The Other Side of Stone

Linda Cracknell Welcome to our regular feature showcasing the talents of the nation’s best writers.

He went back to the loom and put on his ear defenders. The pattern book with its rows of estate tweed samples was lying open, each window an echo of the landscape – mottled greens, blues, gold and beige. Bracken, bluebells, primroses, and birch.

He was working on a length for the Glen Alder Estate. An outstanding order. Proof that there was still life in the business. It had to be fifty yards long, and so far it was only twenty-five. This was the only mill in the country still delivering these short commissions. And still working on the old Dobcross looms at that.

He filled the pirn of pale blue yarn for a crossway that made up thirty-eight parts of the hundred, and replaced it in the shuttle. He thought of the oval recess inside as a womb, a strangely tender place within the grease-smoothed metaltipped wooden bullet. He replaced the shuttle in its box, ready to cross and re-cross the warp that the shafts would open in sequence, determined by his careful threading the day before.

His stubby fingers worked at the loom, an echo of the first jerks and twitches of his apprentice hands back in Huddersfield. But after thirty years, the movements were automatic and smooth, despite the increasingly crooked back and failing eyes. Today he took the greatest care, slowing and exaggerating each gesture as if he was demonstrating to an ignorant audience who knew bugger all about weaving. He slid the power bar across and the shuttles started their journey, slamming across from box to box in a ferocious display of speed and noise.

Visitors to the Mill always commented on it.

“How do you bear the noise?” they’d ask when he stopped it.

“Eh?” He’d crane his neck and cup his ear in their direction as they started to repeat it. “I can’t hear ’owt.”

There would never be any visitors now.

About the author

Linda Cracknell wrote the Saltirenominated Life Drawing as well as the popular novel Call of the Undertow. Published by Taproot

Press (£14.99), The Other Side of Stone is her first work of fiction in seven years, and is the culmination of over 20 years of research, when she was first given a Scottish Arts Council grant to research it.