God Is an Englishman (30 page)

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Three

the big city

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He had come to terms with the big city, with its stink, its squalor, its grime, its sulphurous smoke, its nonstop groundswell of greed and noise and muddle, and one reason why he had been able to do this was the unique observation post he had secured for himself in those first frenetic months.

Avery had found them a depot, a large, tumbledown area in the centre of a seething rectangle formed by the Old Kent Road, Tooley Street, Tower Road, and the river itself. It was not the most salubrious base he could have picked on the south of the river, but it had the great advantage of being cheap and central.

It had started out in life, several centuries ago, as a nunnery, and the chapel tower, three storeys high, still remained, a forlorn witness to God and his angels among a vast clutter of sheds, stables, and ashstrewn yard wholly given over to Moloch.

It was here, in a strange octagonal chamber that had been the nunnery belfry, that Adam had his office, main tained his logbooks and account ledgers, and hung his wall-maps and all the data gathered in the journeys he made in his first eighteen months in England.

The belfry, his eyrie as he called it, had an impressive view, even when the smoke pall shrouded all the one-storey buildings around. From his desk he could look between other buildings at the sluggish Thames, the Tower itself, the wharves and barge traffic, the London Docks, and even the western edge of the Surrey Commercial Docks further east. He could see the smoke puffs of the Bricklayer’s Arms goods depot, a large tannery, a biscuit factory, a match factory, and, passing between these points down the arteries that linked them, the ebb and flow of wheeled traffic and the scurrying, doll-like figures of draymen, hawkers, urchins, clerks, and dockers, and the more de liberate passage of the paunched gentlemen who held this multitude in thrall.

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Up here, forty feet above the apparatus of his own adventure, he had leisure to dream, to take a detached view of his endeavours and what it meant in terms of his future and Henrietta’s and the child she would bear him soon, but it was not often that his dreams were personalised or localised. More often they probed across the river to the shires where hedgerows were still green, where trees stood, where the pace of life was still as leisurely as it had been in Tudor times, and every now and again, when a ship went down with the tide, he would follow it in his fancy, rounding the North Foreland and sailing to dis tant shores he had seen and to others he had not and probably never would now that his anchor was down. Yet it intrigued him to reflect that he was now an active participant in this gigantic and ever-ex panding business, that it really mattered to him how much tonnage of manufactories were gathered here to be transported to every corner of the world and also that, as this imperial venture grew and grew, so would his own concerns, and those of the sixty-odd men and boys who looked to him for their wages every Saturday.

It gave him a feeling of contributing that he had never had as a mercenary, and for the very first time in his life he felt a glow of self-justification, of being who he was and where he was. In a subtle way this certainty began to enlarge him as an individual, so that his per sonality flowered under the triple pulse of power, responsibility, and risk. He shed much of his barrack-square brusqueness and shyness, involving himself in the destinies of underlings in a way that had never been possible in squadron or regiment. For he was now com mitted, deeply committed, and so, in a sense, was the least of Saul Keate’s vanboys moving to and fro down there on the greasy cobble stones between warehouse, stable, and waggon park. One and all, he told himself, they would sink or swim with him, and an understand ing of this not only reinforced his confidence in himself but endowed him with tolerance and patience and put a curb on his temper.

Everybody about him noticed this broadening and deepening of his character.

Not only Henrietta, bustling about her little house in Shirley twelve miles to the south-west, but hardbitten men like Josh Avery, and dedicated men like Keate, and all the crusty old carters and snotty-nosed urchins Keate had recruited on his behalf. Pater nalism not only grew on him but suited him. Little by little they began to trust both him and his judgements, and he secretly basked in that trust.

The depot had been other things besides a nunnery. At some time in its existence it had served as a brewery and then as a knacker’s yard, and later still a livery stable. There was no form about its design, for every trade had left its stamp GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 157

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upon the place, a labyrinth within a labyrinth, a slum hemmed in by slums. It was surrounded by a long, clapboard fence with double gates on two sides, and a central yard enclosed by a tumbledown warehouse cut up into sections, a waggon park on the north side, where vehicles not in use or in the course of repair were housed, innumerable sheds and dumps and tackrooms and lofts and finally, in somewhat better heart, the stables themselves, where there was always activity, even at night and on Sundays.

It was still very much a London enterprise, although plans to ex pand as far north as Berwick, and as far west as Truro, were in train and awaiting the drying out of the roads. The delay in launching out had chafed him during the initial stage, but now he saw that Avery’s advice and Keate’s doubts had been justified.

There was so much to do, so much to hire and buy, so much to be committed to memory and to paper. Avery had said, when he had displayed his original wall maps, “Good. From the beginning I urged you to think in guineas instead of sixpences—now I’ll add a rider to that. For God’s sake, don’t go off at half-cock! You’re facing stiff competition, not only in the haulage field but from the railways. You’ve got to pros pect your areas one by one, and plot your rates and routes down to the last penny and the last half-mile. The potential is there awaiting you, but you have to be able to give a service that no one else is pre pared to give, you have to be in a position to guarantee punctuality and intact delivery of every product the country is putting on the home and overseas market. The name Swann has got to be synony mous with speed and reliability. Ensure that and you can build a reputation in six months and once it’s there you’ll be your own best advertisement, providing you can make good your promises. Merchants will seek you out, their pockets stuffed with lading bills.” Keate’s comments had been more restrained, perhaps because, unlike Avery, he had lived his life thinking in terms of halfpennies. Keate, warned of the projected expansion and the establishment of depots right across the country, had demurred on the grounds of equipment and staff, for it already seemed to him that this strange, impulsive man had taken an excessively large bite at the cake and would need a decade to digest it. He had hummed and hawed over the difficulties of finding enough men who could be trusted to operate efficiently and honestly at such distances, and the number of horses and waggons needed to establish links between the source areas and the nearest railheads. It seemed to him a prodigious undertaking, almost like the exploitation of a sub-continent, and because of this he urged consolidation before serious thought was given to the kind of expansion Adam had in mind.

