The Whispering Swarm Read Online Free PDF Page B

editor and printer’s devil, every Thursday I went down to Old Bailey and checked the proofs. I was getting great experience. When copy was late and we were short of time I learned to read type straight from the frame in reverse, making corrections without the type being ‘pulled’ off on paper, by rolling ink onto the frame, putting a sheet of cheap paper on top of that, then rolling over it to make an impression. If copy was too long I could cut in an instant and if not enough, I could write a short article and have them set it on the spot. They had a couple of typewriters on a high desk so you could type standing up. I was born to the job. I could turn an issue around so quickly, I usually took an hour or two off before going back to the office. On a good day, I didn’t have to go back at all.
    During these extra hours there was time for a stroll by the river, or a walk to the Tower of London, to watch the Tower Bridge open for shipping, explore the alleys and courts off Fenchurch and Liverpool streets, or cross the river and dive into mysterious Southwark or Bermondsey. The Blitz had destroyed those Victorian boroughs more thoroughly than the Restoration buildings. Councils were putting up great blank blocks of modern flats where the old alleys had been.
    I had known Fleet Street, of course, since childhood. I spent more time there once I had decided to become a writer. I drank and ate the atmosphere. It enriched me. It was the stuff of life. I had developed an unbeatable immune system from it. I had gone there for as long as I could remember but now I was fully part of it! I was a pressman, treated as an equal by most who knew me (though because of my youth some still took me for an office boy), including the other editorial staff members who congregated around the typesetters early on Wednesday afternoons when we put our charges to bed. I carried a pica ruler, which we called an em-stick, for measuring type. I knew the number of words which would fill two or three columns on a quarto page, how to mark up and turn an illustration into a reduced block, how to prepare a picture. We understood the same trade jargon. We were brothers (sisters were not yet even a novelty) of the typewriter. Most of my fellow pressmen only had time for a quick familiar nod as they rushed in and out, but one rather eccentric regular, Friar Isidore, shared my hours and was willing to pass the time of day, to ask me an opinion, to offer a thought of his own on the news as I presented it, addressing me with a kind of mild, respectful goodwill which was as welcome as it was unfamiliar. His smile, if a little distant, was infinitely benign.
    I was fascinated by Friar Isidore. A tall, scrawny, hunched, pink, bright-eyed man, he would push back his hood to reveal a tonsured, stubbled skull. Carefully rolling up his habit’s sleeves, he tackled the sheaf of proofs the setter took out of the pigeonhole for him to read. His magazine looked a bit dull to me, mostly closely printed text in double columns with mysterious titles which meant absolutely nothing, using unfamiliar words in Greek, Latin or Hebrew. Some were even in Arabic, he told me, pointing to what looked like shorthand. And Aramaic. The title was equally meaningless: The White Friar . I had no idea what a white friar was. Judging by Friar Isidore’s appearance, he surely had something to do with religion.
    Religion, in a view shared by the majority of my fellow Londoners, was something mostly associated with our superstitious past. All the Jews I knew were nonbelievers. Occasionally I saw an Hasidic oldster in Hatton Garden but as often as not, he was from Amsterdam. I had never met a Moslem. I knew no one who went to church. In common with most of my contemporaries I thought people needed to invent a creator to give authority to their ignorance. Our remaining churches were chiefly empty, their congregations almost entirely made up of growing numbers of tourists;