Fact'ry 'Ands by Edward Dyson

WHAT may be called the machinery of this book is the outcome of experience in one establishment; the characters and the incidents are gathered from a wide field. Workers in the busy top flat I have described, who may perhaps recognise scenes, situations, and materials, will search in vain for familiar lineaments in these pages. From the smallest prim office boy in the stationery warehouse below to the most frivolous "donah" deftly manufacturing fruit bags in the higher flights, master and man, all were too decorous for my needs. The people here presented are a choice selection from a large circle of acquaintances earning honourable if humble subsistence in jam, pickle, lollie, and biscuit factories, in tobacco factories, box factories, shirt factories, rope works, and paper mills, and I claim for them at least that they are true types of a pronounced Australian class not previously exploited for the purposes of the maker of popular fiction. Feathers, Benno, Goudy, Odgson, Fuzzy Ellis, Billy the Boy, and many others capering through my book spring from germs of reality, but I have used my originals as plastic raw material, remoulding them at my own sweet will, robbing them of semblance, but never quite squeezing vitality out of them in the process, I hope.

There is an aristocracy amongst factory hands as in almost every walk of life. The superior young ladies who go to business in first class establishments, and provoke the wondering admiration of discerning foreign visitors by their accomplishments, their dainty dress, and the modesty of their deportment, I know only by sight, the raffish hoydens who stream from some smoky, staring building in a side street, raking up unstable garments, brandishing battered crib baskets, and squealing compliments in the dialect are my good familiar people. They scatter like bees from the hive, running for a lift on homeward bound lorries, kicking vagabond limbs from the tail of truck or dray, scampering in little bands, voluble, raucous, gesticulatory, shouting at each other abuse without anger and threats without venom. Termagants at sixteen, it is as well not to provoke them to eloquence if you have the prejudice of a "higher order," and object to figuring as the object of a public demonstration. Respectability snorts at them like a blood horse, and then they answer with derision in language that compels madam to stop her cars in self defence. Then madam's beautiful toque may suffer. It is all very dreadful, but there are faults on both sides, and you cannot have class distinctions without these little differences.