God Is an Englishman (11 page)

“I helped to empty the well at Cawnpore.”

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Walker looked at him with a new interest. “That has a bearing on why you’re here? But a man doesn’t make money out of with drawals, Mr. Swann.”

“I should enjoy making money as much as the next man, but it would have to be from some form of personal enterprise. India needs policing but I’m not a policeman. Maybe I have too much sympathy with the burglar or, at all events, with the burglar’s motives. But even that isn’t the whole truth.”

“What is the whole truth, Mr. Swann?”

“Let’s say I’ve had my fill of risking my skin to glorify buffoons, like that prize idiot Cardigan of the Light Brigade.”

“You were in the Crimea as well as the Mutiny?”

“I saw the Light Brigade shot to pieces. I daresay I should have died with it if I hadn’t had the luck to be riding a lamed horse that particular day. You could say I’ve had luck of a kind all along. Only two of my Addiscombe class survived the Mutiny, me and one other. But it can’t last for ever and if I go down it’ll be in my own cause. Does that earn me the map, Mr. Walker?” The superintendent settled himself, shooting his long legs under the desk and tilting his chair. “Why take it for granted commercial warfare is less chancy? Or more civilised for that matter? I assure you it isn’t, or not nowadays. The best times are behind us. It’s a costermonger’s scramble for money and power today.

There’s no idealism or personal initiative left in it. A thousand companies, most of them bucket shops, scrambling for concessions and for Johnny Raw’s cash to squander. No cohesion. No unity of purpose. Just quick profits at the expense of the Crown, the public, and the other speculator over the hill. And speaking of hills, Mr. Swann, I’ll give you something better than a map. Don’t invest a penny in rail ways. Anything else you care to name but not railways. Why?

Be cause all the main trunk routes are laid, and in less than ten years ninety-five per cent of the smaller lines will be carrying freight and passengers at a loss. All that’s left for the gleaners is to build where no railway could possibly pay and that map will prove it. You ob viously know something about it, so you might also remember Stephenson’s Chat Moss? You watched Balaclava and I watched Chat Moss. It made my blood run cold. His reputation, and hun dreds of thousands of speculators’ cash, staked on the double track between Manchester and Liverpool, and there it was, disappearing into a bog overnight.”

“Stephenson mastered Chat Moss.”

“Men like Stephenson and Brunel are two in ten million, Mr. Swann. And in those days their backers were interested in something better than money. Do I make my point?”

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Adam said, smiling, “You’re making so many points that I’m be ginning to wonder if I should re-enlist,” and then, with an eagerness that made him feel a boy in this man’s presence, “I’ve lain out there under the stars dreaming of people like you. Army life made a Crusoe out of me. I’m turned thirty but I’ve got ambition and a certain amount of capital to invest. If you were me, and wanted to start all over again, how would you begin, Mr. Walker?”

“That’s putting a damnable responsibility on someone who mis took you for a lawyer’s tout,” Walker said, but tilted his chair for ward and placed both elbows on the table, so that Adam, watching his expression, knew he would get an honest answer. Walker said, after a longish pause, “Forget steel, coal, cotton, wool, and every thing else that gave us a headstart over the Continentals. Forget land too. British agriculture is marked down for death. I don’t see you as a retailer, so what remains? Something where the years behind you aren’t entirely wasted. Something where the lessons you learned in the field can be added to your capital.”

“Go on.”

“You’re an ex-cavalryman and you must have specialist know ledge of horses.

There’s more future in horse-transport than the Cleverdicks would have you believe. The railways can solve all the big problems but none of the small ones.

They can’t in a group of islands threaded by rivers and broken up by stiff gradients and marshes like Chat Moss and the Fens. If I were you, Mr. Swann—and I wish to God I were and starting all over again—I would spend the next week studying the
blank areas
of that map there. Then travel about and take a look at the goods yards of the most successful com panies, and see merchandise piled in the rain on all their loading bays for want of a good dispersal system. Think about that, Mr. Swann. And here’s a final piece of advice, to prove I’m a disinterested party. When you go north to Cumberland, don’t use my railway, except for your luggage. You’ve been away from your potential workshop a long time, and you won’t learn anything new about it staring out of a carriage window at cows.

