God Is an Englishman (107 page)

“The im portant thing is to be ready to back yourself and then find people willing to cover the bet. That, and to guard against self-pity. I should know.” She felt immensely comforted in his presence and in his need of her, and the emotion demanded assurance of a kind she had never sought from anyone, not even Adam.

“You’re not married, are you, Tom?” He did not seem to put the obvious construction on the question but replied, simply, “No. I never cared to involve anyone fond of me in the life I led and the risks I ran.”

“There was somebody?”

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“No one in particular. I suppose I took my fun where I found it.” So had she, she reflected, except that there seemed to have been precious little fun all told. She was glad then that Mrs. Sprockett would soon be back, for she understood quite clearly what she would be inclined to propose if they were alone and it seemed very unfair to rush him to that extent. So she compromised, saying, “We might have fun working together, if you were so disposed. And that isn’t a roundabout leap-year proposal. At least we could get to know one another,” and he replied, soberly, “I don’t need time to get to know you. I’ve not thought about anyone else in all this time and what you might find harder to believe is that it didn’t begin with that ambush on the train.”

“When you were working in the yard? Nonsense, Tom.”

“It isn’t nonsense. You fascinated me from the first day. I used to watch you when you didn’t know it through that office window. When I heard you giving the orders, and men twice your age taking them, it sometimes seemed as if you were married to everyone in the yard and had brought everyone a dowry.” She laughed and it struck her that he could make her laugh without any trouble at all.

“Is that all? A loud-voiced gaffer in skirts?”

“No. As I say you always intrigued me but the real impact was when I saw those pipes slipping and had what you could call a cast-iron excuse to put my arms about you and satisfy myself that you handled like a woman.” It was an odd sort of compliment, she thought, but it pleased her. She said,

“Kiss me again then and go before we scandalise Mrs. Sprockett,” and he kissed her but with a mildly abstracted air. He had, she decided, a very rare technique, half drollery and half male gentleness that was new in her experience.

“Where are you staying, Tom?”

“The Wheatsheaf. I’m paid up until Saturday.”

“You want an advance on your wages?”

“No, I’d much prefer to earn it.”

He made ready to go then and she saw him as far as the door, smiling when he tipped his hat as he turned into the street and won dering if his elation matched hers, and whether a man like him would settle to any collar for more than a month. It was unimportant. A month would be long enough to enable her to readjust to the rhythm of things and stop feeling so damned sorry for herself. She closed the door, went through to her little bedroom, and began to unpack. As she did she caught herself humming.

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Six

petticoat

goveRnment

1

That was the autumn and winter of seeping, pitiless rains, of swiftly alternating gales, frosts, and thaws, that made the life of every man and beast in the network a torment. A time when thoughts turned yearningly to the summer that was gone, and forward to a spring that sometimes seemed reserved for the next generation.

Henrietta, clinging to her five-day stint at the yard until the Christ mas break, was there to hear the dolorous pleas of Ratcliffe in the west, the first domino to fall, setting off a chain reaction among the southerly regions. His initial bleat reached them as early as late October, after a fortnight’s torrential downpour had smashed the banks of the Exe, the Taw, the Torridge, the Bray, the Dart, and many lesser streams, inundating all the valleys along which his bread-and-butter runs travelled, and spilling millions of gallons of ruby floodwater across the grazing grounds of his regular customers be tween the Channel and Barnstaple Bay.

Then the Tamar and the placid Camel followed suit, and in a single disastrous twenty-four hours he lost eight loaded waggons and three teams, two of his waggoners barely escaping with their lives when a wall of water engulfed them north of Tiverton. That same week, with half his routes under water he had to turn to the railways for succour, not only in Devon but in Somerset too, in order to fulfil his commit ments, but as every other carrier in the west was in similar straits, deliveries piled up on sidings right across the region and railway em bankments were beginning to shred at a dozen places between the Vale of Taunton and Bodmin Moor. After his St. Thomas’ sub-depot had been flooded to a depth of four feet he sent a despairing wire for reserve teams, declaring that unless Rookwood in the Southern Square could help him, he could not undertake to keep his traffic moving for another week.

