God Is an Englishman (12 page)

He reined in here for a spell a few miles short of Stourbridge, and the process of assimilation was underlined for him by a sudden and rather poignant memory of young Paget, a chubby Worcester shire lad who had shared some of his vigils in the trenches before Sebastopol, and died soon after on the slopes of the Redan. The memory of Paget was very vivid here on his home ground, a pink-cheeked, fanciful youngster much given to spouting poetry, especially Gray and Wordsworth, a self-confessed hater of industrialisation and particularly averse to the spread of railways that bid fair, he declared, to ruin Worcestershire and Shropshire hunting. Paget, he recalled, had even invented a parable about it, involving the ransom this Midland heart of England had paid to what he called The Company of Black Dwarfs, changelings shown the door by the yeoman of the four shires and had then formed an alliance against them, with headquarters just across the Warwickshire border at what had been the village of Birmingham.

Their aim, he vowed, was to extend their domination of every farm, field, and coppice of the island kingdom, until the entire nation slaved and sweated under a sulphur-yellow pall lit by the glow of their furnaces.

It was an extravagant and prejudiced notion, but it had substance of a kind, and looking over his shoulder at the stationary mushroom cloud in the sky, he could share for a moment Paget’s gloomy vision of the Black Dwarfs’ master-plan—to filch a green acre there, to raise a brick breastwork there, to push their sooty picquet lines across fields yellow with charlock until their advance was stemmed by the mountain bastions of Wales, once more a final refuge for the original inhabitants of the island. For himself, however, he was pre pared to compromise. From where he sat his horse on the last wooded bluffs of Worcestershire, and within sight of the town of Wolverhampton, the country fell away to a greyish plain of uniform flatness, where the theme of enterprise was marked out by the forking lines of the Severn Valley railway and the Oxford, Worcester, and Wolverhampton line picked out in the puff clouds of two, slow-moving freight trains, one heading for the old England, the other into the heart of the new.

He sat there, his feet free of the stirrups, thinking of Aaron Walker’s advice, pondering the multiplicity of products piled in those crawling waggons, and GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 55

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wondering what the volume of over land freight might be in the densely populated area on his right. The railways had their own door-to-door delivery services.

He had seen some of their flat-topped drays, dragged by gigantic shire horses, moving ponderously along the few main roads he had crossed, but he would say that the service was slow and unpunctual, limited to roads that had gone into a terrible decline since the rail ways had killed off the coaching and packhorse companies. He took out his map and, dismounting, spread it on the grass verge, securing the corners by pebbles. Half-formed ideas began to shape in his mind, and the most insistent of them was hitched to that parting remark of Walker about the open spaces between the lines criss-crossing the country. There were several to be spotted even here, where towns with populations of around forty thousand were almost two a penny. The great triangle between Worcester, Shrewsbury, and Leominster; the squashed square staked out by Stratford, Spetchley, Droitwich, and Birmingham itself; the hilly, untapped reservoir of central Wales where, he supposed, a railroad could never show a profit, and a closer study of the map showed him it was similar all over the east and south, and along most of the two hundred miles he had already travelled. Only in the north was the iron network dense and interwoven, where rails converged from the south and east towards the ruler-straight slash of Stephenson’s pioneer line be tween Manchester and the coast. Here, as on the far side of the Pennines where lay the woollen towns, rail spurs projected in almost every direction, and even where they did not, dotted lines indicated that surveyors were already at work and the bickering between en gineers, farming interests, and foxhunters had begun.

He folded the map, replaced it in his saddlebag, and went down the gentle slope and across the plain to the southern suburbs of the city, the mare’s shoes scuffling on sun-slippery setts, the bondsmen of the Black Dwarfs staring up at him curiously, as though they had never seen a man astride a horse.

