I read one of the Stitches in Time stories last night – ‘Spand Grectacular or, Pedal-Powered Pavement-Printing Velocipede!’ Featuring the fudge-obsessed and overworked printer, Imogen Clacker.
Being as one or two people said they’d enjoyed it, and may be foolish enough to Google me, then here’s the story:
Spand Gractacular! or,
Pedal-Powered Pavement-Printing Velocipede!
Within her shop
On Scansion Way,
Imogen Clacker pedals away:
She pedals all night
And most of the day
Nobody thinks
She’ll ever stop.
But in-between
The words she prints
And in-between
The treadle’s groan
Something on
The paper hints,
Something stirs
Around her bones.
The more the st-ords
Come out so w-rangely
The more the mages
Puddle themselves,
Imogen Clacker
Sees the matter
Building on her
Cast-off shelves.
There is a problem, with the machines, in Clacker’s Printworks. Some might say a bad workman – or person – blames their tools, but Imogen doesn’t stand by this. Her face is smeared and smudgy with ink, but her printing has always been as crisp as her frosty little mind.
It can’t be my fault
Her thoughts are a-clatter,
I tend these machines –
Every nut, screw and bolt –
Something else
Must be the matter.
Imogen seeks comfort in a box of confectionery by her seat. Since it arrived in the city, quite recently, she has taken up eating fudge whenever anything troubles her. As a result, her teeth are not her best feature – although, it is hard to say what is her best feature. Fudge is not good for the waistline, either. My printing machines, she thinks, are my best feature. Indeed, Imogen often has so much sugar in her system, she pedals and pedals her printing machines while at the same time eating more and more fudge, until she just can’t sleep – and works long into the night. But mistakes are creeping in, and becoming ever more common in her work. People are starting to notice. She considers her most recent misspelling of an important legal document and thinks:
How can it be that
With all of my pedd’ling,
All my hard work
And machinery-meddling
There are these constant
Printing quirks?
Perhaps my machinery
Is going berserk?
But once my new
Scheme has begun
Business will really
Start to run.
Imogen’s thoughts here refer to a very special new machine she took delivery of yesterday, all the way from Paris, which she thinks will be excellent for business. The machine will be able to print advertisements directly onto the ground – she will make special rubber tyres with letters around them and pedal along making the road’s surface itself a billboard. No other printer in the city has such a vehicle and she’s sure it will catch on. It is sitting under a piece of cloth in the corner of the shop – underneath her shelves of misspelled or faulty prints – awaiting the first customer she can unveil it to…
On the street outside, the gas lamps are being lit and occasionally one of the city’s trams – with huge decoy horse heads on the front of them – gallops by on its noisy rails, shrouding the frontage of Clacker’s Printworks in steam. Seeing them, Imogen pedals a little harder at her latest job and thinks:
Steam? Steam!
Who needs steam?!
My pedal, treadle-
Powered machines
Are more than a match
For their foggy screams.
As she glares out of the window through the steam, a man emerges suddenly from it and pushes the door with some force and grandeur.
‘Good day, Miss Clacker!’ his booming bass voice fills the room.
‘Mr Falbust,’ Imogen stops pedalling and stands up, wiping a mixture of fudge and black ink across her nose – she was halfway through a mouthful, ‘I wasn’t expecting you just yet, the programmes won’t be ready until tomorrow.’
‘That is fine, Clacker – I wish to up my order. We will need some bill-posters for the production too – and quite a few of them.’
‘Of course, Mr Falbust – how many?’
‘One hundred, by the day after tomorrow.’
‘The day after tomorrow?’
‘Is that a problem, Clacker?’
‘Of course not, Mr Falbust – and not only that, but might I…make a suggestion?’
‘What kind of suggestion?’
‘About the production – and your advertising?’
‘Go on…’
Imogen scuttles toward the veiled machine in the corner, twitching with excitement. She takes the corner of the cloth in her hand and – like a game-show assistant gone very, very wrong – in one movement unveils it. As she does, she declares:
‘The Pedal-Powered Pavement Printing Velocipede!’
‘It’s a bit of a mouthful.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well – what is it?’
‘As the name suggests, Mr Falbust, this is a machine for printing directly on to the roads and pavements. The city itself will be your billboard! As your prospective audience are trotting along in their carriages or whizzing by on the wretched tram, they will see the advertisement spelt out before them. And you, Mr Falbust, will be the first to advertise to them in this way!’
‘The first?’
‘The first!’
‘Here, or anywhere?’
‘Well – the first here.’
‘And how much will it cost me?’
‘A shilling a yard for the first ten yards and a half-shilling thereafter.’
‘Expensive!’
‘Innovative!’
‘Will it work?’
‘Or your money back!’
Falbust puffs himself out to his fullest width – which is very wide – and like a great warbling red-breasted bird says:
‘Very well. Take this down: GRAND SPECTACULAR! With entirely New Scenery, New and Magnificent Dresses and Properties, Stage Band &c., &c. – Artemis Theatre, Hatchet Square.’
Frantically, Imogen runs to her machinery and takes down his words on her typewriter – a half-ball shaped device from which all the letters of the alphabet protrude – from which a piece of paper emerges.
‘And where would you like the text, Mr Falbust?’
‘This is the main shopping street, so the full length of Scansion Way. And across the Hybridge too, there’s a lot of traffic there.’
‘Of course, Mr Falbust – I’ll let you know how many yards once it’s done. By tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow it is!’
‘Splendid, Mr Falbust.’
‘You’ll be getting one of your staff to do it, I suppose?’
