God Is an Englishman (32 page)

He remembered riding out along one of these highways north west of Abergavenny near the end of his odyssey, and meeting no living soul until he came across a tramp trudging along the crown of the road. He had stopped to talk to the wayfarer, commenting on the emptiness of the road, and the tramp had replied, in his sing-song Welsh, that he now had the highway to himself and was right glad of it, for he could never have walked so blithely along a main road when coaches were plentiful.

“Covered in dust, I was, or spattered with mud, and running up the hedge for my life efferry few minutes,” he said. “Giff you a lick wi’ their Short Tommies they would, the bastards, soon as look at you, if you didn’t get out of their road.” Chats with Blubb had made Adam familiar with coaching slang, and he knew that the “Short Tommy” was a heavy whip used by the more brutal of the coachmen to get the maximum effort from their teams. He said, chuckling, “Come, now, you’re lying in one respect. The Short Tommy wasn’t used by top-class coaching men. They had to nurse their teams, didn’t they?” but the tramp, assuming that half-furtive, half-knowing look characteristic of his race, replied, “Were iss it you’ve been all these years, sir? Before the railroads came competition wass cruel among they ole devils. Drive one another into a ditch they would, and gallop on laughing, with the outside passengers egging them on, you know? Glad to God I am they’m gone from yer, leaving the roads to the likes of me. Walked five mile from last night’s camp I ’ave, and you’re the first I’ve seen today and the last as’ll cross my path before noon, I wouldn’t wonder.” Adam gave him a sixpence for his information and rode on, but now, studying Mountain Square, he remembered him vividly, and drew speculative pencil lines from the proposed capital, that was in fact Abergavenny, to the railway tracks running west to Fishguard, north to Chester, and over Brunel’s bridge to Holyhead.

GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 166

3/27/09 5:13:42 PM

The Big City
1 6 7

It was a pity, he thought, that they had spanned the Menai Strait. In the absence of the bridge he would have had almost the whole of Wales as a monopoly.

From Chester to the Humber, and again from Harrogate to Preston, the territory was shaded, a great, industrial wedge where railways proliferated near their original breeding ground. There would be nothing here but short, unprofitable hauls. Every millowner in a fair way of business had his own transport, and even if he had not it was no more than a mile or so to the nearest branch line. North of the Cotton Belt, however, was far more promising territory. Here were the familiar fells and lakes encompassing a district reaching south from the line he had drawn between Allendale and Whitehaven, with its capital at Appleby. The roads he knew were bad in this un tamed area, christened the “North-Western Polygon,” but the profits, hauling coal, fish, sheep, dairy produce, slate, granite, and possibly cotton from the Lancashire railheads, should be correspondingly high, as they promised to be in the Border Triangle between Ber wick, Carlisle, and the outskirts of Newcastle. There was a main line linking Newcastle with Carlisle, and the triangle he had marked out here was bisected by the Border Counties Railroad, but with a base at Hexham these might serve his purposes admirably, for all the areas between were untapped and likely to remain so.

It was different again down the east coast, where he had traced a huge, coastal crescent and divided it, almost equally, into three sub sections, naming them

“Crescent North,” “Crescent Centre,” and “Cres cent South.” Crescent North had its apex at Redcar, its base at Market Weighton, and its coastal capital at Whitby.

To the north was the father and mother of all railways, the Stockton-Darlington, and the area was now traversed by three other lines, the Hull and Bridlington, the Hull and Holderness, and the Malton and Driffield, but there was ample room to manoeuvre in between, and in the east and north of this area agriculture was still the dominant industry.

It was the same with “Crescent Central,” a great swathe between Humber and Wash, running through the eastern outskirts of Doncaster and Newark to Spalding. Here, so his memoranda told him, grew wheat and barley and potatoes.

Fine cattle were raised on the farms, and in the north there were iron foundries.

