God Is an Englishman (46 page)

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It did not probe deeply into the subtle stresses of the first, post-expansion period, years that saw the completion of the British gridiron, for its authors had no reason to regard 1862–4 as the watershed Adam had predicted that December night when he stood in the Mall and learned from a policeman that the Prince Consort had succumbed to typhoid fever. This period came under the vague, general heading of

“Early Beginnings—the Age of the Horse,”
and at least three incidents that went some way to making Adam Swann a national figure were not mentioned. There was no reference, for example, to Hamlet Ratcliffe’s spectacular feat in the west, or Blubb’s bloody brush with Fenians in the east. Neither was mention made of how Bryn Lovell, in the Mountain Square, brought off the Swann treble in a remote Welsh valley, in the very last days of that eventful year, and this des pite the fact that all three occurrences found their way into news papers that printed Gladstone’s speeches verbatim. For how could these things be known to a couple of hired hacks (with one eye on the money to be made out of a TV soap-opera) when the names of Ratcliffe, Blubb, and Lovell were no more than entries in an account book, handed to them by Algy Swann when they were halfway through their chore? In this way, perhaps, historical keys fall through the pockets of time. Adam Swann should have written his own history, instead of confining himself to casual jottings in the daybook he kept in his eyrie.

Hamlet Ratcliffe, sometime auctioneer who had taken the post Adam offered him as manager of the Western Wedge, had not suc ceeded in making good the promises given shortly before returning to his native Devon in the vanguard of Swann’s provincial mission aries. Hamlet was an amiable man, too amiable perhaps for the initial prejudice he encountered, but Adam had not completely mis judged him. He was loyal, hardworking, and honest, and had he succeeded to a branch already established by a younger, more thrustful man like Vicary (who soon had a virtual monopoly in the section marked on the map as The Bonus) he would have been an excellent choice. He knew his Devon and his Devonians, and proved as much by getting plenty of short-haul work in the base area on both sides of the Exe Estuary; but he failed lamentably to attract business fur ther west and north, where the majority of hauls were commissioned by agricultural-ists, and the goods carried by road were almost exclu sively produce of one sort or another.

Ratcliffe was under no illusion as to the reasons for his failure. Most of the prosperous farmers, that is to say, men cultivating four hundred acres or over, were committed to locally based carriers. Others had made satisfactory arrangements GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 243

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with the two main rail road companies operating in the west and others again, among whom were many of the smallholders, made do with their own transport, a cart or a haywain, pressed into service for the collection and de livery of milk churns and the transport of goods and cattle to local markets. Thus, one way and another, Tybalt’s canvass of the area yielded almost nothing in the way of long-term contracts. It was difficult to convince men of this type that speed was money in their pockets, for down here speed was not and never would be a feature in the pattern of their daily lives. The farmers had adjusted to the pace of herds coming in from pasture, and to the slow but predictable rhythms of the seasons. Deliberation was bred in their blood and bone. They were as fond of money as the next man, but they did not need it so urgently as the men of the cities, for the means of continuity reposed in the soil, the timber, the thatch, the leather, the very clothes they wore on their backs, providing they were pre pared to work fourteen hours a day in their meadows and byres. It needed a more persuasive man than Hamlet Ratcliffe to convince them that he could lighten their burdens and increase their turnover by hauling cheap manufactured goods in and carting produce out, but rooted conservatism was the least of his worries.

In the two popu lous cities, and the three dozen thriving towns in his territory, near access to the railways had already been achieved. Exeter and Ply mouth were both situated astride main lines and so, for that matter, were towns in the southern half of Cornwall. The North Devon line ran clear across his territory to Bideford where, as a native, he might have looked for some support, and three great slices of his domain, Exmoor to the north, Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor to the west, were sparsely settled and did not boast of a single good road, so that large areas were completely isolated in severe weather.

