God Is an Englishman (43 page)

Into this book went not only facts and figures relevant to the 1860–61 expansion, but a distillation of all Adam Swann’s thoughts con cerning the eight unexploited territories, together with a record of the teams he maintained, the men he signed on, and the nature of goods hauled. He did not make entries concerning income and ex penditure. That was Tybalt’s province and the clerk guarded it jealously. Adam’s book was not a ledger in that sense. It was more of a private Domesday Book, used for the purpose of clarifying ideas before he was ready to share them with anyone, even his sleeping partner, Avery.

The book still exists, hundreds of pages covered with Swann’s neat, angular handwriting, and one very early entry, dated June 1st, 1861, relates to his first inroad into Tom Tiddler’s Ground. It is a laconic entry and reads, “
June 1.

House removal to Ventnor, I. of W. Blubb’s haul as far as Lymington, then on by collier to
Yarmouth. Blubb’s teams turned back. Four horses hired the far side
.” The entry signified both an extension of territory and a deviation in the established pattern of his business up to that date. For this was the first house removal Swann-on-Wheels had undertaken, and con cerned the transfer of the chattels of a naval captain who, on retiring, had elected to leave the Medway area for a cliff-top home where he could enjoy an uninterrupted view of Channel shipping.

Tybalt’s quotation was cut to the bone, not only because the old seaman was tightfisted, and had rejected estimates submitted by other carriers, but because Adam suddenly came to realise that there might be money in house-removals, more commonplace now than even ten years before. Twenty years ago it was rare for a man to move out of the county where he was rooted, but now people were more restless, as if rail travel had given them a taste for migrating, and they were reluctant to settle anywhere until they were too old to be bothered.

In terms of time and cash the firm lost money on the removal, but it gave Adam a chance to prospect the Isle of Wight and ended in the establishment of a base at Newport, equipped with four one-horse vans and an Islander, a young mail-driver called Dockett, in charge of the four men established there.

Because, so far, nothing heavier than pinnaces were based there, and because the island seemed, more or less, to be self-supporting, the branch specialised in house removals from the outset. By the end of the year it was showing a profit.

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The incident remained fixed in Adam’s mind for another reason. The following day, June 2nd, Henrietta gave birth to his son Alexander, and although she produced a boy weighing well over eight pounds she was spared a repetition of the ordeal that had accompanied Stella’s arrival, or so she assured him when he went in to congratulate her after the doctor had given his reluctant assent.

He never recalled seeing her more cock-a-hoop, but the child made a different impression on him. His daughter, he remembered, had looked alert and wise even at this stage, but the boy, with his square face, uncomprehending eyes, and utter indifference to everything but his mother’s breast, seemed to his father a miniature parody of all the stolid, whisky-swilling regulars Adam had met in barrack messes from Deal to Allahabad. He looked also as though he would never open his mouth except to eat, drink, or utter a platitude, would execute every order he received to the letter, no matter how stupid or out-of-date it was, and would never, under any circumstances whatever, show a spark of initiative. “A rare plodder if ever I saw one,” thought Adam but said, dutifully, “Well, my dear, it looks as if you’ve got your soldier,” and Henrietta, unconscious of irony, cooed,

“Oh, but he’s beautiful, beautiful! And he’s going to be as strong as a bull and as bold as a lion.”

They chatted awhile about the impending arrival of the Colonel, Aunt Charlotte having died a month ago, but she was not really in terested in anyone but the child at her breast, and soon he excused himself, looking in the nursery where Ellen Michelmore was prepar ing Stella for her morning outing. He said, for something to say, “Mrs. Swann seems to have got through this last business fairly com fortably,” but Ellen replied, tartly, “It’s never that comfortable, sir. If men had the babies I wager you’d hear them roar from here to Sevenoaks.” Because he wanted to be on hand to settle the Colonel into his quarters Adam had stayed at home and for a moment thought of taking Stella a ride on his saddle bow, but then reflected that she was still too young for this kind of excursion, and he would have to wait upon the pleasure for a spell. A cautious, exploratory relationship was already developing between father and daughter, and whenever he was about the house he was conscious of the child watching him with her serious blue eyes. She was, he decided, an extraordinarily attractive child, with a curiously adult air of deliberation about everything she did, and a developing ear for words that she some times seemed to be rehearsing before translating to sound. He said, squatting on his hams, “Has Ellen told you you’ve got a brother?” and suddenly, for the first time, the child smiled, holding out her arms to him so that he said, eagerly, “I’ll take her. We’ll walk up to the crest and back,” and he GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 226