The Great North ern ran north from Peterborough to Boston, then north-east to Gains borough, and the Eastern Counties served a string of inland towns, but a huge stretch of coastline had no spurs at all and it seemed to Adam, already prospecting for customers, that there might be pros pects of a regular fish run inland from Grimsby and smaller ports.

“Crescent South” lay north of a straight line drawn from Spalding to Yarmouth, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 167

3/27/09 5:13:42 PM

1 6 8 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N

with its capital at Norwich. It was served, to some extent, by the Eastern Counties and the East Anglian, the latter still in the process of construction, but there were wide areas of the plain where the railroad was no more than a puff of smoke on the horizon, and apart from agricultural potential there was a well-established wool and silk trade, practised, he recalled, by the descendants of French and Dutch Protestants who had sought a refuge here two centuries before.

Below this again was an area he named “The Bonus,” an impro bably large triangle, enclosed by Yarmouth, Chesterford, and Southend, where it touched the widest sector of the Thames Estuary. Its freedom from railways had puzzled him at first until he remembered it as a region of broad, slow-moving waterways and marshy ground, of the kind under-capitalised companies avoided when they could. Clear across it the Eastern Counties ran from London to the mouth of the Stour, but there were very few spurs serving the districts either side of the line, and he remembered that a large pro portion of the food eaten by Londoners was grown on the Suffolk and Essex farms.

He was now close to his base, but down here, in the south-eastern corner of the island, he discounted the bread-and-butter hauls that continued to preoccupy townsmen like Keate and Avery. From the highest reaches of the Thames, clear across country to Portsmouth, he had drawn his “Kentish Triangle,” enclosing some of the richest soil in the land, with its immense variety of products. He made Tonbridge his capital, following a close study of the rail tracks domi nated by the South-Eastern running down to Folkestone and Dover, the choice being dictated by the junction of the North Kent to Maidstone, and the two spurs of the main line running south to Hastings and north-east to Canterbury and Ramsgate. There would be other spurs, no doubt, (one to Sheerness was already started), but the pat tern of population, and the prolix commercial activities in this sec tion, was more promising than anywhere in the country. Hops and fruit, he thought, would be his main standby, but it occurred to him that he might contract with the military and naval depots that abounded hereabouts, for Keate told him that the Government sometimes put their haulage out to tender, and it crossed his mind that there was talk of laying up the type of warship that had carried him to India and the Crimea, and replacing it with a fleet of iron clads. Most people, of course, would dismiss this as a fantasy but not Adam Swann. In the England he had prospected since his return anything seemed possible.

The circle was almost complete now. From Portsmouth, north to Aylesbury, lay the eastern border of his last big section, a gigantic square west of the capital, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 168

3/27/09 5:13:43 PM

The Big City
1 6 9

running through Oxford to Cheltenham, then south-west via Bristol to the coast at Bridport, where it joined the eastern boundary of the Western Wedge.

Railways were plentiful about here. To the north ran the broad-gauge line of the Great Western and its ancillaries, and below it the main line of its great competitor, the South Western, already in being as far as Salisbury, now nearing completion beyond Yeovil. The Wilts-Dorset and Weymouth ran south-west out of Westbury, and the Salisbury and Yeovil Extension from Salisbury itself where he meant to establish a base. Spurlines, complete or nearing completion, linked many of the areas in between but by no means all. There was still plenty of room to manoeuvre inside the frame, and his little red book told him that here were possibilities of great variety, including the transport of Portland stone and all manner of local handicrafts and industries of which gloves, lace, tiles, and chalk were but four. Wheat, barley, and cider apples grew down here in profusion. Sheep were raised on the Dorset downs and Hampshire plain, and someone had told him that half the milk that went into London’s puddings came from Wiltshire, although he did not believe this, any more than he believed that Wiltshire had a monopoly in bacon, or Somerset in cheese. His surveys had been too detailed to prejudice him in favour of any one area as regards agriculture. It flourished, despite the technological revolution, in every county, having few dominant centres, as had cotton, wool, steel, and coal.

