God Is an Englishman (41 page)

He rarely gave a thought to Sam these days, whereas Henrietta would often go out of her way to avoid mentioning him, as though he was someone whose portrait had been turned to the wall. If he had thought about it Adam might have regarded this as unforgiving on Henrietta’s part, for Sam had made no move to molest her from the moment he marched out of the Colonel’s library and climbed into his cab shortly before her marriage. Adam bore him no malice.

Time and events had clouded his memory of the boy who died under Sam’s horse the night of the riot, so that he had been amused rather than irritated by GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 214

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Catesby’s innocent gaff in transporting a boiler on the millowner’s behalf. He did write to Catesby, explaining the relation ship, and making one or two sardonic remarks about Rawlinson’s character, but the account went through the ledgers and it even pleased him to think he had lifted five pounds, ten shillings from his father-in-law for a nine-mile haul performed by a three-horse team in two hours, door to door.

He was therefore much surprised, in the first week of February, to receive a letter from Catesby reporting that Sam had not only written demanding a quotation for transporting roofing slates from the Upper Polygon to Rochdale, but had added a postscript to the effect that his son-in-law would be welcome if he cared to call at the mill when he was in the district. Adam, who had been planning to make a trip north within the next week or so, deemed it wise to say nothing of this to Henrietta, deciding that he would take the old devil at his word and prospect the ground before taking his wife into his confi dence. Then he forgot about it, busying himself with preparatory moves to open a branch in the Isle of Wight, designated Tom Tiddler’s Ground on the master map, and after that a breakdown by himself, Tybalt, Keate, and their mutual friend, Frankenstein, of possibilities of launching the service in the Border Triangle. He did not know what he would make of the Isle of Wight, but a Scotsman called Fraser, who had run a carrier service in the north-east, was selling up and offering teams and waggons at what Keate declared a knockdown price. Avery, consulted on the prospect of moving north to the Border, gave his approval but added that he had never yet met a Scotsman or a Yorkshireman who would sell anything worth having at bargain price.

Then the Colonel wrote saying that Aunt Charlotte was down with chronic bronchitis, and he feared she would not survive the winter, so Adam decided to go north at once, with the triple object of seeing what Fraser had to sell in the way of teams and goodwill, paying a call on his father and aunt, and studying Catesby’s methods at first hand, for he had been astonished by the turnover from the Polygon after Catesby had demanded three-horse instead of two-horse men-o’-war, and had also broken into the short-haul market in the cotton-belt itself, for when planning the Polygon Adam had assumed the railways would monopolise transport in southern Lancashire.

He travelled up from Euston in one of the L. & N.W. smokers, hauled by one of the new Crewe locomotives at what seemed to him a prodigious speed, and Catesby met him at the depot, driving him to Salford where a yard had been rented to handle the traffic north of the Manchester-Liverpool line. Adam was GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 215

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impressed by what he saw. Catesby already had five one-horse pinnaces operating in this area, mostly concerned with the distribution of bolts of manufactured fabrics and hardware to small towns on the western edge of the Pennines, but his main efforts were directed towards developing a sys tem of transporting heavy machinery to out-of-the-way mills in the north and east of the county, where the delays in the goods yards caused men like Rawlinson, regarding time as money, to find alter native means of getting their raw materials from the Manchester depots to their premises. Here, in the extreme southern section of his beat, Catesby had a dozen men stationed.

