My dad’s print works wasn’t just a business – it was an ink-spattered dream factory

The smell of ink does things to me. That high acrid wheeze over tangy base metal. Lovely. It’s not a smell everyone would enjoy, but for a printer’s daughter it is sheer bliss. It makes my whole body ring with energy, comfort and a deep, certain hope. Instantly I am transported to a place of adventure and dreams. I am in my father’s printing works.

I used to love going there as a kid: the paper stores like jungles, the gloppy rollers, the surgical metal plates. It was a place of creation and sonic thrills. My sister and I would climb the paper stacks and make wigs out of the offcuts. We’d build dens with pallets and ride around on the manual forklift. The sound of the lithographic machines – as big as trains, or so they seemed – was a hiss and a suck and a whirr and a boom as they turned fresh paper into magic print. When I first saw the sound of Ivor the Engine written down – “Pish t’coo pish t’coo pish t’coo” – I remember thinking: that’s not Ivor the Engine, that’s a four-colour Heidelberg Speedmaster.

My father’s factory was called New Leaf Press and was in Newton Heath, east Manchester, a smoke-scarred suburb just beyond Ancoats, packed with chatty cafes and green-veined Victorian brick. He built the factory from scratch, setting up in a smaller place on Dantzic Street in the city centre when I was three and my sister was a newborn. I have sketchy memories of that first place: a few two-colour printing machines, a snowy Christmas Eve spent collecting the presents hidden there. What I do have in my mind, however, is the story about my father getting the first jobs in. He walked around the city offering to do print jobs – for free – for several high-profile companies. When they asked him why they should trust a tiny new business, he said: “Because I’m good, and you’ve got nothing to lose – if you like it, you can pay me next time.” He got a huge amount of work, stayed up all night running those two-colour machines and delivered the jobs the next day – perfectly printed, finished and packed – cool as a cucumber. “Hey, cocky-arse,” one big boss said as my father walked out of his office. “Here’s another job for you. And another.” And he was off.

It’s one of my favourite family anecdotes: my young father striding around Manchester, lanky and bespectacled and full of northern swagger, setting in motion what would become a huge part of my childhood and family. The factory was a part of my brain and heart – as much as any treehouse or meadow. My sister and I used to call it a “third sibling” because it felt very much like Dad’s other baby. I remember holidays when he’d call the factory every day to see how they were getting on. At first we thought he was worried that they couldn’t run the place without him; gradually it became apparent that the real worry was that they could. Because where would that leave him? That factory was part of his identity. He built it and it built him. It built a life for all of us. It was why he was never going to find retirement easy.

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It is a point of connection between us: neither my father nor I know where our work ends and we begin. My father’s father was a printer, as were his father’s brothers, and his father’s father, who lost two fingers in a press. My father used to come home with guillotine injuries – clean slices in the tops of his hands, scabbing with plasma – and my sister and I would huddle round and gawp like he’d just returned from war.

My grandfather told my father when he was 15 that he needed to choose a trade, and my father chose printing, thinking that his dad had done all right out of it. My grandfather was murdered – stabbed by another printer working late one night in the Express building in Manchester – when my father was just 21. My father never talked much about it, but when the industry started to shift – from litho towards digital, and then away from print entirely – I felt as though there was a fundamental family loss that we were only just starting to acknowledge. When my son was born in 2016, I named him after my grandfather. My family history feels so entwined with printing that I am convinced my attraction to books and the written word springs from my deep love of print. I’m often asked when I knew I wanted to be a writer. The answer is: when I first saw the romance in printing factories.

We said farewell to my father’s factory last year. He clanked the door shut and locked the padlock on the gate for the last time. It hit us all hard, the loss of that place. But the spirit that built it – my father’s grit and dynamism, my mother’s maths brain, hardcore childcare and soulful counsel – will live on in my family for ever. My dad was a printer for 52 years and ran his business for 35 of those. His relationship with his work has adapted to fit retirement, but I hope he knows how proud I am of him every day. The place he built is the place we all still find ourselves in. As for things that trigger happy memories: you can keep your madeleines. I’ll take a large tin of magenta.

• Emma Jane Unsworth is an author