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swung Stella out of her pen, carrying her down the broad staircase and into the sunshine that was flooding the face of the old house.

It was full summer out here, with the woods humming with sound, and the smell of parched grass and wildflowers coming from the thickets. The gardener and his boy were at work on some delphinium beds in the lawn but Adam had never cared for cultivated flowers and said, “Come, I’ll show you some real flowers,” and hoisting her on his shoulder took the path through the rhododendrons and up to the spot where he had stood overlooking the house the day he had decided to lease it.

He had, if he was frank, no regrets about that decision. Henrietta, without knowing it, must have been acting in all their interests, for it was surely a wonderful place to spend the eternity of childhood and would encourage in the least imaginative a sense of belonging in a community that was safe and rooted. Where the timber fell away, and the drop to the stableyard was steep, all manner of plants had seeded themselves among the moss and bracken. On a stretch of stone wall built, he supposed, by the original Conyer to guard against a landslide, he saw herb robert, toadflax, wandering trumpets of convolvulus, bright red campion, stitchwort, the tall dragonfly spires of rosebay willowherb, and dozens of other wildflowers. Nearer to hand stood a single foxglove as tall as himself and sporting a hundred mottled bells. He saw the child’s eyes stray to the flower and would have picked it but remembering it was poisonous, said, very articulately, “It’s a foxglove, my love. Papa’s favourite wild-flower.
Fox
—
glove!”
and Stella arranged her lips and echoed, with remarkable clarity,
“Fox
—glove!” It was the first identifiable word he had heard her speak, and it seemed to him a miracle, performed for his benefit. He set her down with her back to the wall, and finding that she could stand fairly steadily retreated a few yards into the wood, saying, “Walk, Stella. Walk to Papa!” The child braced her self, hands thrust back against the wall and then, pushing herself off, stumbled towards him, her fat little legs working like pistons. She reached him without a stumble and he said, triumphantly, “Splen did!

Absolutely splendid! You’ve walked and you’ve talked, all in five minutes!” and swung her up to his shoulder again, thinking as he did so, “Henrietta can have her boys, any amount of them. I’ll settle for this one, for she’s really mine” and with a light heart he went down the winding path to the forecourt where old Michelmore, who had swapped the profession of miller for that of groom and coach man, was awaiting him, holding the mare that had carried him the length of England and he had never disposed of, for somehow she had a place in the complicated pattern of his life over the last three years.

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4

It was late August when he opened up the Crescents territory, finding a Yorkshireman named Wadsworth to supervise the east coast seg ments, based on Whitby, Newark, Spalding, and Norwich, with a control centre at Boston, where they leased a yard within sight of the Stump.

It was a huge slice of territory to manage, but Wadsworth, who had driven locomotives until he was involved in an accident that had left him lame, was familiar with every mile of it, and Adam thought him self fortunate to engage a man as intelligent and dependable. Wads worth was a widower, and the father of a boy in his early twenties who was serving as a fireman on the Eastern Counties.

He also had a daughter who kept house for him and was capable, during her father’s absences, of taking his place in the Boston yard, exercising an amiable despotism over the waggoners, stablemen, and, on occa sion, customers, who were not averse to a little sharp practice, for up here were some of the most penny-pinching hagglers in the country, men who would spend half-an-hour debating the difference between threepence and fourpence on the transport of a bag of hops.

He soon learned to trust Wadsworth and respect his judgement, but he never succeeded in making a friend of him, as he did his brisk, buxom daughter, Edith.

