Extracts
One For The Master
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Extract from One For The Master

Geelong, 1996

Ghosts form in the damp mist above the banks of the Barwon River. I meet them there at dusk when they take shape out of the yellow mist that hangs over what used to be Highlands woollen mill.
Though the mist is always present, it often drifts into tatters and re-forms; this is the time for ghosts.
The Barwon is not a big river, except when it's in flood. I sit by it in the evenings until dark, sometimes late into the night. I listen to the ghosts and they tell me their stories.
Behind me are the shells of huge buildings, which no river mist can hide. The air itself seems to stand in awe of them. Once they were woollen mills, noisy and dirty, bumptious and solid as rocks, their boilers spitting out steam, their dye vats a poisonous, rainbow-coloured cocktail.
It is one of life's small ironies that land along the river now is worth so little that no-one has bothered to pull the mills down and build something else in their place.

Highlands, 1961

I started work in the middle of a heat wave.
I walked to Highlands mill along the river path, a path as familiar to me as the back garden of my house, as the house that had been left to my uncle when my grandparents died.
Squatting on the river was a glum, sleeping mist, nothing like the grey mists of winter, but yellow, seeming to hold the coming heat of the day within it. I stopped and turned to face the houses that backed on to the river, then quickly flicked my head around to trick the mist into disappearing. But it stayed stuck to the river, as though the two were partners.
I thought of Mr Wind in a book my uncle used to read to me, Mr Wind with his yellow cheeks full of air, ready to blow it out, and the way my uncle copied him, puffing out his cheeks, the way his fair skin stretched, how soft his face was.
I started walking again, more slowly this time, under the last of the gum trees. Ahead of me, across a dry grass common and a road, were the mill's black ram's-head gates.
Three boys were pushing their bikes through the gates. I knew one of them from school and was glad they didn't turn and see me.
The wrought-iron gates, twice my height, were already warm and slippery from the sun. I reached up and ran a cautious finger around the bottom of the old-fashioned lettering - 'Highlands 1887' - and the whorls and curves that were two huge horns, dwarfing the body of the ram beneath them.
My Uncle Len had told me how the gates had been made in the iron foundry in Fyans Street. I recalled his stories about Highlands, his careful speech, the explanations he'd taken such trouble to give me, and realised that they were a gift.
I couldn't believe that my uncle wasn't there with me, explaining things, walking through the gates with me to show me where things were.
My uncle had gone away to live in the bush, to throw wool fleeces across classing tables. I'd often watched him practise while he was studying for his certificate. He used to make me smile. He always looked as though he expected the fleece to be much heavier and stiff, not soft and wieldy. He held his large hands wide, and his legs even wider, as though to grapple a machine, and when the fleece went woosh! across the table, he looked so surprised.
A group of girls in flowered dresses pushed past me on the gravel driveway. They all seemed to be carrying large handbags and wearing black high heels. I knew that when the whistle went I was expected to be in the weaving shed; I could not have said why I dawdled and held back.
The driveway led straight to the main tower building, which was tall and square, made of locally quarried bluestone. Around it were a number of single-storey wooden sheds. From the front, looking up from the river side as I was, the tower looked rather like a castle. It stood as high as the cliffs it was made from, and it wasn't hard to imagine it lasting for eight hundred years, the way castles had in Scotland.
Faces that I knew, or didn't, bodies of all shapes and sizes brushed past me, making for the different sheds. Some called 'G'day boss,' or 'Morning Sir!' as they drew level with a yellow car parked in the middle of the driveway. They spread out and around the car, like the river at my back rippling around a snag in its path.
Mr Ferguson stepped out of the driver's seat, smiling and nodding greetings.
'Wait a minute!'
I shaded my eyes, feeling my cheeks go red beneath them.
'Don't tell me!' Mr Ferguson called out. 'I know who you are! You're Frannie Pritchard's daughter.
I drew my breath in sharply, then I said, 'Mum's changed her name twice since then, Mr Ferguson.'
The old man held out a bony white hand, and I blushed again and took it, while he recited, 'Frannie Pritchard, Frances Plathe, Francesca Bonacci! And you must be Helen!'
'Oh,' I said. 'Oh, yes.'
Mr Ferguson's face was white, his skin so thin it looked as though it needed only a whisper of breath to lift it. His body was that of an ageing bird, not frail, but when I drew my hand away, it was like passing it through a bag of chicken bones.
'One of my best weavers, that mother of yours!' Mr Ferguson kissed my on the cheek and said, 'My dear, I know everybody's name. No-one's ever caught me out!'
The 7.30 whistle went, so close and loud it frightened me.
At the door of the weaving shed I stepped aside to let a trolley pass. One of the men steering it called 'Morning duck!' and winked.
Across the trolley lay a great wooden beam already fitted with the warp for someone's loom. I watched the men manoeuvring the trolley down the narrow isle and levering the steel-tipped beam into place.
The light in the weaving shed was bright and hot from the saw-toothed roof, half made of glass. Wool loved light, my mother had once told me, and plenty of humidity.
The huge light in the shed was a kind of overload, and a deprivation at the same time. The floor was grey concrete, the walls stained grey, the machinery that filled the room was grey and black. No matter how hard they were polished, the looms were so old they never came up more than grey.
I spotted Queenie Bissett and began walking over to her.
'Skeeta!' Queenie hugged me, smelling of the lounge bar at the Clarion.
Queenie wore a bright green eye-shade. Half the buttons on her orange cardigan were missing, and she'd replaced them with a four-inch nail threaded through the wool. She hugged me again and shouted, 'Let's see if we can get you set up next to me!'
I was given two looms, not next to Queenie but in the same aisle. The forelady, a tiny, green-haired woman, her back bent like the hooks used to lift wool bales in the warehouse, showed me what to do. By the time she had finished, nearly all the looms were going, and it was impossible to hear yourself speak.
A weaver's main job, as I'd known all my life, was to change the shuttles as they emptied every few minutes; each weaver was in charge of two looms, turning in a half circle in a narrow aisle between them. The aisle was just wide enough for me to stand with one arm outstretched.
I'd seen the movements of the weavers as a stately business, a kind of dance, when I'd watched from the doorway with my mother.
The shuttles on my Dobcross had to be changed every seven minutes; and every seven minutes on the Addersley behind. That was every three and a half minutes. Ample time to rest in between.
My looms had turrets and sloping polished drawbridges. They were carefully tended like the gates. Their iron walls stretched above my head. They seemed like walls that morning, but were more a kind of scaffolding that held the warp in place.
There was something wrong with the tracks that carried the shuttles from one side of my Dobcross to the other. Instead of coming to a neat, split-second stop before beginning their return journey, they banged into the shuttle box with an almighty thump that went right through me.
Queenie's teasing and jokes blew up and down the aisle as easily and lightly as the wool fluff in the air. The bobbin boy rolled an empty bobbin at her feet when she sashayed past him on her way to the toilets. The bobbin startled Queenie, almost tripping her. She picked it up, turned and shook it at the boy. He raised both hands and made a face: who, me?
I smiled at the pantomime that seemed to go on all the time because the noise of the looms was too loud for conversation.

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