All these factors—prejudice, conservatism, established local opposition, bad roads, rough terrain, all these were obvious handi caps to him, and he took cognisance of them, severally and col lectively, and yet, because he was an inward-looking man, he knew that they were not the basic causes of his failure. The real cause was closer to home, reposing not in his circumstances but in his temperament and record, boy and man.

Nobody, from the moment he had trotted round his father’s farm in the wake of a string of lumbering, Jan Riddish brothers, had paid much attention to Hamlet, or judged him capable of anything in the way of personal achievement.

About the farm he had always been referred to as The Runt, for what other label could his parents give a son measuring a shade over five feet, when his shortest brother, Abel, was an inch over six? And it was not merely a matter of inches. His GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 244

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brothers were hulking, musclebound peasants, capable, so it was said, of balancing carts on their bellies and pointing them to the sky. Each was a slow, purposeful man, dedicated to the soil, and beside them, scuttling about the South Molton holding, Hamlet looked like a timid terrier who had strayed among oxen or, more accurately, perhaps, a rosy little cider apple lost among pumpkins. Not only did he fail to grow, his complexion was proof against the North Devon sun and wind. His skin did not ripen and coarsen after puberty but remained, even at fifty, as smooth and pink as a girl’s, and it was on account of these physical disparities that his father decided that Hamlet should wear a collar and “work clean,” apprenticing him at the age of twelve as clerk to a corn-chandler.

It was the first of his failures. He remained perched on a stool (from which he was obliged to leap down to the floor) through the remain der of his boyhood, then drifted through a succession of indoor jobs, counter-jumping jobs mostly, but made his mark nowhere, and the reason for this was that he was always at war with himself, a very small man with big ideas that would inflate in each new environment until they were pricked by his own inadequacies.

When he was twenty-two he met and married Augusta Bickford, youngest daughter of a Tiverton undertaker, and here, at last, he found the one person in the world who would accept him at his own valuation, believing him to possess not merely brains and initiative but, beneath a cherubic exterior, a hard and unrelenting mascu linity.

There was a reason for this too. When Hamlet appeared Augusta was twenty-eight, the very last of the seven Bickford girls who sat stitching shrouds for their father until somebody spoke for them. Agnes, the last to go, had been married four years when Hamlet pro posed, and Augusta, speechless with relief, enfolded him in an em brace before he was halfway through his proposal. In a sense she had never relaxed her hold. As though fearful that one day he would escape, and she would find herself back at the shroud bench, she invested her entire emotional capital in him, inflating his confidence like a nonstop bellows, and dismissing all his failures with the state ment, “Twadden gude enufî vor ’ee, ’Amlet.” When any of the Bickfords or the Ratcliffes pointed out that it was time Hamlet chose a trade and stuck to it, Augusta would shake her head and say, “No, that ole job—

twadden gude enuff for ’Amlet,” and leave it at that.

Her loyalty sustained him wherever he went and remained un tarnished when even Hamlet himself was beginning to entertain secret doubts about their future.

He would have doubted long before had he not mastered a trick of convincing strangers, for at least a month, that he was a man of ideas and even Adam Swann, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 245

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reckoned an excellent judge of character, had been deceived at the first interview.

Now, with the Western Wedge lagging far behind newer territories, he became reluctantly convinced that, so long as the area was managed by Hamlet Ratcliffe, it would be restricted to short hauls in and around Exeter, and in the spring of 1862 he made a decision. Unless Ratcliffe could land a few contracts necessitating the use of two-horse frigates he would have to go and his territory be joined to the Southern Square, booming along under the hand of a Bristolian called Abbot, reckoned a slave driver by his teamsters.

