Counting turns with Nell

Nell Fitch, second-year walk-boy, spent the whole of the noon walk last Tuesday saying numbers under her breath. One to about three thousand and four. Marta, the foreman, let her.

Counting turns sounds like a superstition. It is not. The jack spins at a pace the spinner sets by feel, and the lay of a rope depends on the turns being even down its whole length. A walk-boy who counts learns what an even pace sounds like in their own head, so that on the day the wireless cuts out and the jack goes quiet, they hear the missing turn before the rope does.

Nell says the number she will remember is one thousand: the turn at which she stopped hearing her own voice and started hearing the rope. Bert, oldest of the three spinners, says that is the whole apprenticeship in one sentence. Ivy says wait until she has to do it backwards. Nobody has explained to the journal what doing it backwards means, and Bert grinned and would not say.