A Life of Cryin' - part 1

It was an early wish of mine to bring entertainment to the streets. Growing up in the city of Dundee, this was both a need sore-lacking, and a strange desire to have.  It began quite innocently, making up stories in my shared room of an evening to scare my younger twin sisters. Tales of hauntings, and headless gravediggers, that sort of thing. Mother walloped me when she heard, little Allicia and Hallelujah crying to her through their sodden nightshirt sleeves. So that was that, for then.

When I hit early manhood - those days we did not have a choice to stay in school, we were out and earning - Father had a word with a newspaper man his employer was neighbours with and got me a placement. It was fairly simple stuff to begin with, I was tea boy mostly.  The presses were entirely man-powered in those days, steam being a heavy industry and news being an intellectual affair, so on night shift I was expected to muck in on the treadles. It seems amazing now that they were paying us to do for honest employ what the convicts were being whipped into action to do not so many miles away.  A man now might suggest the prisoners would have been better used in connecting their spindles to a crank in some profitable enterprise or other, but bureaucracy is as it ever was and these things just did not occur.

I had been a Smith and Baltry boy for six months when my first 'promotion' presented itself. Gus, the leading street seller, was laid off - and sentenced to flogging - for selling Dutch etchings under the cover of his stock for certain of the city's 'gents'. Blaise, the gaffer, called to me as I was sluicing the ink drains and told me to 'wep yer fece, greb a barreh', end geht SELLIN' son!' His grin was so infectious that I almost stacked a double load of dailies on the sack barrow that was to drive my enterprise forwards; stopping this madness only when a front page nearly squashed the gaffer's goutish hallux rigidus.

I trollied down to the other end of Union Street and hastily constructed my trestle stand, jangled the small float within my sporran, and held the first example of my wares up and out for those passing to appreciate. But it was not to be handed to me as the aritsocracy get it. People just walked past ignoring this poor beggar, eyes on the pavement or calling at some gadgie across the way they knew.  One elderly wifie stopped to ask me if I knew where the nearest souter's was, but nothing more. I despaired, I quailed... dear reader I rallied.  Swallowing my layrnx somewhat to embolden my tone - drop my register, that sort of thing - I pursed my lips to give my accent that hardened edge: 'Daily occurences, yours for a penny! Interesting things planned for city ordure!...'  I had read a couple of pages in and thought this, being a pressing issue for all, might pique some interest.

And indeed it did: fingers rummaged for specie; labourers, shopkeepers, and ladies' housemaids; a queue of two or three began to build. Sold out within just twenty minutes, I trollied back to the office house wherein I surprised the print clerk with a demand for more. 'You cannie hev sold eht!' cried he. But lips shut to my story, I winked and asked for a bigger trolly to carry my bundles.  

Well, by 8 pee em I had sold three times what Gus had been wont to, and me without the salacious sweeteners. Over the coming weeks I elected to make a success of my cries.