The Black Book, by Albert Henshall

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

Mr Lazenby’s coal yard stood at the bottom of Cross Lane, behind a gate with his name on it in white letters that I repainted every spring from a tin of paint he measured with a ruler before and after. He paid me sixpence for Saturdays on the cart and another sixpence for sweeping the yard, and he wrote both down in a small black book, as if he expected one day to be asked for proof.

He was a thin, grey man, grey even before the coal dust reached him, who wore his cap indoors and his overcoat in summer. Every sack that left the yard went first onto the weighing machine by the office door, and he stood over it with his long fingers folded, and if it came over the hundredweight by so much as a lump, he took the lump out with his own hand and dropped it back on the heap. He never once looked at the customer while he did it. I thought him the coldest man in Salford. Most of Cross Lane agreed with me.

On the board by the gate he had painted NO CREDIT, and he meant it. When the mill went on short time and the women came to the office with their purses half empty, he read the price back to them in a flat voice, sack by sack, until they stopped asking. He did not argue, and he did not explain.

Mrs Tunnicliffe came on the first Friday in January. Everyone on the Lane knew about Mrs Tunnicliffe. Her husband had been killed at the gasworks in the autumn, and she had four children under ten and a front room she could no longer afford to heat. She asked for one sack until the Friday after.

Mr Lazenby looked at the board, and then at the weighing machine, and then past her at the yard.

‘No credit, Mrs Tunnicliffe,’ he said. ‘It’s on the board.’

I stared at him. She went out with her head down, and I swept the same square of yard three times so as not to look at him.

That evening, when the cart came in, he called me into the office. On the machine stood a full sack, tied at the neck, weighed, I saw, a good stone over. He told me to take it down the Lane on the handcart after dark, leave it at the Tunnicliffes’ back gate and knock once. If I spoke of it, or let myself be seen, I need not come back on Saturday.

I did not speak of it. I took a sack down every Friday until March, when the mill went back to full time, and each one was a stone over, and not one of them was ever written in the black book.

On the Saturday after the last one, he was in his usual place by the office door, taking a single lump off a customer’s sack and dropping it back on the heap, and he did not look up, and he did not ask me how it had gone.

What impressions does the writer create of Mr Lazenby? How does the writer create these impressions?

You must refer to the language and structure used in the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.