The Long Song (43 page)

Up from the basement comes a pressman. Filthy with ink and sweating damp as the paper he carries. He puffs and grunts the form back down four flights of stairs. Here he locks it on to the press—the Albion or the Stanhope (never the Columbian for merely proofing). And the form is inked, the paper is applied, the bed is slid, and the platen is levered down and the proof is printed.

So up the stairs to the top of the house our page now travels, within the hands of the luckless apprentice, for in the closet of the attic, under a sloping roof sit the readers. Three men usually, and the only ones within this series of dark caverns who have ink upon their hands and fingers, but have not been turned black as chimney sweeps by it. And these men scour the printed proof for error, blunder, and misspelling. By daylight or lamplight or a candle’s weak glow, these mistakes are found and marked.

Back down the stairs the paper then travels, where the compositor sighs upon the errors that must now be corrected. Then, once amended, ‘proof’ is yelled again. Three times, this printer’s round jig is danced before any form might find itself despatched to press for printing.

And then, down in the basement, the print run starts. On four sturdy iron presses—secured to the floor solid as teeth in a lion’s jaw—the pressmen, stripped to the waist, begin their work. When handling paper, a pressman’s touch can be gentle as a lady with her skirts. But once these men are printing, once they are caught in the rhythm of inking and sliding and levering, they appear like great goliaths goading a metal beast. And, above them, the readers grab their vibrating ink pots, the compositors steady their clicking letters, Linus Gray weights down his quivering papers, and the devil apprentice upon the stairs, or in a closet, or in a cupboard steadies himself as the whole house upon Water Lane begins to shake under this industry.

Thomas Kinsman mastered every procedure within this print house; he was accurate at case, strong at press and steadfast at office; but the task upon which he truly excelled beyond all other was as a reader. None queried Linus Gray’s boast that his Black Tom was the best reader in the whole of London. None, excepting for one man.

This learned man, this ‘scholar of high reputation’, upon becoming aware that the reputed reader at Gray and Co. was indeed a nigger, decided that he would do better to read his pamphlet for error himself.

‘Your negro boy,’ the scholarly man told Linus with a smile, ‘would soon be up to the ears in pumpkins and would only work on it half an hour a day.’ And he laughed heartily while continuing, ‘I make no claim upon those words, for they are in fact the wisdom of Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish man of letters, in his discourse upon the negro question.’

And fourteen errors that clever man found within his paper; fourteen mistakes upon the first proof sheet; fourteen and it took him only three days to find them. Linus gave the man’s proof to his ‘negro boy’ to read, and within less than half an hour Thomas had found sixty-nine more.

When the ‘scholar of high reputation’ called to claim his printed pamphlet, Linus summoned the eighteen-year-old Thomas to him. And Thomas Kinsman, standing straight-backed before that learned gentleman said, ‘Sir, as the philosopher John Stuart Mill so wisely deduced, if negroes had worked no more than half an hour a day, would the sugar crops have been so considerable?’

As an apprentice, Thomas Kinsman gained a knowledge of the world and the way of it that, for all his education, he had hitherto not known. For Linus Gray was a free-thinker and most of the men that ever worked for him knew it. There was a club for mutual improvement—for which Linus Gray provided the stock of books, drawing materials and papers—that was held in the basement room of a nearby house for any of his workers who wished to join. It cost sixpence to attend (three pennies extra in winter for a coal fire to be lit) and tuppence fine for any who could, but did not turn out.

As the group of seven men met three hundred days of the year from eight o’clock until the hour of eleven, Thomas joined them. For he had no wish to sit lonely in his room every evening, or to spend that time in avoidance of Susan Gray upon the stairs with her broom. And Thomas Kinsman will eagerly tell you that, within the dark, damp, gloomy closeness of that basement room, his mind steadily opened, like a bird freshly hatched from its egg that discovers a wide world in which one day it must have the strength to fly.

And, within that nest, Thomas read
Don Quixote
,
Robinson Crusoe
, the works of Dickens—the
Pickwick Papers
and
Oliver Twist
—Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Shelley, and many more beside. And the merits or otherwise of this literature was thoroughly discussed. The Bible, that good book, was prodded and poked for any evidence that the stories within the Old and New Testament were based upon truth and not just tales of someone’s making.

While Thomas Paine’s
The Rights of Man
had each of those working-men present, English and negro, declaring themselves to be fouly wronged by this modern life; for why were there no tax cuts for the poor or subsidies upon education? And in an essay that was applauded by all, Thomas Kinsman wrote how the philosopher, John Locke, stated that there are many things we cannot know, things about which we can only have belief—yet free-thinkers must build their belief upon fact, scientific inquiry and logical principles; so how might a free-thinker prove that when, say, looking upon a tree out of a window that the tree still stands outside the window when the free-thinker’s back is turned and he can no longer see it? An essay of complete nonsense, as you will agree, reader, and yet Thomas Kinsman will wish you to know that it was awarded a shilling prize!

By the time Thomas Kinsman was twenty-one—his hair sprouted, his voice a deep bass tone and his shoulders mightily broad—he wrote to James Kinsman, eager to declare that he was no more bound to Linus Gray as an apprentice, but employed by him as a journeyman printer. And, he added as no more than an addendum, that he was now also of the deistic belief.

James Kinsman sent in reply, a twenty-page letter in which the words heathen, idolater, savage and ingrate played very large part within the message. While the word atheist was repeated so many times that Thomas, in a long reply, explained that although he was no longer of the Baptist faith, he was not a non-believer, not an atheist, but just one who believed in natural religion and a creator God. James Kinsman sent back, in answer, just one page, with the word ‘blasphemer’ written large upon it.

