Piece and Cheese

At the mill whistle the men sat down to their piece, and for a great many of them the piece was cheese. A piece is the Scots word for a sandwich, but the word carries a life the English one does not: it is the slice you took to the work, the thing in the box that got you through to the back shift. A nineteenth-century account of a stonemason has him subsisting through the day on his piece; an 1882 record of piece-time at a Scottish works has the men breaking at noon to eat oatmeal cakes and cheese. The cheese piece is older than the loaf it now rides on, and the word came packed with the day it fed.

What goes between the bread is decided by the box, not by a kitchen. The cheese is cut in a slab thick enough to taste over a long morning, because a packed piece is eaten hours after it is made and a thin shaving would have surrendered to the bread by then. Butter goes corner to corner and earns its place twice: it seasons the plain wheat against the cheese, and it lines the crumb so the slab's cool fat does not work it damp before piece-time comes round. There is no sauce to hide behind and no second filling to share the load. A wedge of cheese, butter, two slices of bread, and a lid pressed down on top of it.

The cheese is whatever the house buys and the week allows. Most often it is a firm orange Cheddar, sometimes a paler creamery block, occasionally a crumbling Scottish Dunlop from Ayrshire that breaks soft and lactic against the teeth. A mature wedge gives a long savoury push and a faint salt crystal at the edge; a young one gives a mild milky chew and a clean finish that asks for less. None of it is dressed up. The point of the cheese piece was never refinement but reliability, a known quantity in the box that would still be itself when the body finally got a minute to eat it.

Open a piece-box at the bench around eleven and the smell off it is cool and dairy-faint, a little of the wax paper it was wrapped in and a little of the cheese gone soft in the warmth of the bag. The bread has firmed where it pressed against the slab for four hours, the butter set hard at the edges from the chill of the tin. The first bite goes through soft crumb to the dense give of the cheese, the cure landing slow and salt-warm with the butter reading underneath it. Nothing in it is hot, nothing crunches, nothing is meant to surprise. It is fuel eaten fast and standing, then the lid goes back on the box for whatever is left.

A piece travels by box, and the box decides the company it keeps. The same word covered the skule-piece a child took to the desk and the twal-piece a labourer ate at noon, the bread folded into a piece-poke or shut in a tin and slung in a piece-bag for the walk to the work. The cheese version belonged to the older end of that life, the one most likely to have come out of a tin at a bench rather than a hand at a window. Its commonest cousin is the jeely piece, bread and jam, the snack nearly every Scottish child grew up on, and its plainest savoury sibling is the piece and ham, the same carried slice with cooked meat where the cheese would sit.

The piece out the window

The clearest the cheese piece ever got into the record came when it nearly stopped being possible. In old Glasgow tenements a mother would wrap a piece and fling it down from the window to a bairn playing in the back court, a few storeys at most. When the slums came down in the 1950s and the families went up into the new high flats of schemes like Castlemilk, the throw stopped working: a piece flung from the nineteenth floor does not survive the fall, and a child waiting below cannot catch it.

The schoolteacher and folk-song collector Adam McNaughtan, born in Camlachie in 1939, put that exact problem into a song in 1967. The Jeely Piece Song, also called the Skyscraper Wean, runs on one flat and unanswerable line: "Oh ye cannae fling pieces oot a twenty story flat." It is a comic lament about a wean going hungry because the loaf cannot make the drop, and it became one of the best-known things ever written in the Glasgow tongue.

A cheese piece in a box at the mill and a jeely piece flung from a window are the same word doing the same work, feeding a body with no time or means for anything grander. The tower blocks the song was aimed at were the Mitchell Hill Road flats in Castlemilk, which once held around 570 families; they came down in 2005, and the song about the piece that could not reach them outlasted the buildings.