Text 1: Before sunrise, by Yasmin Cole

An original contemporary memoir extract.

I began my bakery apprenticeship with a sentimental picture in my head. There would be warm loaves, bright windows and perhaps a tasteful dusting of flour on my cheek. At 3.45 on my first morning, I discovered the truth: the street was black, the rain had found the gap between my collar and my neck, and the bakery door appeared to be locked.

I knocked. Nothing happened. I knocked again, harder, and the door flew open. Mara, the head baker, stood there in a white apron, holding a metal scraper. “You’re late,” she said.

It was 3.57. My shift began at four.

Inside, the bakery was already roaring. Mixers shook the steel tables, oven doors clanged and trays rattled past in tall wheeled towers. The air was hot enough to sting my face. Nobody had flour arranged attractively on one cheek. They had it in their hair, on their backs and in pale handprints across their aprons.

Mara gave me a lump of dough and told me to copy her. In three quick movements, she turned hers into a smooth, tight ball. Mine spread across the table like a tired cushion. I folded it, squeezed it and whispered threats to it. It became a tired cushion with fingerprints.

“Use the table, not just your hands,” Mara said. She placed her palm over mine and showed me how to pull the dough towards myself so that its surface tightened. There was no speech about believing in my potential. She simply gave me another piece.

An hour later, I reversed a trolley into a rack and sent twelve trays of bread rolls sliding onto the floor. The noise stopped the whole room. I waited to be dismissed. Instead, one baker fetched a brush while another said, “First-day tax.” Mara looked at the mess, looked at me and said, “You can be sorry while you sweep.” Then every mixer and tray started up again.

By the end of the shift, my feet throbbed and my arms felt too long for my body. On the cooling rack stood one small loaf I had shaped without help. It leaned slightly to the left, and its crust had split across the top, but Mara tapped its base, listened and passed it to me.

I carried it home through the waking streets with both hands. It was not the beautiful loaf I had imagined. It was better than that: it was mine.

Text 2: The letters in the case, by Arthur Bellam

An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this extract from his autobiography, published in 1901, a newspaper editor recalls beginning work as a printer’s apprentice in 1867.

I entered Mr Sorrell’s printing office at thirteen years of age, supposing that I was entering the kingdom of books. I had imagined myself reading newly written tales before all other men and perhaps offering an opinion upon them. Mr Sorrell handed me a broom and directed me to begin with the floor.

The office was in a cellar, reached by nine stone steps worn hollow in the middle. The windows admitted the boots of passers-by but very little daylight. Within, the press beat without rest: iron upon iron, hour after hour. The smell of ink entered one’s coat on Monday and remained there until Sunday.

For the first month I swept, carried paper and sorted pieces of type into a wooden case. Each metal letter appeared backwards. The small ones seemed no larger than ants, and I often stared at them until the alphabet itself became strange to me. Mr Sorrell inspected my work in silence. When he found a letter in the wrong compartment, he placed it on the ledge before me. At the end of the day, the number waiting there showed me the measure of my failure.

One evening I lifted the case carelessly and let it fall. Hundreds of letters scattered over the floor, mixing into a dark, glittering confusion. Mr Sorrell neither shouted nor struck me. He shut the door, lit another candle and told me that I would go home when every letter had been restored to its proper place.

I was still kneeling on the boards at ten o’clock when Evans, the oldest compositor, brought me a cup of tea. “Words feed the mind,” he said, looking at the floor, “but letters earn your bread. Learn the letters first.” He stayed without being asked and sorted beside me until midnight.

Some weeks afterwards, I was permitted to set one line for a notice announcing the sale of three farm carts. My fingers trembled so badly that I dropped the same letter twice. When the press was turned, the line appeared on the paper straight, black and readable. I had seen finer sentences in books, but none had astonished me so much.

Mr Sorrell examined the sheet. “That will do,” he said, which was the first praise I received from him and, for a long time, the highest. I kept the notice for many years. It taught me that print was not made from grand ideas alone, but from small pieces placed correctly, one after another.

Both of these texts are about beginning an apprenticeship.

Compare:

• what the writers say about their experiences as new apprentices
• how the writers present their thoughts and feelings about these experiences

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