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They sent him a convoy and at once had cause to regret it, for large-scale subsidence along a stretch of the Wilts, Somerset, and Weymouth Railway north-west of Salisbury swamped Rookwood with a flood of a different kind. Every farmer for miles around began to clamour for road transport to haul London-bound produce to departure points further east, so that Rookwood, in his turn, had to call on the Kentish Triangle for help.

Then the implacable downpour moved east and Vicary, his low-lying territory laced with estuaries, was soon in difficulty, flooded roads necessitating complicated detours where the usual routes were blocked by a dozen or more collapsed bridges. The strain on the draught-horses was killing as they churned their way through seas of liquid mud and slewed into open country where landslides had ob literated the highways. Horses foundered, loads shifted, axles broke, canopies were stripped by high winds, and journeys that had been made in a few hours stretched into a day and a night throwing every timetable in the south into disarray.

Early December brought a brief respite when temperatures fell and the ground hardened, but a quick thaw followed and stream beds brimming with snow water washed down a wilderness of up rooted trees and tangled underbrush, so that conditions were soon chaotic in all four regions and reserve teams were just not to be had. It was then that the game of general post they had been playing with one another had to cease.

About a fortnight before Christmas, when things were at their worst but the most dreaded months of a haulier’s calendar were still to come, Henrietta made her decision but in obedience to her policy of giving the professionals first call, she summoned Keate, Tybalt, Godsall of the Kentish Triangle, and the lawyer Stock to the belfry, asking them what they had in mind to guard against a complete stand still when the regions advanced into the new year with depleted teams, broken-down vehicles, and a sullen, exhausted work-force.

They had ideas of a sort. Tybalt proposed a head office edict, for bidding the acceptance by any district manager of a single new com mission, all efforts being bent to meet the requirements of customers whose loyalty had been tested over the years.

Keate, whose cautious nature had been eroded to some extent by Adam’s ex-pansionist creed, had an alternative solution. Setting his face against the rejection of new business (especially when it was there for the taking), he suggested an overall abandonment of time-schedules right across the affected regions, a concession, he said, that would ease the tremendous burdens laid upon men, waggons GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 578

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and horses operating over half-ruined roads, particularly in the soggy Western Wedge and The Bonus that was now like a gigantic sponge.

Godsall, declaring that his loans to Vicary and Rookwood had left him dangerously under-strength, was more revolutionary. He recom mended a cancellation of all long-distance hauls and a new under standing with the railways on the basis of bulk shipments over a limited period, to carry them over into the spring.

Stock, the lawyer, offered no solution, having decided that Hen rietta’s recent probing into the financial aspects of her husband’s con cerns indicated that she had a sweeping decision of her own and was merely indulging in a cat-and-mouse exercise with her lieutenants. He was, as it happened, quite right as regards this although, as soon as she spoke, he thought himself a fool for not having seen through her request for a summary of the reserve accounts when she called on him the previous afternoon.

By now, of course, they had all adjusted to her presence behind that great desk of his, with her little feet on a footstool, and her art less way of playing them against one another. They were a genera tion of men who had grown to maturity under a small, plump woman ruling large slices of five continents. Perhaps this helped them to accept her invasion of their spheres of influence.

She said, rather pertly, Stock thought, “All very practical, I’m sure. But there must be a better way, a more
daring
way of going about it. What I mean is…

well, why couldn’t we turn this run of bad luck to our advantage, seeing that it must have thrown all our competitors into a regular whirl? Wouldn’t
you
say it has, Mr. Keate? Knowing as much as you do about what one can expect of the strongest teams?”