He said, “It’s largely on account of machines being sent out of the foundries in sections light enough to manhandle. Time was when their kind of equipment was built up in a single unit, needing an eight- or ten-horse team to drag them off the sidings. Nowadays most millowners can assemble their own machinery, and there is a steady demand for spare parts that are needed within hours unless the whole output is to be halted on account of a defective crank or flywheel. I had the advantage of knowing the trade, and that brandy-faced chap Rawlinson has been a missionary on your behalf, Mr. Swann. I made him one quick delivery, and he’s told all his cronies for miles around.” Adam was not surprised that Catesby, despite knowledge that Sam was his father-in-law, should none the less refer to him as “that brandy-faced chap,” for this was Catesby’s way. He was impressed, however, by Rawlinson’s apparent eagerness to boost Swann-on-Wheels, and said, “Knowing my father-in-law, I’m persuaded our rates must be well below those of competitors. That old rascal wouldn’t pat ronise us out of sentiment. I’ll call and see him when I’ve finished my business in Hexham and Keswick. You’ve made a fine start up here, Catesby, and I’d like to thank you. You can go on piece-work rates now if you prefer. If not, I suggest you work on a commission basis.” Catesby, a true Northerner, seemed embarrassed by praise, grunt ing something to the effect that “this could be worked out as time went on,” but adding offhandedly that he was encouraged by the initial figures. Then, becoming thoughtful, he went on, “Things are changing up here, Mr. Swann. Some millowners are finding them selves obliged to co-operate with their hands in a way that would have been impossible a few years ago. There’s even talk of an opera tives’ union among the lads.” He glanced shrewdly at Adam under grey brows. “How would you respond to the introduction of that kind of bargaining factor in all the basic trades?”

“I’m hanged if I know,” said Adam, lightly, “but it can’t concern me, can it? I transport goods, I don’t manufacture them.”

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“You employ men,” Catesby said, obstinately. “You must have well over a hundred on your pay-roll at this moment.”

“I can’t see a scattered gang of waggoners forming a union, but if they ever did, and a level-headed chap like you was behind it, I’m sure we could arrive at some mutually satisfactory arrangement.”

For the first time since they had met Catesby relaxed his defensive attitude, saying, with emphasis, “Then you can depend on me, Mr. Swann, for I know how to distinguish between a good gaffer and a jumped-up swab. Your kind will always get the best out of a working man, and that cuts both ways, although few employers can bring themselves to believe it,” and then it was Adam’s turn to feel em barrassed.

He travelled north-east, taking the North Western to Leeds, the Leeds and Northern as far as Darlington, and then on through the network of the Newcastle and Carlisle to Hexham, crossing country with which he was unfamiliar. He passed the journey making notes in his daybook, having at last learned the trick of writing legibly in fast-moving trains. It seemed to him, up here among so many inter-related lines, that the prospects of road-haulage were barren, and he was also confirmed in his earlier prejudice that the industrialised belt en closed by Harrogate, Redcar, Newcastle, and Allendale, at the north eastern tip of the Polygon, could not support an independent service unless he was lucky enough to find another Catesby. This was not the case, however, in the territory marked out as the Border Triangle. Here, apart from the coastal line, and the new Border Counties Company, the land was ripe for exploitation, and when he met the Scots haulier Fraser at Hexham he saw at once that Keate’s guess had been accurate, and that Fraser’s stock was indeed a bargain, nine medium-sized waggons good for another two years’ work, and twenty-three heavy crossbreds, much inferior to his own Clydesdales and Cleveland Bays, but not the broken-down crocks he had expected to find in the stables of a man who was selling up.

“Why are you selling the business?” he asked bluntly, and Fraser said because he had no head for paperwork, and that was what every business demanded of its owner nowadays on account of competition from London-based railways. He was, Adam thought, an open-air man, who had probably enjoyed travelling the roads when it was no more than a matter of moving from town to town at his own pace, but the complexities of the railway age, and the price they had put upon speed, had broken the rhythm of his life, and he was ready to work for someone else if he could find a younger man to employ him.

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“Would you consider staying on as my area manager?” Adam asked, and the man seemed astonished.

“You’re intending to take over the runs as well as the stock? Up here? In border country, that’s as foreign to you as London is to me?”

“That’s the point,” Adam said. “I prefer to employ local men.” Fraser considered. “There’ll be no paper-work?”

“Some, but most of it is handled by Headquarters. You could make hauls yourself if you felt inclined.”

