The Softening Flat, by Isobel Rennie

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

The machine that took Jessie Lowrie’s fingers was a softener, a long iron beast of fluted rollers that crushed the raw jute and oiled it before it went to the cards. She was fifteen and had been at Baxter’s Mill in Dundee for eight months. It was the rule, written on a board by the door, that no worker was to clean the rollers while they were in motion. It was also the rule, though it was written nowhere, that Mr Craik the foreman did not stop a machine for a lassie with a rag, because a stopped machine was money lost and Mr Craik was paid by the output of the flat.

‘Keep it going,’ he had said to her that morning, as he said every morning. ‘You’ve quick hands. Use them.’

She did not remember the pain, only the noise, and then the faces of the other girls all turned towards her with their mouths open, and somebody screaming, which she realised much later had been herself.

Six weeks afterwards a man came to the tenement in the Hilltown. He was not Mr Craik. He was Mr Ogilvie, the under-manager, in a grey overcoat with a velvet collar, and he climbed the four flights of stone stairs with a handkerchief pressed to his nose and sat down at the kitchen table where Jessie’s mother had laid the good cloth. He had a paper in a leather folder. He set it on the cloth and turned it so that Jessie could read it.

It said that the injury had been caused by the employee’s own carelessness, contrary to the clear instructions of the management. It said that the firm, out of goodwill and without admitting any liability, would pay the sum of fifteen pounds. It said that by signing she agreed to make no further claim.

‘Fifteen pounds,’ her mother said. She said it the way she might have said the name of a saint.

Jessie looked at her right hand, which lay on the table in its bandage like something that belonged to somebody else. ‘Mr Craik told me to clean it running,’ she said. ‘He tells all of us.’

Mr Ogilvie smiled. ‘Mr Craik has given a statement. He says he has never told any girl to do anything of the kind. Of course, if you wish to dispute it, there are courts. They are very slow, and very expensive, and the firm has a great many lawyers.’ He took a pen from his pocket and unscrewed the cap. ‘And of course there is the question of whether the mill would wish to employ again a girl who had gone to law against it.’

Her mother’s hand found hers under the table and squeezed.

Jessie took the pen in her left hand. She had never written with it. It took her a long time to make the letters, and they came out large and crooked, like a child’s, and Mr Ogilvie watched every one. When she had finished he blotted it and folded it into his folder and stood up.

‘Very sensible,’ he said.

‘I’ve signed your paper,’ Jessie said. ‘But I’ll be back on the flat in a fortnight, Mr Ogilvie, sweeping, with my left hand. And every lassie on that flat is going to hear what it says, and why I signed it, and who told me to keep that machine going.’

Mr Ogilvie paused with his hat in his hand. Then he went out, and they heard his good shoes on the stone stairs all the way down.

“By the end of the extract, Jessie has been completely defeated.”

To what extent do you agree with this view?

You should write about:

• your thoughts and feelings about how Jessie is presented in the extract
• how the writer has created these thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.