The decision, conveyed to Hamlet by letter, was the worst jolt in a lifetime of disappointments and for once the level of his mercury failed to respond to Augusta’s boost. When she said, “Dorn ’ee mind, midear, twadden gude enuff for

’ee,” he exposed in sudden flash of temper, a Hamlet she had not encountered in getting on for thirty years of marriage, for he said, rounding on her, “Dorn ’ee talk so daft, Mother! This is the best billet I ever had an’ a bliddy zight better than I’ll ever have, now we’m both over the hill. You know it an’
I
know it, zo us’d best make up our minds to
do
something!” and when she said, meekly, “Do what midear?” he roared, “How do I know? But
something!
Something as’ll make ’em all zit up an’ take notice! I’ll keep this billet if I…if I ’ave to ketch the Bamfylde Lion zingle ’anded!”

She accepted this, of course, as a figure of speech.

Indeed, that was what it was at the time, for Hamlet had used the phenomenon to give vent to his exasperation and sense of personal inadequacy. It was, to both of them, the ultimate in derring-do, and yet, no sooner had he uttered the words, than they translated themselves into the kind of resolve that must have been slumbering in Hamlet since he was a child under his brothers’ blundering feet. In a single phrase, it summed up everything he thought himself cap able of achieving, and from here, to a man drugged on Augusta’s faith and his own optimism, it was but a short step to believing such a feat to be entirely possible.

To catch the Bamfylde Lion singlehanded. That would rattle them. That would have everybody out in the street cheering and would not only make him world-famous but would provide Swann-on-Wheels with a magnificent advertisement.

For who, in his senses, could neglect an opportunity of doing business with a man who attracted publicity wherever he went? And here, as it transpired, he was not deceived, for in a way, and without being aware of it, the imagination of Hamlet Ratcliffe had leaped a century, straight into a world where a single bizarre feat was enough to fix a man so firmly in the public eye that he remained linked to that feat for all time. Perhaps, after all, he was half-aware of this and of GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 246

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the importance of what he had said, for presently, adjusting to his mood, Augusta set the seal upon his declaration, saying, “Well, ’Amlet, if you
zay
you’ll do it you will, and there tiz, midear. How will ’ee go about it?” With a stir of inner excitement that acted upon him like a quart of cider on an empty stomach he knew how he would go about it. The properties, and a means of employing them, came tumbling into his brain. Recognition, adulation, public acknowledgement of Hamlet Ratcliffe as a superman that had capriciously evaded him for half-a-century, were out there awaiting him, and he even knew where—in the thickets and river bottoms north-west of the farm where he had been born. He marched out of the house and set about the business of mounting his safari.

Visitors to Devon during the last month had heard of the Bamfylde Lion, but most of them dismissed it as a local hoax, a reference to a mythical beast approximating the unicorn or the dodo, but this was an error on their part. The Bamfylde Lion was real enough, a circus animal that had gone astray when the horse-box that had been conveying it from Barnstaple to Exeter had overturned a mile or so west of South Molton. At the time of Hamlet’s boast the Bamfylde Lion was a twenty-seven-day wonder, for that was the period it had been at liberty.

Hamlet had taken a keen interest in the incident, partly because he came from the area where it was at large, but also because, to his great satisfaction, the Two Rivers Carrier Service, his principal rival in the eastern half of the territory, had been held responsible for the escape, the lion having been left behind by a travelling circus after a breakdown at Barnstaple and later sent on under private charter.

The story of its escape, stripped of local embellishments, was simple. The driver had been drunk and had neglected to fix the brake shoes before descending a steep hill. The van had then run away and overturned in the ditch, where the doors had burst open and the lion had walked out, disappearing into the rough country north of the road before the concussed carter had been rescued.

In the period that followed there had been numerous sightings and local hue and cry, with parties of armed farmers and constables beat ing the area day by day but so far without success. Then claims for slaughtered livestock began to be filed but in this kind of country they were difficult to check, and everyone accepted the fact that iso lated farmers would make the most of such a unique opportunity.

Half-devoured carcases were said to be found as far north as Lynton, and as far west as Swimbridge, and Hamlet had followed all these reports with great thoroughness. Now, taking out his map, he marked down the most reliable sightings GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 247