Give Us This Day (42 page)

She lay very still, aware once again of the night sounds in the coverts and the pale glow of moonlight, almost blue it looked, shafting a gap in the curtains and touching a corner of the bed. Her body continued to tremble but her mind was inexplicably still. She knew then, savouring the knowledge with a deep sense of fulfilment, that Jo had been uncannily right after all. Not only about Clint but about her errant peace of mind.

PART FOUR

Reconnaissance

One

In the Beginning There Was George…

T
he transition of Swann-on-Wheels from a horse-powered network to a haulage system served by a fleet of mechanical vehicles, supplemented by horse teams where the terrain was more suited to hooves than tyres, was effected so quietly and so smoothly that it never qualified as a nine-day wonder in the trade.

Briefly, in city coffee houses frequented by shipping men, and in the loading yards of midland and northern factories, it was seen as a typical foray of that old fox Swann, who had been trying to corner the national hauling trade from the day he recruited his ruffian army of unemployed coachmen and Thameside waifs back in the ‘fifties. Briefly because the ‘fifties themselves were now viewed as an era not far removed from that of Stephenson’s Rocket.

Swann, they recalled, flaunting his banner-with-the-strange-device, had always been an innovator, so there was nothing remarkable about his overnight conversion to horseless carriages. He would likely burn his fingers, but he could afford that, having exacted his percentage from almost everything carted over county borders during the last forty years. Even those among his rivals who actually owned a private motor and bumped their wives and families down to the seaside at weekends considered that he might, for once, have over-reached himself, especially when it got around that he was designing and building his own transport. But that again was to be expected of a man who had always been a jump ahead of his competitors and who still qualified as an eccentric in a world where eccentrics were rare and becoming rarer. After all, no one could challenge Swann’s record as an amateur whose enterprise, launched with a hundred Clydesdales and half as many waggons, had gone on to become a household word in a single generation, and there was no denying the horseless carriage had come to stay. Only a small minority of merchants refused to entrust their goods to these clumsy, vapourtrailing equipages that people were beginning to call “lorries,” once their overall performances were seen to be fairly satisfactory. A majority, remembering Swann’s reliability and punctuality, were content (though not over-eager) to renew their contracts, reasoning that Swann and his successors must know their business, or how could they have survived the cut-and-thrust of the last half-a-century, when something revolutionary appeared on the world’s markets every day of the week.

This then was the impersonal verdict on the transition. It was otherwise from within, where initial opposition to the change-over had been so resolute that it had been seen as a board-room mutiny. Here, indeed throughout the entire network, there had been a ransacking of conscience and personal prejudice that was regarded as a rich private joke by the minority that had voted in favour of George on what was accepted by Swann veterans as “The Watershed.” That is to say, the period immediately prior to George Swann’s famed cross-country jaunt with a six-ton gun-turret aboard, a feat that set every transporter in the country by the ears once they had digested the relevant logistics. The conversion was unanimous and all but immediate, and perhaps Jack-o’-Lantern Coles summed it up best in a Biblical parody of the incident that enlivened the otherwise dull speeches at the firm’s annual dinner in December 1905. It was an occasion when the commissioning of the hundredth Swann-Maxie was announced by Scottie Quirt, and Coles said, proposing the customary toast to the firm: “In the beginning there was Adam. And Adam begat George. But George did much better in that he begat the giant Maximus, and Maximus begat the Swann-Maxie that did multiply until it darkened the countryside. But the elders of the tribe murmured against such begetting and took counsel among themselves, saying, ‘It is not seemly in the sight of the righteous that so great a strain should be placed upon our pockets.’ Yet George set his face against them and persisted. And it came to pass that they were convinced in spite of themselves, and took counsel one with the other again, saying, ‘We have sinned and will go forth in sackcloth and ashes manifesting our fault. For this man has found favour in the sight of the Lord and we will henceforth bow down before him and do his bidding…!’”

It was recorded that even Young Rookwood smiled (he had never been known to laugh) but the others, Godsall and his fellow doubters, were more generous. Few annual dinner speakers had received such a weight of applause and laughter as Clint Coles, when he sat down and reached for his glass of hock. Converted they were, and to a man, but some went even further, becoming, as George told Adam after the 1906 New Year conference, “More Catholic than the Pope.” And indeed they were, inasmuch as they were clamouring for vehicles much faster than Scottie could manufacture them. But notwithstanding this, George rejected his father’s advice that he should put the patent out to tender among the two hundred-odd registered motor manufacturers now operating in the country.