It was this thought that led him to give names to three sub-sections, where he meant to set up depots, and because they were small and scattered he thought of them as postscripts to the master map. There was the Isle of Wight, so far without a railroad, and what he thought of as “The Pickings,” two areas that had somehow been bypassed, although each was within a day’s ride of highly industrialised centres. He did not know what he would make of the Isle of Wight (he christened it “Tom Tiddler’s Land”), save that its base should be Newport, but in the other areas his plans were beginning to mature. One was a long, isosceles triangle, pointing west of a line drawn between Sheffield and Derby, to an apex at Buxton, and he fixed the capital at Ashbourne. The other, away to the south-west, was a longer, narrower triangle, enclosing Worcester, Gloucester, and Shrewsbury, that he had noted during his ride north from Plymouth. There was no knowing what could be hauled in and around The Pickings, for they seemed to have slipped through the net of the gridiron and their potential was impressive.

Here was the heart of the high quality porcelain trade, as well as the richest fruit-growing district in the country. He meant to have his share of both.

GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 169

3/27/09 5:13:43 PM

1 7 0 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N

He was still crouched there, his mind sifting the revenue potential of herrings, tomatoes, fleeces, graphite, and rootcrops, when Henrietta found him and frowned to note the furniture had been pushed against the walls, the rugs scuffled, and every inch of floor space littered with what she could only think of as an untidy exercise in map-making. She stood back from the threshold, one foot on the Cornish peninsula, the other on the knob of Norfolk, and exclaimed,

“Really, Adam! Why can’t you do whatever you’re doing in the den?” and he said, vaguely, “Because there isn’t space there to make a pattern of it and see it as a whole. Well, it’s finished, or as good as finished. We’ve got the whole damned island sewn up, and as soon as the roads harden I’ll be launching out in twelve different direc tions.”

His enthusiasm puzzled her. Almost eighteen months had passed since she rode beside him down the winding road from Keswick to Ambleside, and he had kissed her in view of all the outside passengers of a passing coach, but since then, once he had settled her in the little rented house on the Kent-Surrey border, she had lost him to a mistress who lived out there under the smoke pall, someone who seemed able to exert an influence on him that she could never hope to match, for she was able to send him scurrying all over the country, to reappear at intervals with homecoming gifts, a Paisley shawl, a box of shortbread, or a model of the Eddystone lighthouse in crystal. It was not, she reflected, that he was in any way debilitated by his wanderings. He invariably reappeared in high good humour, and would seize her and use her with the vigour and dispatch of a return ing Crusader, but although she had little to complain of in this direction, there was an aspect of their marriage that bothered her. Once as it were, having disposed of her doubts that he still found her personable, he would become distrait, even while she was still in his arms. There was no doubt in her mind where he was on these occa sions. He was away prospecting some dingy town like Seddon Moss, or crossing some vast, rural waste, so that in this sense he was not so different from men like her father and old Matt Goldthorpe, his mind almost exclusively concerned with making his mark and setting his stamp on the world and also, she had to concede, making the money that kept them fed, clothed, and housed.

She was realistic enough to understand the necessity for this, but it was a pity, she thought, that a man whose lightest touch could make her knees tremble, should spend so much of his time away from home. She was suffi ciently inexperienced, on the occasion of his unexpected reappear ance late one night, to mention this, not plaintively but in words that evidently led him to the wrong conclusion, for he said, with a laugh, “You miss me then? Well, it’s handsome of you to admit it,” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 170

3/27/09 5:13:43 PM

The Big City
1 7 1

and before she had the least opportunity to be more specific he had addressed himself to her with renewed enthusiasm, so that she won dered where he stored so much energy, and if all husbands were as easily satisfied with this purely passive role in a mate. It did not occur to her then or later that he had already come to certain conclusions concerning any other role she might play in his life.

On the map-making occasion, however, when he had been at home rather longer than usual, she made another attempt to pene trate the armour of his self-sufficiency, saying, in the little girl’s voice she had come to employ when she hoped to beguile him, “Adam, dearest, I…I wanted to ask you something, something
important
.”