The acrid atmosphere made him sneeze and the mare resented it too, for she flung up her head, as though eager to break into a canter and put bricks and mortar behind her. He pushed on through the city, tempted to follow the line of the Shrewsbury and Birmingham Railway to Shifnal and take a passing look at the King’s Oak at Boscobel, but he thought better of it, reminding himself that he was here as prospector not sightseer. Thereafter he hugged the great trunk line of the London and North Western, that he might have been rid ing along had he not chanced to meet Aaron Walker.

Once the city was behind him there was more green country to be seen liber-ally dotted with farms and occasional coppices of elm, beech, lime, and chestnut.

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The Black Dwarfs
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But he had a sense of riding along a shrink ing corridor, with pressures at either end, and the countrymen he met lacked the geniality of the men in the west, as though they were uncomfortably aware of the march of the Dwarfs.

At Stafford, and later at Crewe, he found the black army well entrenched, but the next few stages took him on to the broad Cheshire plain where, although sliced in half by a main line, the countryman was still king. Up here were some of the neatest, cleanest, and most prosperous-looking farms Adam had ever seen, and the men who inhabited them were clearly on the road to becoming gentry, for they sat thoroughbred horses arrogantly and wore well-cut broad cloth, with nothing in common with farmers south and west of the Cotswolds but the tan of the open air. It was a pleasant, settled country, likely to put up a sturdy resistance, or so he thought until, on his third day in Cheshire, he approached the northern border half way between Manchester and Liverpool and here, almost at a stride, he re-entered no-man’s-land.

To the south the fields and copses spread away as far as the hori zon, but to the north, just beyond the railway, lowering sky banners told him the Dwarfs were in complete control of the land scape and there in such numbers that they could never be driven out.

It was evening then, a still, airless sunset, with every leaf drooping, the sun a flaming ball over the Wirral, and the smoke-stack of a tired, Liverpool-bound goods train shooting cotton volleys straight into the sky as it dragged itself east to west. He reined in where a dust road joined the metal road and studied his smaller ordnance map, think ing longingly of a draught of cool beer and perhaps the luxury of a hip bath in an inn. There was a town on the skyline, one of a line of towns that starred the father and mother of all railways, like a row of guard towers along Hadrian’s Wall, and he had already seen sufficient of these towns to know that they promised little in the way of comfort. They were usually no more than vastly enlarged villages, where someone had converted a barn into a mill and then other mills had come and perhaps a small foundry. After that the jerrybuilders had swarmed in to run up their rows of back-to-back shan-ties along streets that often bore pastoral names but were, for all that, no more salubrious than the foetid alleys that ran inland from the wharves of Wapping and Rotherhithe. The mare was tired, however, both of them were hungry, and there was nowhere to bivouac, so Adam moved off down the macadamised road and straight into chaos.

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4

The first indication that something unusual was happening in Seddon Moss was the number of men abroad, all surging in one direction towards an open space that did duty for a town Square. Their ex pressions were enough to alert him. He had seen looks of that kind in the days leading up to the first murders at Meerut, and there was a kind of loose discipline in the movement that made him think of the parade ground degradation of the 3rd Native Cavalry that had touched off the Mutiny, dragging from the massed ranks of sepoys the long, rumbling growl of
“Dohai! Dohai! Dohai!”

Curiosity made him forget his fatigue, and when a man at the door of a hovel glanced in his direction he reined in and asked what was happening. The man hesitated and then spat, viciously but not very accurately.

“If you’re a stranger then give t’square a bloody wide berth. Lads mean to make an end of it but they’ve nowt agin anyone but Sam Rawlinson and ye c’n spread that as far as Manchester.”

Adam swung himself out of the saddle. “I was looking for an inn, somewhere I can put up the horse and get a bite to eat. Is it a strike?” The man looked him over carefully before answering. “Nay, a lockout,” he said.

“Sam Rawlinson’s overstepped t’mark this time. There’s men there as’ll burn his bloody mill if they have their way, but that’s daft. Burn t’mill and they’ll fetch in troops an’ yeomanry be railroad, same as they did last time, and them as they caught in the open are still blacklisted; if they haven’t starved, or died in gaol long since.”

