.

He thought the hens were impressive creatures

He thought the hens were impressive creatures, large and buff-coloured, with unfeathered shanks and red combs, wattles, and earlobes. They made no objection when he robbed their nests of four of five white eggs every morning. 'They think you're a big bloody rooster,' Barber said

'Why don't we buy them a chanticler?'

Barber, who liked sleeping late on cold winter mornings and therefore hate crowning, merely grunted.

Rob had brown hairs on his face, not exactly a beard. Barber said only Danes shaved but he knew it wasn't true, for his father has kept his face hairless. In Barber's surgical kit was a razor and the fat man nodded grumpily when Rob asked to use it. He nicked his face, but shaving made him feel older.

The first time Barber ordered him to kill a chicken made him feel very young. Each bird stared at him out of little black beads that told him they might have grown to be friends. Finally he forced his strong fingers to clench around the nearest warm neck and, shuddering, closed his eyes. A strong convulsive twist and it was done. But the bird punished him in death, for it didn't easily relinquish its feathers, Plucking took hours, and the grizzled corpse was viewed with disdain when he handed it to Barber.

Next time a chicken was called for, Barber showed him genuine magic. He held the hen's beak open and slid a thin knife through the roof of the mouth and into the brain, The hen relaxed at once into death, releasing the feathers; they came away in great clumps at the slightest pull.

From the book “The physician” by Noah Gordon.