Derek's letters

Engine driver, then footballer, in that order, same as every boy on our street. I had trials for the school team and scored twice. Unfortunately one of them was at the wrong end, and that more or less settled the footballer question.

The engine driver ambition lasted longer. I used to stand on the bridge over the cutting with my friend Malcolm, taking down numbers. Steam was nearly finished by then, which we knew, and didn't talk about, the way you don't talk about a thing you love ending.

What I actually became was a compositor, which no boy in history has ever dreamed of becoming, mainly because no boy knows it exists. You find the work, or the work finds you. Mine found me through my uncle Ron, but that's the next question, I expect.

I didn't. Your great-uncle Ron decided it. He was a machine minder at Barraclough's, the print works off Canal Road, and in the summer of 1966 he told my mother they were setting on apprentice compositors and that I was going down Monday morning with clean fingernails. Nobody consulted me at any stage.

Seven-year apprenticeship, four pounds a week to start. First year I mostly swept floors and fetched things, and learned the type cases — where every letter lives, so your hand goes there without your eyes. There's a reason they call the capitals upper case and the small letters lower case, and I'll happily bore you with it at Christmas.

It pains me to report that Ron was right. The trade suited me down to the ground. Precise work, a bit of pride in it, and the smell of ink and machine oil that I'd bottle if I could. Fifty years on I still read menus and gravestones like a proofreader. Once it's in, it doesn't come out.

Stan Hedges. Overseer of the composing room, forty years in the trade, and a man who could spot a wrong fount across a room the way a farmer spots weather.

Two things he drummed into me. First: measure twice, set once — corrections cost money and reputations, in that order. Second, and he said this about once a week: "the job's not finished when it looks right, it's finished when you've checked it." I've applied that to everything since, including tiling your mother's bathroom.

He wasn't warm. He never once told me I'd done well — the highest praise going was "that'll do, lad", and you dined out on it for a week. But when I sat my City and Guilds he lent me his own books, and when I passed, he shook my hand and called me Mr Foster in front of the whole room. I was nineteen. I've been paid better since, but not often.

Not a job — a year. 1984, when the works went over from hot metal to photosetting. Everything I'd spent eighteen years getting good at was carted off for scrap, and men I'd served my time with went with it.

I was thirty-three, which is a bad age to start again — old enough to have a mortgage, young enough that you've no choice. I did the retraining at nights, six months of it, coming home cross-eyed from a screen after full shifts. Your mother kept the house running and never once said the thing she'd have been entitled to say, which was that I was miserable to live with. I was.

I came out the other side of it quicker with the new kit than most of the young lads, out of pure spite, and I'm not ashamed to say so. But I'll tell you what the hard part actually was. It wasn't the learning. It was grieving for a trade while everyone kept telling you it was progress. It was progress. Both things were true.

The trade answer is the county show programme of 1979, ninety-six pages, set clean, delivered a day early. There's a copy in the loft. Your mother says I've shown it to every visitor we've had since the Silver Jubilee, which is an exaggeration of no more than ten per cent.

But the honest answer is smaller. When your sister got married, I set and printed the order of service myself. Proper job — Caslon, laid paper, the good guillotine at the shop after hours. Nobody in the church knew or would have cared that the spacing was right. I knew.

She's still got one framed in the hall. Every trade has its version of that, I think. The work you do for money keeps the lights on, and then once or twice the trade lets you make something for love, and that's the one you'd run back into a burning house for.

Left Barraclough's in 1987 and set up on my own. Foster Print, one room, one second-hand offset machine, and a second mortgage your mother signed without her hand shaking. Mine shook.

Everyone sensible told me not to. The trade was contracting, which it was, and I was walking out of a steady wage with two kids, which I also was. My reasoning, such as it was: the works was going down slowly and I could either go down with it in company or swim for it alone. I've dressed it up better in the years since, but at the time it was that crude.

First year we made nearly nothing. Second year we made a bit. By the fifth year I was turning work away and employing two lads, one of them the son of a man I'd served my time with, which closed a circle I didn't know was open. Bravery gets talked about like it's a feeling. It isn't. It's arithmetic plus your wife saying "well, we'd best get on with it then."

Up at twenty to six, no alarm needed after the first ten years. Tea, two sugars — I've since been reduced to none, and I'd like the record to show I consider it a wrongful conviction. Bike to the works in all weathers until 1975, van after that, and I missed the bike, which surprised me.

First man in got the machines warming and the kettle on, and I liked being first man in. A composing room before the day starts is a fine place — everything squared away, the day's jobs racked up in order, quiet enough to hear the clock. Some men hate the start of a shift. I never did. The start was the best of it, all the work still perfect because none of it existed yet.

Bacon roll from Enid's van at half nine if the week's budget ran to it. It usually ran to it. A man needs one indulgence with a fixed time attached, or the whole day's shapeless.

The computer. It ended my trade, and then it paid my pension. I've never worked out whether to shake its hand or not.

Everything I was taught between 1966 and 1973 — the type cases, the spacing, setting a line by hand and eye — a machine did it faster by 1990 and a teenager did it on a screen by 1995. Whole floors of skilled men, gone in a decade. And yet: Foster Print survived because I bought the Macintosh early and learned the thing while my competitors were still writing angry letters to the trade press.

Here's what I'd want written down, though. The computer changed who does the work. It never changed what good work is. Straight lines, honest spacing, check it before it goes out the door. Stan Hedges would have understood a Macintosh in about a week, and then told it that'll do.

1991. Two thousand christening invitations for the printer's own deadly sin: I didn't check the proof, because it was a small job, and I was busy, and the customer was in a hurry. The church was St Mark's. We printed St Mary's.

I found out when the customer's mother rang, and I can still hear the particular quiet in her voice. I reprinted the lot overnight at my own cost, drove the boxes to her door myself at seven in the morning, and knocked, which I did not want to do. She was decent about it. People mostly are, if you turn up.

What it taught me wasn't "check the proof" — I already knew that, that's what made it a sin rather than an accident. It taught me that the apology is part of the job. Do it fast, do it in person, don't explain, just put it right. I got fifteen years of that woman's family's printing afterwards. You don't get that from the jobs that go right.