It was one of her artifices, Stock thought, smiling his discreet law yer’s smile, to flatter a man before she knocked him over the head, and he wondered how Swann had managed this sharp little filly be fore his accident. Pretty firmly, he would say, so that now she was making the most of a loose rein and enjoying every minute of the canter.

“The point is,” she went on, “and do correct me if I’m wrong, all those suggestions would help to keep us marking time but they wouldn’t do anything to prove we were the best hauliers in England. They would show we were just as dependent upon weather as any one else owning a horse and cart. Isn’t that so?” Stock saw Keate wince and guessed the reason. Keate thought of himself as a waggoner, not a carter, and there was a subtle difference, although it was not one a pretty woman like her could appreciate. In fairness to them all, however, he decided to give her the opening she was seeking and said, “Come now, Mrs.

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Swann. You’ve got the advantage of us, for you’ve slept on this and unless I’m mistaken you already have something in mind.”

She smiled then. It was one of her advantages as an amateur among professionals that she could have her bluff called without losing face. She said, “Well…yes, I have. Ever since poor Mr. Ratcliffe wired that he was in trouble. But I didn’t like to put it forward until I was sure it was in my husband’s mind as long ago as last December, when we had all that snow in the north. Now I
am
sure, because here’s a file on it,” and she produced a buff folder entitled “Central Pool. Team Allocation Account.”

None of them had ever seen the folder, and she did not tell them where she had found it. There was very little in it but some pages of jottings and a map, and it was the map rather than the notes that interested them. It was a sketch of the regions, with three place names ringed in pencil and decorated with question-marks. Keate, studying it closely, said he could make nothing of it, but a small bell tinkled in Stock’s mind, recalling Adam’s approach over a year ago when he had suggested deducting five per cent of the net annual profits and building up an account specifically earmarked for renewals. For the moment, however, he could not remember whether any decision had been arrived at, and saw no reason to link it to a map starred with the words “Harrogate,” “Derby,” and “Oxford.” He said, “I take it you’ve studied this file, ma’am?”

“I didn’t have to. The map, and Mr. Tybalt’s statement that there is already over four hundred pounds in that account, tells me what Mr. Swann had in mind for the winter. What’s happened proves what a good idea it was.” She had their attention now and made the most of it. “This con tinual shuttling we’ve been doing for months, it’s silly and wasteful, and beyond a certain point I think it makes matters worse in the long run. It would do as a stopgap if we had the worst of the winter behind us but we haven’t. In January and February the weather might well be worse, especially up north, and for heaven’s sake, where will that leave us? Borrowing teams and waggons from one another so often that not even Mr. Keate will know who has what, or for how long. What we should have is a fixed reserve of waggons and teams wait ing at specially selected points, and that was what Mr. Swann had in mind when he pencilled in those towns. Mr.

Tybalt says refuse new business. Mr. Keate says cut the time schedule, Mr. Godsall says go cap in hand to the railways. Well, I can’t believe Mr. Swann would approve of any of these courses. He was never one to miss a chance of making a new customer. He built his business on speed, and from all I hear he only made the railway serve him when and where it’s useful. I’ll tell you what I think we should GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 580

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do. Draw on that account, buy fresh teams, and base them on stables where they can be rushed in wherever they’re needed as soon as we get a call for them!” She searched her mind for a phrase, something that had reoccurred very frequently in newspaper reports of the Crimea and Mutiny she had read long before she got involved with waggons, sides of bacon, slates, and foundry machinery, and suddenly she remembered it.
“A strategic reserve!”
she concluded, triumphantly,

“that’s what’s needed,
a strategic reserve
!” Stock had the greatest difficulty in restraining a very unprofessional yelp of laughter. It was not that he found Henrietta’s proposal funny, indeed, it struck him at once as a brilliant piece of improvisation, but the expressions on the faces of the three other men were those of children who had just watched a magician pull a rabbit from a hat and hold it up by the ears. He covered himself by thumping his knee and exclaiming, immoderately, “That’s capital, Mrs. Swann!