Get yourself a good horse—you can buy one at today’s market for a handful of guineas—and take advantage of this wonderful weather we’re having.” He looked at the map. “Plymouth to Derwentwater. Say three-fifty miles, at around twenty miles a day, and as good a cross-section of the country as you’d find between any two points of the compass. Think about that too, Mr. Swann, and here is your homework, with my compliments.”

He took the map from its clamps and folded it eight times, reduc ing it to a crackling package about eighteen inches long and half as broad. Somewhere a GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 51

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bell clanged and Aaron Walker glanced out of his peephole window. “That’s the twelve-ten from Bristol, right on time and I have to meet it. There’ll be a gaggle of directors aboard, all come to see how I waste my time ‘downalong.’ I have some difficulty convincing them I am not addicted to playing bowls on the Hoe, Mr. Swann.”

They shook hands across the desk, and Adam followed him out into the arcade.

Nothing had changed out here. Sombre gentlemen in dark suits and tall hats, all the cares of commerce on their shoulders, dodged in and out of the platform barriers. Luggage trundled by on two- and four-wheel trolleys. Women in “travelling” crinolines swished past, shaking their flounces to rid them of drifting smuts. The rumble of trucks, the intermittent hiss of escaping steam, the squeals of excited children soared like a multi-tongued prayer to the echoing canopy of the depot. With a lift of his hand Aaron Walker was swallowed up in a swarm of customers and underlings.

Adam drifted back to the luggage cave to claim the stub that the long-nosed clerk had been too busy to bring, and recognising his man he looked worried.

“Not had a minute, sir,” he said, “but I got it right here tell the Gaffer,” and he produced a voucher from his waistcoat pocket. “You can get your ticket at the booking-hall under the clock,” he added, as though to ward off a possible reprimand, but Adam felt he could afford the luxury of a small joke. “The luggage is going ahead,” he said, “but I’m following. On horseback,” and he thought he had never seen a man look more out raged. He went out into the June sunshine and boarded the nearest cab for the cattle market.

3

It was the most leisurely journey of his life and certainly the most instructive.

As he moved north-east, sometimes taking as long as four days to cross from one county border to the next, a whole spread of England unfolded, so that he saw not merely their geographical features but the crafts and characters of the people rooted in successive hill-folds and river bottoms. His ear, always attuned to dialects, marked their speech idioms, vowel sounds, and habits, and sometimes even their professions were revealed to him in gait and gesture. As he watched them from an inn window over looking some village green, his sense of isolation fell away, leaving him tolerant, watchful and deeply at peace with himself, as though he had entered into a new and deeper kinship with all he remembered of childhood and boyhood, and all he had admired in Englishmen whose bones GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 52

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lay in shallow graves on the slopes of the Fedioukine Hills and the Causeway Heights, and in half-a-hundred squalid villages along the banks of the Ganges.

But this was by no means all he gained following Aaron Walker’s eccentric advice. On still, midsummer nights, and again in the first hour after sunrise, he would sit crosslegged before his bivouac tent pitched in some woodland clearing, or beside some tumbling stream, sniffing, watching, and listening to the life stirring about him, recalling the name of this bird or that, checking his memory against a flash of plumage among the June gorse, and slowly adjusting to the miracle of regeneration that the scenes and scents of the countryside presented.

And as this healing process advanced the stench of putrefaction that had lingered in his nostrils since Cawnpore was exorcised by the scent of honeysuckle, and of a hundred hedgerow flowers for which he had no names. Soon this sense of liberation enlarged itself into an almost physical experience, so that to some extent he could analyse it, relating it to memories of a pastoral England that must have been hiding in his saddlebags all these years. It had to do, he supposed, with the casually bestowed legacies of Smollett and Goldsmith, Constable, Cotman, and Crome, who gave a man a sense of belonging in the community of men who shod his horse and women who served him ale. But there was a wider, more restless community in the glades and along the verges where he unsaddled, a shy and puckish life-force that stirred and rustled and whistled and flitted whenever he and his mare were still.