“No, sir!” he said, with emphasis. “Swann-Maxie remains a private company in our name, although it’s officially registered under the title of Swann & Quirt, Scottie owning forty-nine per cent of the stock. From here on we sell ourselves all the transport we need, even if we have to dribble it out piecemeal. That way we not only save money, we also modify week by week, using our experiences on the open road as blueprint material. Ten years from now, five maybe, fourfifths of those manufacturers will be broke and out of business. You recall what happened at the tail-end of the railway boom, before you set up in business?”

“I remember very well. There were two hundred bankruptcies in as many weeks, but there’s no real comparison, is there? The founding of a railway company called for heavy investment, mostly for rights of way, and a motor can drive anywhere it pleases on established highways.”

“I’m saying the majority of those pioneers are amateurs,” said George. And when Adam reminded him that both he and George had been amateurs in their day he said sharply, “Not in that sense, Gov’nor. We mapped our markets in advance. That’s more than you can say of this bunch. Most of ‘em are financed by loan sharks, who make damned sure they skim any profit that emerges. Half of ‘em are working in back street stables, buying their materials retail from blacksmiths and coach builders, and all of ‘em, without a single exception so far as I know, are concentrating on the joyride market.”

It made sense, as George’s pronouncements usually did on reflection, and Adam, who had never stood in awe of anyone during twelve years’ soldiering and forty years’ trading, confessed to a certain awe of his son when he gave Henrietta a summary of the discussion that same night.

“I once thought of him as a chip off the old block,” he said, ruefully, “but I’m well on the way to revising that opinion. Before he’s done, the trade will think of him as the block and me as the chip.”

It irritated her to hear him talking like that, even in praise of his own son, for she could never see him as anything less than an oak among saplings.

“He had two advantages you never had. Almost unlimited capital, and a father egging him on,” she said, sharply, and was rewarded by a self-satisfied grin on his face as he reached over her to extinguish the bedside lamp.

“Ah, something in that.”
* * *

By early summer of that same year, he had a much sharper reminder of the debt George owed him when the new Swann maps appeared in the annual brochure. For there, set out for all to see, was the twentieth-century image of Adam Swann’s earliest essay in commercial cartography, reproducing so many features of the original company maps, now framed and exhibited in the Swann museum at The Hermitage. For the revised theme of the network now was re-regionalisation and George, he noted, had even restored some of the first names bestowed upon regions by Adam in 1858.

He carried the brochure away to his perch on the knoll overlooking the southern boundary of the estate, as intrigued as a lad with a complicated mechanical toy. One by one, superimpositions of the new upon the old emerged as though he was looking at George’s fleet of mechanically-propelled vehicles through the legs of a hundred Clydesdales, symbol of all the muscle, blood, and bone that had hauled his customers’ goods from one end of the country to the other.

For to Adam the familiar tracings of old routes and boundaries of the network were clearly visible under the firmly drawn lines of the new frontiers, dictated not by railways, as in his day, but by the factors that had governed the path of the gridiron in Stephenson’s day.

First, Zeus among them, was geology, the innumerable strata of chalk, greenstone, Lias, Trias, Permian, oolite, basalt, and granite that had prescribed the movements and habitats of men in these islands since the beginning of time and still, for all man’s new technologies, called the tune and regulated the pace.

Then came temperatures and rainfall, and the use man had made of the land in his nonstop wrestle with the elements, and after that, on the heels of climate, came crops, mineral resources, and the new concentrations of electrical and industrial power and population.

It was as though he was looking at a potted history of transportation, and in the siting of George’s new depots, he could detect pointers to all the problems and frustrations of man’s fight against gravity since stones were dragged across country by weight of muscle for the erection of cromlechs and the building of pagan temples. But, once he had absorbed the general message of the map, he was able to distinguish the domestic patterns that had emerged and found here food for speculation in the way George had set about carving up the realm for the convenience of Swann and Swann’s customers. Some basic conclusions leaped from the page, but there were others, born of stresses unknown in his day, that he had to search for.

