Free The Flyer by Stuart Harrison

help, him but she only employed a cook and a girl for cleaning and serving the evening meal. After he’d unpacked his things, William went out again and caught a tram into the town. He walked along Gold Street looking at the shop windows. The streets were busy with trams and motorbuses, as well as horse drawn carriages and the occasional motorcar, and the pavements were full of people. After Scaldwell, and even Oundle, the town felt thriving and prosperous, and William began to feel more optimistic about his situation. Though he was alone in the world he was well educated and well dressed, and he had a little money in his pocket, enough to get him started in his new life. He decided that he would begin looking for a position straight away. Within a few weeks, he thought, he would be earning a regular income, responsible to nobody but himself. He would find rooms, which he would make comfortable with books and pictures on the wall that were to his taste. No doubt he wouldn’t be able to afford anything very grand to begin with, but it would be his home, and he would make it as pleasant as he could. He resolved to put his recent disappointments and the sorrow of his father’s death behind him and look forward to the future instead.
    He still had the paper he’d bought earlier, but when he looked at the section advertising vacant situations he was surprised at how few there were. Though nothing appealed particularly, he was aware that his money wouldn’t last very long and he resolved to take any kind of work to begin with. Once he’d had a chance to settle down he would think about his longer term plans. Most of the advertisements were for manual work in factories or warehouses, but there were some vacancies for office clerks which William thought he might be more suited to. Though all of them seemed to require relevant experience, he was sure that his education - coupled with a willingness to learn - ought to do instead.
    At the first place he went to he was told the position had already been filled, and the same thing happened when he arrived at the Northampton Boot Company, where a position as a clerk in the stores was advertised. As he left, William was glad the job had gone. The firm occupied a number of high, dirty brick buildings with a grim and forbidding air about them, and the air smelt unpleasantly of blood and the chemicals used in the tanning works.
    The third place he tried was a brewery, where the position of clerk in the purchasing office had been advertised. When he arrived he joined a dozen men lined up in a corridor, all waiting to be interviewed. They were all older than William. He took his place next to a man who was perhaps in his mid to late twenties, who wore a suit that didn’t quite fit him properly, and whose shirt collar was beginning to fray at the edge. All of the men had a similar sort of appearance, and William realised that in the clothes he wore, paid for by his grandfather before he died, he stood out from them. The man in front of him nodded.
    ‘I ‘aven’t seen you around before.’
    ‘I only arrived today,’ William said, wondering why the man would expect to have seen him in a town the size of Northampton. The man seemed taken aback by the way William spoke, and afterwards didn’t speak to him again.   
    Eventually it was William’s turn to be called into a small, cramped office where a fat, balding man sat behind a desk dictating a letter to a young woman who sat in front of typewriter at a small desk in the corner.
    The man paused mid-sentence and looked curiously at William. ‘Are you here about the position then?’
    ‘Yes, sir. My name is William Reynolds.’
    ‘What sort of experience have you got?’
    ‘None really, I’m afraid. I was at Oundle school until recently.’ He was beginning to realise that there were a lot of people looking for work, and that he would have to sell himself to stand out from them, especially given his lack of experience. ‘I passed