“Aye, I’d like that fine,” Fraser said, thoughtfully, “for snow and rain never bothered me like being stuck in an office. My father was a chapman, a pedlar that is, and my mother another’s daughter, so wandering the roads is bred in blood and bone. How much time would I be expected to spend in the yard?”

“That depends on your turnover. I pay two pounds ten shillings a week for a foreman waggoner, but later on, if the work merits it, I can get you a clerk. The point is, you’ve already broken the ground up here, but I’m getting your goodwill thrown in for the price of your waggons, teams, and stabling. Would you like time to think it over?”

“No, I wouldna’,” the man said, “for there’s no’ so much ‘good will’ as ye call it. Give me the price I’m asking for the stock and I’ll stay as manager and find carters who can be trusted to pass an ale house without haltering.” And so it was settled, and during his crosscountry journey to Keswick Adam reflected that he had been very lucky in a trade he had entered as a raw amateur, for here he was opening his fifth sub-depot, and four were already paying off, two of them handsomely. By next spring he would have waggons and teams in all twelve of the terri tories, and Swann-on-Wheels would be on the way to becoming a household word, like Pear’s Soap and Bryant & May’s matches. But then he wondered if he would lose something he valued by over-expansion, reflecting that enjoyment of the past two years had been derived from the opportunities offered of learning at first-hand what happened to a rural society when it took off its smock and populated ten thousand factories and foundries in a single generation. He was deeply interested, and always had been, in people like Keate and Tybalt and Catesby, and this new man, Fraser, not as individuals but as segments of the new society, and this, he supposed, had a bear ing on his conception of England, English traditions, English values, and England’s comparatively new preoccupation with the acquisi tion of an overseas empire. Throughout the whole of his youth it was this last aspect of national life with which he had been concerned, and against which, he recalled, he had rebelled.

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The train of thought led him on to contemplate England and the English in the abstract. The evangelical zeal and rooted urbanism of Keate and Tybalt was only one facet of the race. Cutting a furrow of their own were the men like Catesby, uncompromising in their conception of human dignity, and ready, if necessary, to fight and starve for what they regarded as basic human rights. Then again there were the Blubbs and the Frasers, clinging stubbornly to an Eng land that had begun to wither the day Stephenson laid the first yard of rail along the old Stockton-Darlington line, and there were many other segments that he had taken for granted, the Robertses and the Averys and men of Rawlinson’s stamp, who were to be found in their hundreds in Threadneedle Street and on the Manchester Ex change. Thinking of Sam led him to ponder the impact the new iron age had had upon Englishwomen. Most of the men who had made fortunes in a matter of years seemed to have felt obligated to consign their womenfolk to a national seraglio, where they spent their lives whispering, gossiping, and parading a succession of French fashions, so that unless one was almost brutally frank with them (as he some times felt he had been with Henrietta), they turned themselves into mindless little dolls before they were twenty-five.

His thoughts, thus diverted, dwelt upon Henrietta for the re mainder of the journey, wondering how much nervous energy he would have to expend in the years ahead teaching her that marriage was much more than an exchange of one set of shibboleths for an other, and that he had no fancy to spawn a family of red-coated martinets of the kind he had seen dancing attendance on dolts like Raglan in the Crimea, or copies of Roberts, with his romantic imperial visions.

Surely that part of the English tradition was as dead as Blubb’s Tally-Ho coach, and Fraser’s three-mile-an-hour package deliveries. It would be more rewarding, he thought, to raise a spread of pretty daughters, and spend one’s declining years teaching them to put a proper price on themselves as the consorts of a new genera tion of husbands, the enriched sons of artisans and mechanics.

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The Colonel met him at the gate and told him at once that Charlotte was on her deathbed and that he appreciated his act in turning aside to pay what would surely prove a final visit. The old man looked frail himself, Adam thought, and wondered how he would fare up here alone when the prop of his sister’s stronger personality had been knocked away. The redoubtable old lady seemed to him smaller and less formidable than he remembered. She could still converse, he GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 219