Adam asked him how long the lockout had persisted and the man said, “Third month we’re entering, and all over a penny an hour and a bloody breakfast break!

Sam’s daft and they’re daft. There’s nowt we coulden agree upon over a pint of ale.” A woman’s querulous voice called from the dark interior of the house. “Who’s there, Harry? Who’s at t’door?”

“Nobbut a toff ridin’ through,” the man answered casually but the woman shouted, “Bolt t’door and come in out of it, like I warned!” and the man grinned toothily, indicating that orders of that kind carried more weight than the high-pitched voice of an orator Adam could already hear from the direction of the Square. He added, however, “Do like I say, man. Give bloody town a wide berth.

There’s a good enough inn no more than a ten-minute trot south, beyond the crossroads on the Warrington turnpike.” Then he spat again and closed the door, and Adam heard the bolt grate and the rumble of voices beyond.

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He remembered the inn, a rundown establishment a hundred yards or so up the dust road, but he had passed it because it looked unsavoury. Now, he supposed, there was no help for it, for the mare’s head was drooping and hunger gnawed at his belly. And yet he was reluctant to leave without hearing something of the men’s grievances, and deciding whether the hagridden man at the door had mistaken a noisy demonstration touched off by boredom and the staleness of the day, for the certainty of a riot. Then he remembered the expression on the faces of the men and went on down the narrow street to the fringe of the crowd that now filled the small Square and was spilling into the approaches.

Here there was no mistaking the mood of the demonstrators, women as well as men and even groups of half-grown children, all chattering like magpies. The entire town was afoot, drawn to a load ing bay on the far side of the space that was being used as a platform for the speakers. It was not long before Adam began to regret having failed to take the man’s advice, if not for himself then for the sake of his mare whose manners were being sorely tried by the press. It was then about half past eight and not yet dusk, although the closeness of the atmosphere filled the Square with an unnatural yellow light as though the heavy sky, bent on coming to the meeting, was bearing down on the multitude and working upon the restlessness of every man, woman, and child assembled there. A distant growl of thunder heightened this impression, and a ripple of nervous anticipation ran through the crowd, producing a kind of sigh that was caught up by the strident voice of a wildly gesticulating orator.

No one molested him, but no sooner had he edged into the Square than he began looking for a way out, deciding that he was unjustified in exposing those about him to the risk of being trampled if the mare began to rear. Holding her on a close rein he edged his way along the southern face of the Square until he found a ramp that ran up towards the goods yard of the station. The crowd was thinner here and he could observe it individually. He had never seen so many mis shapen people assembled in one place. At least half of the men and women about him seemed to be twisted or crippled, as though he had strayed into a world of the brothers Grimm, populated by the humpbacked, the lame, and the knock-kneed. On every face was the same sullen expression that he had noticed among the men on the outskirts of the town, but here he could smell their sweat and hear the whistle of their breath as they stumbled by in groups in an effort to come within earshot of their leaders’ harangues. He saw two uniformed constables, whose faces were set and strained, and whose efforts to control the crowd seemed to be confined to packing as many people into the Square as it would GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 59

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hold, for they prodded the laggards into the main stream against which Adam now battled in his efforts to reach higher ground and cross the embankment to open country.

At the top of the ramp he saw that this was not possible. He was now in a cul-de-sac, sealed by a wire fence bordering the perm anent way. A constable crossed over and asked if he was a member of the Yeomanry, and when Adam said he was not, and that he had entered the town in search of an inn, the man said,

“Any shake down i’ Seddon Moss will have its shutters up tonight, sir. There’s nobbut a dozen of us, and what can we do now they’ve torn up the track? They knew we were expecting reinforcements down the line, but somebody blabbed and Sam Rawlinson’ll pay the piper if they don’t get here in time.” Then, with a bitterness that half-enlisted him with the demonstrators, he made a similar comment to the man whose wife’s tongue had kept him off the streets. “To think it’s come to this! Forty-two over again, and all on account of a penny an hour and a breakfast snap!”