He was convinced that British officers had saved their own skins by sending in the black troops — including Canadians and Australians — when the situation looked bleak. Now he was determined to warn our readers, through the power of his old printing press, against what he called “The Brutish Empire.”
I handed over his coffee and went to my own desk. Dividing the room in half was a massive slab of glass-topped oak where customers stood to place an advertisement or purchase a subscription. Behind the counter, MacTavish hunched over his desk, partially hidden by his newspaper fortress, while I sat in the opposite corner, as far away from him as possible.
I had tidied my little nook and hung several photographs over the old rolltop, including one of King George and Queen Elizabeth taken during their recent train trip across Canada. I gazed up at the royal couple and mouthed a silent apology.
Although I couldn’t quite bring myself to say the words aloud, I secretly agreed with the letter-writer who had called MacTavish a narrow-minded, contentious old bastard.
For a few minutes I dwelled on the vision of newsrooms across the country, their reporters galvanized by the greatest news since the Great War had ended twenty-one years ago — three years before I was even born.
And here I sat, restricted to a story on page two, forced to listen to MacTavish sucking his coffee through his teeth with revolting gusto.
I vowed once again to get the hell out of Touchwood.
2
After finishing high school at the top of my class, I made a humbling trip around town, report card in hand, looking for work as a secretary or sales clerk, even a waitress. But the depression had hit Saskatchewan hard and jobs were scarce.
I hadn’t even considered applying at the Times. It was one of those mysterious male preserves that had passed from old man MacTavish to his son Jock when he was mustered home from France. Neither of them had ever hired a woman.
So I spent the long summer days pondering my uncertain future while I picked potato bugs in our vegetable garden, and my evenings curled up on the blue mohair chesterfield with our house cat Pansy — we had numerous barn cats, but only one was allowed in the house — reading my beloved Victorian novels.
My luck changed one afternoon when I was fetching a parcel from the train station and overheard Pete Anderson, the one and only reporter for The Touchwood Times, calling down a black curse on MacTavish’s head as he booked a ticket for Toronto. Pete hadn’t lasted long; the newspaper cast off reporters as often as MacTavish lost his temper.
After hastily combing my hair in the station restroom, I hurried down the wide, windswept main street, past the Queen’s Hotel, Chinese restaurant, butcher shop, drugstore, hat shop, and Dutch bakery. I opened the door of the newspaper office as if I were entering a cave full of hibernating grizzlies.
The dimly lit front room was deserted. I was about to tiptoe out again when I heard a crash from the rear followed by a roar. “Bloody bleeding blasted balls!” I sidled around the front counter and down the narrow hallway to the back shop where the printing press stood.
MacTavish was crouched on his hands and knees, his bony backside sticking up in the air like a rock in a field, a circle worn on the seat of his pants by the snuff tin in his back pocket. He was surrounded by dozens of tiny nine-point lead letters that had fallen from an overturned type drawer.
“Well, don’t just stand there!” he bellowed over his shoulder. “Help me pick up these buggers!”
I lowered myself to the filthy wooden floor and began to gather the type while MacTavish clambered to his feet, wiping his hands on an ink-stained rag. He was a small man — even from my crouching position I could see that he was several inches shorter than me — but he cut an impressive figure. His head was covered with matted iron-grey hair and his piercing dark eyes glared at me from under the biggest, blackest eyebrows I had ever seen.
“What the blazes do you want?” he shouted. Later I learned that he always spoke at full volume, having been partly deafened by an exploding shell, but at the time I thought he was yelling at me.
“I’d like to apply for a job,” I said.
“Who’s your father?”
“Tom Jolliffe.”
“You’re the girl who’s supposed to be so bright? Well, looks can be deceiving!”
He gave a mirthless chuckle, but I wasn’t sure whether to laugh so I kept my eyes on the floor. He jammed the rag into his pocket. “As long as you’re here, make yourself useful! Run down to the grocery store and pick up this week’s advertisement! And bring me a can of snuff! Copenhagen Long Cut! Tell them to put it on my account.”
I started work that very minute. Sometimes I wondered why MacTavish hired me. He wouldn’t let me cover anything except women’s events, and there was little space in the paper anyway. Four pages were home print, written by clubs and sports teams and dropped through the slot in the front door. The other four pages came press-ready from an agency that supplied almost every weekly in Western Canada.
But I answered the telephone and worked the front counter, kept a pot of coffee perking, and ran errands all over town. MacTavish even taught me how to use his precious Kodak to photograph grip-and-grin cheque presentations, oddly shaped vegetables, and other subjects of intense local interest.
Each Wednesday, when the back shop was thick with the smell of melting lead and the sound of MacTavish’s curses rose above the thumping, clanking din of the press, I retreated to the little bathroom where I tacked a towel over the window and developed my negatives in the sink. I printed them in the enlarger and hung them up to dry with clothespins on a piece of string. Then I hurried down to the train station and sent them to a company in Winnipeg that made the necessary engravings, small rectangular plates of blueish-coloured zinc mounted on wooden blocks. With any luck, the engravings made it back in time for the next week’s issue. MacTavish laid the type and engravings onto plates, bolted the plates onto an antiquated mountain of scrap iron he called The Auld Dragon, and cranked out eight hundred copies of The Touchwood Times.
The first time MacTavish flew into a rage and fired me for ruining a roll of film, I rode my bicycle home weeping aloud to the fields and the skies. But the next morning I woke up and remembered everything to be done before the next edition. He can’t possibly handle it himself, I thought. I’ll just show up and see what happens.
I dressed and cycled to work an hour early. When MacTavish arrived, the coffee was burbling through the percolator and I was self-consciously marking up proofs on the front counter.
He banged the door, glared at me for a few seconds, and then stomped to his desk. “I like my coffee like I like my women: sweet as sugar!” he yelled. I brought him a cup meekly, although I was tempted to pour it over his head.
From then on, MacTavish continued to fire me at intervals. At first I would go home immediately and return the next morning, but once when I was in the midst of deciphering some illegible handwriting on a letter to the editor, I simply replied: “Yes, Mr. MacTavish,” and kept on typing.
He stood there uncertainly for a moment, then spat horribly into the brass shell casing he had carried home from France to use as a spittoon, and retreated behind his wall of newspapers.
I leaned over the handlebars and swung toward home. At the top of the east hill I stopped to catch my breath. The late afternoon sun poured its peculiar saffron light over the landscape and the ripening grain smelled like yeast. From a nearby fencepost I heard the meadowlark’s song: “I see, I see, I see your petticoat!”
The east hill was really no more than