At sixteen he was apprenticed to a big engineering firm in Aldersgate.
This is one of the oldest streets in London, near the Charterhouse,
Smithfield Market, and the famous "Bart's" Hospital. In fact, the office
of the firm was built over one of the old plague pits of 1665. His
father had died several years before; and for the boy to become an
apprentice in this well-known firm Mrs. McFee had to pay three hundred
pounds sterling. McFee has often wondered just what he got for the
money. However, the privilege of paying to be better than someone else
is an established way of working out one's destiny in England, and at
the time the mother and son knew no better than to conform. You will
find this problem, and the whole matter of gentility, cuttingly set out
in _Aliens_.

After three years as an apprentice, McFee was sent out by the firm on
various important engineering jobs, notably a pumping installation at
Tring, which he celebrated in a pamphlet of very creditable juvenile
verses, for which he borrowed Mr. Kipling's mantle. This was at the time
of the Boer War, when everybody in trousers who wrote verses was either
imitating Kipling or reacting from him.

His engineering work gave young McFee a powerful interest in the lives
and thoughts of the working classes. He was strongly influenced by
socialism, and all his spare moments were spent with books. He came to
live in Chelsea with an artist friend, but he had already tasted life at
first hand, and the rather hazy atmosphere of that literary and artistic
Utopia made him uneasy. His afternoons were spent at the British Museum
reading room, his evenings at the Northampton Institute, where he
attended classes, and even did a little lecturing of his own. Competent
engineer as he was, that was never sufficient to occupy his mind. As
early as 1902 he was writing short stories and trying to sell them.