Clay, by Thomas Ackerley
An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this extract from his autobiography, published in 1889, a man looks back on the work he did as a young boy in a brickfield in the 1840s.
I went to work in Gee’s brickfield in the April of my seventh year, and I have been asked many times since, by gentlemen who meant it kindly, whether I hated it. I find that I cannot give them a plain answer.
My work was to carry the clay. Absalom Gee, the moulder, stood at his table under a sacking roof, and I fetched him his clay from the pug mill in lumps of some twenty pounds, carried on my head, one after another, from five in the morning until the light failed. I reckoned once, when I had learned to reckon, that I must have carried about ten tons of it on a summer’s day and walked twelve miles in doing so, and all of it barefoot in the wet. My mother was paid a shilling and sixpence a week for me. The skin of my neck was raw by the end of the first month, and the boys laughed at me for crying, and by the second month I was laughing at the new boys myself.
Absalom Gee was a great, silent man with forearms like hams, and I was more afraid of him than of the devil. Yet it was Absalom who taught me my letters, in the dinner hour, by scratching them on a brick with a nail; and it was Absalom who carried me home on his shoulders the night I fell asleep upon my feet beside the kiln. He gave me a penny every Saturday that I was not obliged to give my mother. I have not met a better man since, among bishops or anyone else.
There were good days. When the kilns were drawn and the bricks came out red and ringing, we boys would stand in the warm and eat our bread in the glow of them, and I have never since been so warm or so content. On the feast day the master gave us beer and a half-holiday, and we ran races in the mud for a prize of a red handkerchief, which I won the year I was nine.
But I remember also Jenny Lark, who carried for the moulder at the next table. She was eight. In the August of the dry year she fell down in the heat with a load of clay upon her head, and they carried her into the shed, and she did not come back to work, and she did not come back at all. Nobody in the field spoke of it. The work went on.
The law will not now permit a child of seven to do what I did, and I thank God for it. I hear it said that the work made a man of me. It did not. Absalom Gee did that, in spite of the work, and the clay only made me tired.
“The writer looks back on his childhood work with bitterness.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.