Excerpt: Beyond the Blue

Before the Time of Birds

"Dundee was known as a woman's town or she town due to the dominance of women in the labour market. In the jute mills, women outnumbered men by three to one. A unique breed of women evolved from the hardship of life in the mills and the responsibility of being the main provider for the family. Dundee women gained the freedom to act in ways which often ignored convention. They were overdressed, loud, bold-eyed girls and the sight of a woman being roarin' fou or drunk as a man was commonplace. Despite the hardships, many former mill girls recall their working days with fondness."
– from Dundee Heritage Trust, Verdant Works

A light so shifting, so grey and wavering, they might be figments. Their figures are dark, shadowy in the morning light. A steady stream of the dim bodies come up Caldrum Street, past Murphy's restaurant on the corner and the tenements toward the Bowbridge Jute Works entrance; some may speak to one another, but most are quiet, still reminiscing about the warmth of their beds. Morag might see them from the window of the tenement flat if she was inclined to look in the moments before she leaves.

It is early morning in the early spring of 1918. Imogen and Caro are still asleep. Wallis has lit the stove and makes strong tea. Women walk by the tenements, their shoes loud on cobblestones, their coats like the long tail of a kite. As if they are all one, indistinguishable and vague.

The four women live at 96 Caldrum Street, behind the chimney stacks, the blocks of stone and brick, the huge expanses of mills. Close to the heady nature of Hilltown, close enough that they must continually pass the Hilltown clock that never keeps time. A few blocks from Clepington Church, where they have always gone to worship. The women cluster in a city populated by mills and their thick smoke, pubs where the remaining men drink away their wages, churches and boats rolling into harbour heavy with jute or whales. Dundee.

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Excerpted from Beyond the Blue by Andrea MacPherson. Copyright 2007 by Andrea MacPherson. Excerpted by permission of Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.