The Prestige by Christopher Priest Read Free Book Online

own story I shall confine myself to the best. I loved him, and learnt from him many of the
     cabinet-making techniques which, inadvertently by him, have made my name and fortune. I
     can attest that my father was hard-working, honest, sober, intelligent and, in his own
     way, generous. He was fair to his employees. Because he was not a God-fearing man, and no
     churchgoer, he brought up his family to act within a benign secularism, in which neither
     action nor inaction would occur to cause hurt or harm to others. He was a brilliant
     cabinet-maker and a good wheelwright. I realized, eventually, that whatever emotional
     outbursts our family had to endure (because there were several) his anger must have been
     caused by inner frustrations, although at what and of what sort I was never entirely sure.
     Although I was never myself a target for his worst moments, I grew up a little scared of
     my father but loved him profoundly.
    My mother's name was Betsy May Borden (née Robertson), my father's name was Joseph Andrew
     Borden. I had a total of seven brothers and sisters, although because of infant deaths I
     knew only five of them. I was neither the oldest nor the youngest child, and was not
     particularly favoured by either parent. I grew up in reasonable harmony with most, if not
     all, of my siblings.
    When I was twelve I was taken away from the school and placed to work as a wheelwright's
     apprentice in my father's yard. Here my adult life began, both in the sense that from this
     time I spent more time with adults than with other children, and that my own real future
     started to become clear to me. Two factors were pivotal.
    The first was, simply enough, the handling of wood. I had grown up with the sight and
     smell of it, so that both were familiar to me. I had little idea how wood
    
    
     felt
    
    
     when you picked it up, or cleaved it, or sawed it. From the first moment I handled wood
     with purposeful intent I began to respect it, and realize what could be done with it.
     Wood, when properly seasoned, and hewed to take advantage of the natural grain, is
     beautiful, strong, light and supple. It can be cut to almost any shape; it can be worked
     or adhered to almost any other material. You can paint it, stain it, bleach it, flex it.
     It is at once outstanding and commonplace, so that when something manufactured of wood is
     present it lends a quiet feeling of solid normality, and so is hardly ever noticed.
    In short it is the ideal medium for the illusionist.
    At the yard I was given no preferential treatment as the proprietor's son. On my first
     day, I was sent to begin learning the business by taking on the roughest, hardest job in
     the yard — I and another apprentice were put to work in a saw-pit. The twelve-hour days of
     that (we started at 6.00 a.m. and finished at 8.00 p.m. every day, with only three short
     breaks for meals) hardened my body like no other work I can conceive of, and taught me to
     fear as well as respect the heavy cords of timber. After that initiation, which continued
     for several months, I was moved to the less physically demanding but more exacting work of
     learning to cut, turn and smooth the wood for the spokes and felloes of the wheels. Here I
     came into regular contact with the wheelwrights and other men who worked for my father,
     and saw less of my fellow apprentices.
    One morning, about a year after I had left school, a contract worker named Robert Noonan
     came to the yard to carry out some long-needed repair and redecoration work to the rear
     wall of the yard, which had been damaged in a storm some years before. With Noonan's
     arrival came the second great influence on the direction of my future life.
    I, busy about my labours, barely even noticed him, but at 1.00 p.m. when we broke for
     lunch, Noonan came and sat with me and the other men at the trestle table where we ate our
     food. He produced a pack of playing cards, and