And now we have reached the point within Thomas Kinsman’s story where you will detect some sadness within his eye—but look closer when he tells you that, alas, Susan Gray did pass away, for it may be fancy feigning. Susan Gray died at the age of forty, blaming the Hottentot residing under her roof for blighting her marriage to childlessness and for the invasion of consumption that wasted her away until she weighed little more than a bird. As she lay dead, Linus Gray sobbed at her side with the hysterical abandon of a child; he stopped only to snarl upon her attending priest to keep his cant and humbug to the minimum and then get out.

Indeed, Linus Gray grieved so sorely for his wife that he was never to be the same man again. So crushed was he by her death that he kept himself insensible to the sorrow of it with drink. Not just night upon night, but mornings and afternoons, Thomas Kinsman was required to hunt through the dark lanes and narrow streets in an area between the west Strand and St Paul’s in search of Linus. Sometimes, in the tiny rooms of the Cheshire Cheese tavern, Thomas would find Linus lit by a small spur of gas, seated before a hot baked sheep’s head or clutching a beer while clumsily toasting a small loaf upon a fork in the fire. He would greet Thomas, earnestly placing his arm about his shoulder to beg him not to think ill of Susan for her actions to him. Or with words that slurred into one another like a fishseller’s, he would seek to persuade Thomas that, despite how she treated her negro lodger, despite always wielding that broom upon him, that Susan Gray was a good woman.

At other times Thomas would find Linus, wet and sodden and trembling like a palsied tramp, slumped in an alley within the jumble of narrow courts, snivelling over and over on how he had so disappointed his wife.

Meanwhile within the printing office of Messrs Gray and Co., it was Thomas Kinsman who did now receive the papers, reports and accounts from the porters from Parliament—who did glance at them, collate and folio them, before deciding upon their worth. And it was Thomas who commanded the compositors to mount their frames to prepare for copy, while Linus Gray, if present at all, drooped dull-eyed and oblivious within his chair.

Susan Gray, in death, soon slipped from being a mortal in Linus Gray’s mind and slid into being a saint. And yet in all the years Thomas had lived within the Grays’ household, he had witnessed so little affection between the hard-working, sharp-witted Linus and his prim, pious, melancholy wife, as to lead him to the conviction that they had married by some sort of mistake. But her death was to kill Linus Gray too. For he died not a year later, stretched out like a corpse upon her grave within the churchyard—shaking, convulsing and mournfully wailing to the stars above him, ‘Forgive me, Susan, forgive me.’

The last will and testament of Linus Gray expressed his wish to be buried alongside his wife within St Bride’s churchyard at Fleet Street; for it was a nice, quiet place for his ghost to walk. It also stated that no priest should attend upon his burial, for, it went on, he had no time for such frivolities.

And then, from beyond the grave, Linus Gray could be heard laughing and clapping his hands, ‘Oh wait until they hear this, just wait until they hear this,’ when his last will and testament went on to state that, in honour of his loyalty and friendship, and in redress for the wrong done to him by his birth and fate, he did devise and bequeath all his real and personal property, whatsoever and wheresoever, unto the negro Thomas Kinsman, so that he may walk within this world as he deserves—as a gentleman.

And you will now wish to know how Thomas Kinsman—suddenly finding himself a man of substance within London Town, a negro gentleman of considerable means, the owner of the printing office and that tall house upon Water Lane—did prosper. How eagerly will you sit forward upon your chair to learn all the detail of his new life amongst English society. How wide might your eyes become in anticipation of this glorious tale of fortune gained. And for a black man!

But alas, you have reached the part in Thomas Kinsman’s tale where all those particulars, which had once been gladly imparted in wearying detail, curiously cease. For reasons that must be gleaned only from the pulsing vein upon his head as it throbs and wriggles, Thomas Kinsman does not care to summon that time. He may pull out his watch from within his pocket and declare himself to be late for somewhere. Or he may seek to fill his pipe and beg your leave so he might find his tobacco or a match. Or he may simply wave his hand before his face as if the memory must be batted away then, with rolling eyes or heavy sighs, demand that he be allowed to move on. And he will run to the end of his considerable patience if you are fool enough to insist upon its telling. No. No protestation will have him continue his tale until he has departed from the shores of England. No pleading, nor complaint will start the story again before three silent years have passed and Thomas Kinsman is, once again, back upon the island of Jamaica.

There—standing proud within his new print office upon Water Street, Falmouth, overseeing his three precious Columbian presses, and one Platen secured solid into the floor—is where his tale will once again commence; and no bewildered, nor disappointed look from his listener will have it otherwise.

So, long before you desire it, you will be standing in front of a two-storey, wooden, lime-washed building, girdled within the hubbub of an inquisitive crowd of perspiring negroes, one mangy brown dog, and two fussing goats, admiring the painted sign for Messrs Kinsman & Co. being fastened above the four pillars of this new printing office.

Yet the clamour from outside this works is much greater than any din that comes from within it. The four presses, three frames, the reading closets and the office all lie idle, for no white men of business upon the island would condescend to employ Messrs Kinsman & Co. How does a black boy come to dress and speak like a white gentleman? these English merchants and planters asked while sipping coffee within their clubs. How does a Hottentot with not even one drop of white blood within him find himself a proprietor of a print office? A nigger might composite or work at press or even, with careful instruction become a reader, but no slave-son could ever run a printing establishment of any worth. This broad-nosed, thick-lipped devil does walk too tall, they concluded.

Although the Platen press did sometimes find itself employed when negroes from the dry goods store, the boarding house or the masons did eagerly request their small handbills printed by Messrs Kinsman above all other, it was the volume work from those wealthy white men who owned the wharves, the warehouses, the ships and the plantations that the teeth of his presses wished to bite upon.