‘Yes, one of my staff. That’s right.’
‘Well send them my thanks – I hope to see a full house every night. Must be off, the dress rehearsal is about to begin.’
‘Break a leg, Mr Falbust?’
‘Yes! Let’s hope you don’t, with all this pedalling – eh?’ he guffaws.
‘Yes Mr Falbust, let’s hope not!’
As he leaves the shop, Imogen waves him off and thinks:
Staff? STAFF?!
He’s having a laugh,
It’s only me
Who’ll make this budge,
Who’ll spell it out
Without a smudge –
Me and my
Beloved fudge.
She opens another box and sits back down at her machinery to finish the theatre programmes. It is going to be a long night.
***
Imogen awakes with a start in her bed out the back of the shop. Last night was something of a blur, as if she’d dreamt all the pedalling to finish the programmes and the first outing of her new Pedal-Powered Pavement Printing Velocipede to advertise Kester Falbust’s new production. She must only have fallen asleep a few hours ago once she’d printing the length of the Hybridge (having had to wait for a ship to pass through) and then the full length, both directions, of Scansion Way.
She leaps from her bed and rushes to the front door, excited to see the results. Sure enough, there are the messages printed at regular spaces all along the road, past the turn off to Redolent Road and all the way up to the junction with Indolent Avenue. It’s like the street is a giant piece of paper and Imogen has written neatly all over it.
But then – she looks closer. Although the letters themselves are perfect and crisp, on closer inspection, the message on the road reads:
‘SPAND GRECTACULAR – With Scew Nenery, Drew and Nagnificent Messes and Boperty Prand, Stage &c &c Artemis Hatchet, Theatre Square.’
Imogen is horrified –
How can it be
That my murds
Are so wuddled?
Is my sense of spelling
So befuddled?
Truly, this a
Mectacular spess
And cannot be construed
As anything less.
She barely notices that even her thoughts are starting to get confused, too…She glances up at the clock and sees it is 6am. The sun is only just peeking up through the dawn and only the odd shopkeeper is stirring along Scansion Way. Perhaps Falbust won’t have seen it yet? Imogen resolves to rectify her mistake before he can. But she must work fast. Soon, the trams would start running and the whole city would wake up…
First, she looks at the wheels of the Velocipede, hastily removes the rubber tyres, made up of individual letters, and rearranges them so the message is now spelled out correctly. Re-attaching the wheels, she pushes the velocipede out of the front door and hops on. In order to correct her mistake, she will have to erase the first set and then print them again with the proper message. She switches the machine from ‘Print’ to ‘Brush’ mode and starts to retrace her route – to the Hybridge first then back to correct the street outside her shop.
By 7.15, she has managed to erase the messages in both directions of traffic on the Hybridge. As far as she knows, Kester Falbust would have to make his way across the bridge to get to the theatre, so now she just had to get back to Scansion Way before Falbust came to check on his posters, programmes and street printing. Imogen is frantic:
I must correct
This silly error
Or my rep
Will be in tatters
When Mr Falbust
Comes to find us
The perfect print
Is all that matters!
She pedals furiously back towards Scansion Way, her stout legs straining, and takes another mouthful of fudge to keep her going. At the end of the street, Imogen is feeling distinctly worse for wear. Her eyes are barely open and her legs feel as though they are made of lead.
At some point, everything goes dark. Imogen is suddenly aware she is tiny, riding upon a Velocipede a little like her Pavement Printing machine – only enormous. She clambers up to look at the printing wheels, and sees they are made not of rubber letters, but of fudge cut into hieroglyphs, strange symbols she cannot understand. She looks down at the pedals and realises they are powering themselves – or rather, they are being powered by a steam engine just under Imogen’s feet. And it is hot. Her feet are starting to burn – and steam from pipes stretching up either side of the Velocipede right up into the sky – she can’t even see their end. As she attempts to stop her feet catching fire, she begins to breathe heavily and panic. What is happening? Imogen becomes aware that her breathing is not her own, there is a rhythmic sound, coming from behind her. She is asleep and dreaming! Her eyes spring open and she turns to look behind her. Looming from the fog is one of the city’s trams, the horse-shaped front end is rearing up not twenty yards away, belching steam towards her!
Imogen puts her feet to the pedals and tries to push, but something is stopping her. Her heart races as the tram races toward her little velocipede and she reaches down to the pedals – feeling around them, a box of fudge is wedged beneath the right one. Wrenching it out, she presses with all her might and the velocipede lurches forward, just at the second the giant red tram roars by – clipping the edge of the wheel. She squeals as it does so – eek! – and then all is quiet as the tram clangs off on its rails.
Pushing the velocipede back to the shop, Imogen looks down the street – which she must have managed to erase the misspelled advertisements before falling asleep, which was something. The corrected street-writing would have to wait until she’d fixed the Velocipede.
Pushing through a pile of cast-off prints – she must have knocked them off in her hurry – and falling back into her chair, Imogen thinks:
I could rather do
With a day off or two –
And in fact, more than that,
Someone to point the finger at
When everything’s too much for one
And all the work has not been done.
This morning has surely
Been portentous…
As Imogen finishes this last thought, a young woman walked into her shop and says:
‘I wonder – might you need an apprentice?’
No-one had ever rhymed with her thought before, except herself. This, she thinks, is a sign.
‘Funnily enough,’ says Imogen, ‘I am. And you can start with these posters…I need to fix my velocipede.’
And so, Clacker’s Printworks became Clacker and Associate. It transpired too that her new worker had something of a dislike for fudge – and after that day, so did Imogen.