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He hinted at the necessity of farrier and veterinary services. He told gloomy stories of cracked axles and lost lynch pins, of bad debts, bad roads, and bad characters among the waggoners, few of whom he could vouch for except as masters of their craft. But in the end, after the first year’s trading figures were shown him, he capitulated, and perhaps even his imagination was stirred by the vastness of the pro ject, a criss-cross of light and heavy waggon routes embracing thirty counties, a caravanserai equipped to serve the great gridiron that now linked every sizeable town in the country. He said, when he had studied the maps, “So be it, Mr. Swann, and God be with you. I’m your man now and so is Tybalt. We’ll find enough waggoners if they are there to be found.” Tybalt, the chief clerk, was the most important of Keate’s pro teges. He and Keate were fellow workers in the Lord’s vineyard, in asmuch as they both attended the same Thameside Mission Hall, and were equally obsessed with the necessity to work their passage across Jordan and past the barriers of the Celestial City. Tybalt was as small and insignificant as Keate was huge and impressive.

Standing beside his friend, the top of Tybalt’s bald head barely reached Keate’s shoulder, and whereas Keate had a chest like a beer barrel, Tybalt, viewed from the neck down, could be mistaken for one of the ur chins who skylarked in and about the stables, or danced a jig on the end of one of the knotted ropes at the tailboards of the waggons. Yet Tybalt, with domed head, parchment pallor, and rimless eye glasses, could perform prodigies of mental arithmetic, so that Adam came to depend upon him to a very great extent, recognising in the man the same quality of conscientiousness exhibited by Keate, and also something of the gambler that was absent in his friend. Adam would sometimes look down on this strange pair as they paced the yard, debating some problem that concerned him or their per sonal salvation, and his imagination, heated by the stresses of the adventure, would encourage him to see them as a talkative David and an attentive Goliath acting in concert. He would tell himself, with a grin, that St. Peter would be a jackass to refuse either admission, for, whereas Saul Keate could be relied upon to quell any repetition of a Satanic revolt, the finances of Paradise could have no better auditor than Andrew Tybalt.

It was strange that a busy man, with a wife and future family to support, and every penny he possessed locked up in a single, com plex project, should indulge in fancies of this kind but it was an aspect of the new Adam Swann who, in his secret heart, believed himself a match for anything that awaited him in a war far more de manding than any he had engaged in so far. Admittedly the pace was killing, and the day-to-day risks sometimes terrifying, but as his own master he GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 159

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was in a position to weigh risks as he had never been able to do in the field. It was this, perhaps, that enabled him to mount that first exploratory campaign with joyful gusto, advancing across an unfamiliar terrain with the aid of talents he had never been called upon to employ as a soldier.

One such talent, he discovered, was an instinctive discernment of a man’s potential worth, and it came into play when Keate asked him to inspect a mob of waggoners assembled in the yard.

They stood in a sullen rank, thickset, ruffianly, blear-eyed men, dredged up from the murky pool of London’s unemployed coach men and guards, rendered obsolete by the march of the railroad that had, in a matter of ten to fifteen years pulled them from their per ches on the box-seats of their Telegraphs and Tantivys, and left them to rot in idleness after they had grown to manhood thinking of them selves as an elite.

It was an aspect of the railway boom that he had never thought about, the genocide of a class of men who had once been the best paid and most pampered professionals in England, pocketing their substantial tips with the air of men conferring a favour on passengers, grossly flattered by young bucks with incomes of five thousand a year, and fawned upon by armies of innkeepers, ostlers, and bar maids along the metalled highroads that ran out of London in every direction.

For these were the men who had whirled passengers the one hundred and fifty-eight miles to Shrewsbury in fourteen hours, forty-five minutes, to Birmingham in twelve hours at eleven miles per hour plus, or from the “Bull and Mouth,” at St.

Martins-le-Grand, the two hundred and seventy miles to Newcastle in a matter of thirty hours, including stops. These same men, and their four-horse equi pages, had been the wonder of their time, a race apart, as dissolute and dependable as the toughest infantry at the peak of training, yet here they were lining up for haulage jobs in their late forties and early fifties, traditional truculence undispelled by their desperate need to earn a living the only way they knew.

He talked at length to one of them, a man named Blubb, who had driven a four-in-hand at seventeen, and later taken the overnight coach to and from Newark through ten winters of storm, snow and flood without a single accident to blot his record. It was from Blubb that Adam learned that these derelicts had one thing in common, an unremitting hatred of the innovation that had dispossessed them, which they referred to as “the gridiron” or “the tea-kettle,” and could hardly bring themselves to mention without the blasphemy for which they had once been famous. Blubb said, bluntly, “You’d never have got the half of us here, guv, if it hadn’t got about you was ready to challenge the bloody gridiron. We’ll GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 160

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serve any man who does that, who holds out agin ’em, as Chaplin and Home should ha’ done. Now there’s a brace as can roast in hell for my money. Time was when they stabled fifteen hundred apiece o’ the best leaders and wheelers in creation, but what did they do after the bloody gridiron pushed as far as Brum?

Went into partnership with ’em, and invested all the blunt we made for ’em in bloody railroad stock, while the likes of us were turned off to beg or starve or drive omnibus short stages, if we could fit ourselves for lad’s work! Now you’re signing us on to hump baggage behind carthorses, and there’s some here who would ha’ cried shame at driving ‘pickaxe’ or ‘unicorn’ a dozen years ago.”