With his penchant for fanciful nicknames, he always thought of Edith as Boadicea, having first encountered her driving a two-horse frigate, her red woollen skirt tucked up above her knees, her weight thrown back on the reins as she scolded the team. She looked, he thought, like one of the Iceni riding out to do battle with the Romans.

There was a great deal to do up here, and he spent the tail-end of the summer coming and going, assessing what the territory required in terms of men, waggons, teams, and premises. The first hauls were almost wholly agricultural, sugar beet, potatoes, Norwich turkeys, great round cheeses, and baskets of fish out of Hull, but later Wads worth secured two iron ore contracts in and out of Middlesbrough. Within three months they were under a full spread of canvas, so that the Crescents began to overhaul the Polygon where, as Rawlinson had predicted, a crippling blight had set in following the tightening of the Federal blockade of the cotton states.

More and more during these busy weeks he felt himself drawn to Edith Wadsworth, partly by reason of her abundant commonsense and close involvement in his concerns but also, in a way that dis turbed him slightly, by the positive GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 228

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energy reposing in her strong, supple body, so that he caught himself thinking of her as a woman capable of bringing him something more than loyal and imaginative service in a stableyard. And this was odd, he decided, for he now thought of himself as a man of settled habits of mind and body, and he wondered if the strong impression she made on him could be traced to the way she looked at him and addressed him, rather than to his appraisal of her trim figure and cheerful good looks. She had a way of assessing him with a cool, steady gaze, as though she too was seeing him as a person outside his function as her father’s employer, and sometimes, feeling defensive on this account, he would challenge her but with laughter in his voice. He said to her once, “You’ve got more initiative than half the men I employ. Have you ever wished you’d been born a man?” and she replied, with a candour he had learned to expect from her, “Do I look like one to you, Mr. Swann?”

“No,” he said, laughing, “I can’t say that you do, but it puzzles me why some likely young chap hasn’t snapped you up long ago. How old are you?”

“That’s a saucy question to put to a girl,” she said, with an answer ing smile.

“You wouldn’t have asked it of one of those fragile ninnies, who wouldn’t appear in public unless she was fenced in by hoops and a dozen petticoats, and had taken the shine off her nose. However, I’m used to it, for the lads don’t think of me as a woman, maybe because I’ll not stand for their nonsense. I’m twenty-four. Well on the way to the shelf.”

“Don’t believe it. Men up here don’t marry the ninnies, although they enjoy flirting with them. I’ll call in one day, and find you fussing over your trousseau like any other girl. It won’t please me, for I’m hanged if I know where I should find a deputy manager.”

“Ah,” she said, gaily, “that’s my cross. No one can ever replace me but everyone takes me for granted.” Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a carter dragging a crate from a tailboard and bawled, in a voice that carried as far as the Stump, “Careful, you fool! That’s soft fruit you’re handling, not gravel!” She skipped across the yard and laid hold of one end of the heavy crate, bracing one clogged foot against the wheel-rims so that the breeze, lifting her skirt, offered him a glimpse of sturdy thighs and then, as she shifted her weight forward, of a chubby behind under a pair of short cotton drawers. He chuckled, reflecting that if the spread of the territory north and south of Boston led to her father’s frequent absences, he had no need to worry over a lack of supervision here.

They managed to get The Bonus area (based on Harwich, and run ning inland from Yarmouth and Southend as far as Chesterford) off to a slow start by late GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 229

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autumn, but this was all that could be achieved until spring, for the Southern Square, comprising Hampshire, Wilt shire, and part of Dorset and Gloucestershire, was still to be opened up, as were the two smaller areas marked on the master map as The Pickings, one hinged on Worcester, the other enclosed by Sheffield, Derby, and Buxton.

Of the twelve territories, however, he now had nine well established, and of these three were showing a good profit, and four others were producing promising returns. Only two, the Western Wedge and the Mountain Square, were disappointing, for there was strong local competition in Devon and Cornwall among farmers too conservative to entrust their produce to a stranger, whereas in Wales the roads were atrocious and played havoc with Lovell’s time-schedules.