It was quite clear, for instance, that terrain had reprieved the horse in many of the areas of the west and north. In the old Western Wedge, so prolific in humps, bogs, and untamed heathlands, the horse still reigned and would, he supposed, continue to reign for a long time yet. Only two depots, Exeter and Truro, fielded a few motor vehicles designed to operate over short distances, and the same was true of the Mountain Square, with its main depot shifted from Abergavenny to Cardiff. It would be a long time, he mused, before Taffy took horseless carriages for granted, save in the extreme south of the principality where all its heavy industries were located.

Further north, among the Cumberland and Westmorland fells, few if any Swann-Maxies would run, whereas north of the Tay, horse power, in the oldfashioned sense, would hold its own, probably until he and George too were dust in the churchyard down the road.

Yet here and there, in areas that Adam recognised as a terrible challenge to the newcomer, George had compromised, siting branch depots, furnished with teams transferred from elsewhere to supplement and link Swann hauls, on either side of high or soggy ground.

The Pennine depots were a case in point. At six centres, both east and west of the Pennine Chain, George had marked out territory where teams could be summoned at short notice to bridge a difficult stretch, and when they were not so employed they would doubtless earn their oats on shorter, local hauls. All down the eastern coast, clear across the old Southern Square, and over the whole of Kent, the motor vehicle predominated, but the Cotswolds, the northern fells, and the Fens were served by emergency depots. Only Ireland, where the pace was slower, was all but denied power-driven vans. Belfast had two and Dublin three. The other ninetyfive were shared, unequally, among English and Lowland Scottish shires and the industrialised regions of South Wales. As Adam refolded the pull-out map inside the brochure, he wondered how impressive an ascendancy George enjoyed among those quarrelsome privateers, so jealous of their individual rights and privileges.

2

He was right to ponder the question. Under the reconstruction, George discovered, the managers were not only greedy for vehicles but also for territory, and the right to nominate managers of the sub-depots sited within their frontiers. The preparation of the short lists for these, and for the new territories, demanded great a deal of thought, private enquiry, and tact, and even when they were approved there were mutterings all round.

There were now thirteen areas, eight of them with all but unchanged frontiers, and in the main he left the suzerainty of these severely alone.

Bertieboy Bickford still ruled in the west, Young Rookwood in an enlarged Southern Square, and Godsall in the old Kentish Triangle, where his influence was undisputed. Similarly Jake Higson, he who had adopted the kilt, was left master of Scotland, and the ageing Dockett, who had at last abandoned his fence-squat, was still in charge of the Isle of Wight, otherwise known as Tom Tiddler’s Land. Spectacular gambles, however, had to be taken with new personnel appointed to oversee the new territories, and the two biggest of these showed up in The Funnel—a two-hundred-mile wedge tapering north from Southern Square to the plain of York and the Polygon territory, where the Lancashire cotton and Liverpool shipping industries were paramount.

Casting round for a promising master of these, George remembered his brother Edward’s contribution to the now historic snail-crawl from Bromsgrove to the naval dockyard at Devonport, and on impulse he took a night train to Cardiff, where he found Edward superintending repairs to a ditched Swann-Maxie that had fouled a gateway a few miles from the depot and had to be towed home by horses. Edward said, emerging from beneath the chassis with a broad smear of oil on his forehead, “I’ve been thinking of you all morning, George. When are you going to set up a driving school, and put these damned mechanics through a running repair test? Pritchard can handle a vehicle well enough, but he’s got no more idea about what makes it tick than a South Sea Islander.”

The remark, and its portentous implications, decided George in a decision he had been considering ever since reorganisation.

“That’s an idea that’s been playing hide and seek in my head ever since we made that run, kid. I’ll get about it as soon as I can clear a space on the desk. In the meantime, however, wash your face and join me in a beer, for I’ve a proposition to put to you,” and they went across the road to the Prince of Wales’ Feathers and ordered two pints from the wood. With Edward one never had to approach a subject deviously. He said, after the first draught, “You’ve served a long enough apprenticeship in the backwoods, Edward. How do you feel about taking charge of The Funnel?”