There were so many Englands. On that first day’s ride over the moor to Moretonhampstead he crossed a treeless tract that stretched as far as the eye could see, and before the sun got up, drink ing up the ground mist at a draught, he might have been clip-clopping across the clouds with only a distant tor for company. It was the best kind of weather for a jaunt of this kind, cool in the early mornings, when he sometimes urged the mare into a mile-consuming jog-trot, blazing hot at noon, when he sought the sanctuary of the woods, and cool again in the evening, when he would seek a pleasant spot for his bivouac, eat a cold supper, and listen to his thoughts. He was never lonely, as he had been during the voyage. Everywhere he went he met with a polite, impersonal welcome from cottagers, inn keepers, drovers, and village craftsmen, who gave him directions and passed the time of day with the incurious civility of people whose lives had adjusted to the sweep of the centuries, whose traditions were habits before Angevin kings had brought a measure of security and stability into their fields and townships.

He first became aware of this on his third day out, when he was crossing Exeter on a market day and the grey towers of the cath edral were presiding over GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 53

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a weekly rout that had persisted among the huddle of shops and stalls and houses for time out of mind, and a much older England again asserted itself in Honiton, Taunton, and Wells, all of which seemed to him to be enjoying the best of both worlds, the rich fat of a prosperous present, and the serenity of a settled past, for in all three places money was changing hands fast, the children looked fat and rosy, and time, doled out sparingly by the bells of thirteenth-century churches, had no power to accelerate the pace of the countryman’s walk, or the speed with which he drove bargains with his neighbours.

On the seventh day he reined in a few miles beyond Bridgewater and looked over his shoulder at the field of Sedgemoor, recalling that these people had had their share of tribulation, and that the peace they took for granted had not been acquired without struggle and sacrifice, for it was in these dykes and withy clumps that Kirke and his dragoons had hunted men like coneys, slaughtering some and delivering others up to Jeffreys as human sacrifices to the bigotry of a London-based king. It crossed his mind then to wonder whether the clamour of battle would ever return to this sun-soaked plain, and whether Englishmen would continue to press for an ex tension of the basic liberties they had wrestled from Norman over lords, a greedy church, and the swarm of opportunists who, over successive centuries, had gravitated to the wealthiest city in the world. He had to admit that they looked more than capable of sur viving down here among their hayricks and their sleek, cud-chewing cattle, but his confidence was shaken somewhat by witnessing, at a place called Radstock, west of Bath, a shift of coal-miners emerge from the pit and disperse to their cottage homes after a ten-hour stint in galleries far below the Mendips. He had not realised until then that they mined coal this far west, or that the stain of industrial expansion had spread so far beyond the Midland plain, the cotton belt, and the woollen towns.

The men, moving like stocky gnomes, looked exhausted and apathetic, but then he remembered that dramatic advances in the franchise were already being won from the central government by their counterparts in the Midlands and the North, and also that many vocal leaders were emerging from the ranks of that catalyst of independence, the good old British Puritan.

Through Bath, where he rested his mare for two days, then on over the uplands of the Cotswolds, through stone villages that looked as if they had been built to withstand annual hurricanes and an occasional earthquake, and on beyond Gloucester where he rode across the Vale of Evesham, rich with the promise of a bumper fruit harvest and populated by a brusquer, more matter-of-fact countryman than he had met further west.

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It was half a day’s ride beyond Worcester that he first saw the dun brown cloud on the north-eastern horizon, telling him that he was now approaching the cluster of towns at the junction of the four shires, shires that remained predominantly agricultural but ceded annual territory to the urban sprawl that constituted one of the main centres of national wealth.